Before And After

Dunscaith Castle after processing. 15 sec f/2.8 ISO 2500.

Starting Settings

What’s a good way to edit nightscape images? This post will take you through the process I used to edit some photographs from a recent trip to Dunscaith Castle on the Isle of Skye. I’m including before-and-after shots as I have always found it really useful to see the differences made in editing, so I hope you enjoy this as well.

Firstly, it’s best to get as much right “in camera” as possible. This makes the edit easier, and gives the maximum possibility of getting a good end result. From many years of experience shooting at night, I know roughly what my starting settings should be in my camera, but there are always many variables such as how bright the moon is, if there’s an aurora, cloud cover etc. Having an initial baseline setting is really useful though.

My usual camera for nightscapes is my Son A7III. It isn’t the latest model, and doesn’t have the most pixels, but the results it provides are always first rate. I bought it secondhand and, although the user interface is a nightmare, it’s technically excellent. I use a 16-35 f/2.8 GM lens. It’s a large thing, but gives me some flexibility with its zoom, and is very sharp at f.2.8.

My starting settings are manual mode, 15 second shutter speed, f/2.8 and ISO 3200. I have the lens set to manual focus, am shooting RAW, and white balance is auto (I can adjust it later in edit as I’m shooting RAW). I’ll have the self-timer set to two seconds. When I clip the camera onto the tripod, I’ll dial in all of the above and I know I’ve got a sensible and well-practiced start point.

Because the stars turn into elongated lines at anything over 15 seconds at a 16mm focal length, I don't use a longer exposure time. I have to adjust the aperture and ISO to suit that exposure time.

Drone: A Bit More Light

How a drone can be used for foreground lighting

On the ideal starry-sky clear night with no moon, the foreground land/sea will be pitch black at a 15 second exposure. This can be fine if you are doing silhouettes. But in the case of this shot, the castle and arched entryway are key features of the scene. The contextual positioning is important as well which requires the sea to be in shot.

To get some light onto the foreground, it is possible to use a torch. But I find that this looks very unnatural as it is usually the photographer shining the torch from the camera position, not somewhere any light would ever come from. Alternatively, I could take a separate shot at a really long exposure time, like 3-5 minutes, for the foreground and blend them afterwards in Photoshop, but that’s quite a hassle. Always better to do it in one shot if possible.

So these days, I always pack my drone (DJI Mini 4 Pro) in my bag for my night photography sessions. I have found that the auxiliary (“landing”) light is superb for this. I have set up a rear button on the controller to turn the light on and off. It’s as simple as flying the drone up, positioning it usually to one side and not in view of the camera, and just letting it sit there hovering until I open the shutter.

Then I’ll turn the drone light on for 5 seconds or so, and it’s done. You can see the effect on this shot. The shape of the shadows can be changed really easily by moving the drone around - it’s like your own personal sun in the sky that you can put anywhere you like!

The Unedited Image

I’ll always try out multiple compositions, and always take horizontal and vertical shots. This is because it is so hard to see features in the landscape when there’s no light, and it’s often only once I’ve done an initial edit that I’ll see something wrong or missing. Having multiple shots of the same subject at different compositions really helps.

Anyhow, here’s the unedited image. There was a lot of charged particle activity in the sky, hence the amazing colours. I just missed a big but very brief aurora display so you’re seeing the afterglow here.

The unedited version of image 1.

Above is the unedited version of the first shot in this post. As you can see it is very dark. You need to watch out as the shot will look a lot brighter on the back of the camera when you’re in pitch black conditions. In fact it can be so bright that it will kill your night vision. It is common to be disappointed when you get back home to look through your images only to find they look like the one above - dark and useless.

But all is not lost! I know just how much detail is in these Sony files, and how much I can push them. I even ended up reducing the ISO to 2500 (the lower you can get it, the better from an image quality perspective).

Lightroom settings for the “Select Sky” mask

Processing of these images was done in Lightroom. It takes me about 5 minutes per shot these days. For image 1, I first used the AI-denoise function on a middle setting to mostly remove the sensor noise. This is a miraculous feature, but needs to be used with care on starry skies as it can create weird results where stars get elongated into bright snake-like shapes.

Then I do some very simple masking to make some local adjustments. I’ll separately edit the sky and the land. I select the sky using the “Select Sky” function (often with a bit of tweaking to get a more precise selection) and in this case I upped the contrast by 19, the whites by 44, and the blacks by 13. I slightly adjusted the tint by 15 and clightly increased the saturation by 11. This brings out a load of detail.

I may then do even more tweaks to the sky, but taking care not to go overboard. For example, some localised small clarity and dehaze long the Milky Way, but didn’t in this case. The colours in the sky were incredible and I had to take care not to make it look crazy, but instead just draw out what was there.

Once the sky is sorted, I duplicate and invert the sky selection to select the land/sea. Exposure is up 1.9, shadows 86. The drone lighting has made a huge difference, allowing the detail to be shown.

The editing for the second image below is pretty similar. I used image 1's editing settings as a starting point and did some slight tweaks from there.

Before and After: Vertical format composition, with shooting star (yay). ISO up to 3200 for this shot.

Hopefully that all sounds fairly simple. I remember when I was first trying to edit my nightscape images I was all over the place and it took forever. Now I find it quick and fairly easy. Having some decent camera settings to start with, and knowing what to adjust in the field, makes a huge difference. Practice makes perfect!