Transcripts
1. Introduction: This location is awesome. It is uncoupled, oaky up Turkey, which is famous for these ancient cave tempos. And this one is in the middle of nowhere. He found that they accidentally every border hike. And the first thing I do, of course, I check the location with my app. I immediately decided to come back here because it's awesome. It's a perfect place for Mercury shot. All I needed to do is to wait until your new Moon and a clear sky. And I was lucky this time. In this course we will talk about everything you need to know to take a nice Austrian landscape photography with Milky Way, like this picture. From planning to camera settings, composition, editing, everything. The best way to learn landscape photography or asteroid landscape photography is to go through real-life examples like this image. And this is my second course and I plan to do a bunch of other. So I'm sure if you're going to go through multiple images and learn the same or similar techniques in different scenarios. You will learn it for sure, and you will be able to create amazing images. By the way, my name is Dalton and I'm a landscape photographer and a number, so therefore, O M digital solutions, aka Olympus and Manfrotto. Without further ado, let's get started.
2. Location: Let's start with the location and composition. Before we have a look at the picture, we need to discuss some really important rules in terms of night photography or night escapes me, take my escapes in a pretty dark environment. If you can't see anything, how do you set up your composition, for example? So be there in time, be there in daytime. When you see everything, the exam test shots, walk around with your camera. Don't use any tried both. Just use your camera walk-around, take some images, then you'll find your final composition. Put your camera on the tripod and turn off any kind of stabilization. If you use a tripod, the stabilization just ruins your images. The second rule is to take a picture of something with this guy or with the Milky Way this time, not just take a picture of the Milky Way, everyone can do it even with the smartphone nowadays, it's not super interesting. Now we learn how to take a nice landscape with me, a cafe. So you need some foreground, something interesting in the picture, not just the Milky Way. That's another reason you need to be there in time, in daytime actually. And if you follow these two steps, we'll be fine. Now let's have a look at the picture. Here. You can see our final image. And I paid attention to some important things on the location. One of our main subject is the Milky Way, which is here. I checked where it will be at the perfect time of the night, and I set up my composition according to the Milky Way. The other thing I paid attention to is this part of the wall, which for me it's really interesting. And what I didn't want these to overlap these part though, this war to the other, I wanted to be a standalone, nice part of the image which is right in the middle. So it's really important to, to look good. Here we have a rod which leads to the Milky Way and they are in a really nice harmony. Of course, most of the people will look at the Milky Way first. Then they probably really realize, Oh, there's a nice leading line to the Milky Way, but it doesn't matter. They just need to be synchronized or, or in harmony. And as I mentioned, it's really, really important to have some nice and detailed foreground. It's not just about the Milky Way, was just about the stars. You need to take a picture of something with the milky way, not just to Milky Way itself, to do a really nice, good-quality detailed image in the dark. That's the R, That's the beauty of night scape photography in my opinion. So as you can see, this is my style actually, and I hope you really like it then and use it on your images. There is not a single beat and not, and not a small part of the image which is too dark where there is no texture or some kind of information, full or full of details, but it's not overwhelming. If you look at this picture, you instantly know what to look at. You see though there's a person, there is a really nice illuminated the ancient Church or the Church cave and there is 0, there is a Milky Way itself. It looks amazing and they compliment each other. For example, this part of the sky would be to empty. It would be a dead or empty space without Milky Way. So this composition only works if you have a star trail or MilkyWay fills the frame here. That's another thing you need to look for. Two, feel your frame B, the interesting stuff, I think the best image and best composition when you look at a picture and you instantly know what to look at them and you understand the picture. But there are more. So if you spend more time you will see or there's a person, there are some nice grassy or super detailed everything there is destroyed. So you can spend time on the picture if you like. But if you don't, you're just on Instagram and you're scrolling around, you're all, it's a really nice feature and you give a lichen and go, that's fine as well because you understand it in immediately. And I press tab because we are in Photoshop now, I choose the crop tool and as you can see our horizon on the bottom third, I use the rule of thirds here. So actually the composition, It's really basic. I think it's more about the balance. You feel, the frame B, the interesting stuff. And I think that's the hardest part in, in photography. And again, I repeat myself, but it's really, really important. Don't take a picture of the Milky Way. You need to take a picture of something with the Milky Way, which we'll be 100 times more interesting and unique than just take a picture of something we choose on the sky every night and every event can take a picture of it. So it's not super interesting on itself, I think, but this is my opinion, and that's it. In the next episode, I help you to choose the perfect image to build the scene like this.
3. How to choose our images: We are in Adobe Lightroom, and as you can see on the bottom, we have lots of images. And in this episode, I will show you how to pick those. B we'll work with. Obviously, we want to use anything from from the beginning. As I was just working. We're walking around trying to find the perfect composition. So let's go there. There we found already there the final composition. And this is here, as you can see, this is the last movement. So this image looks good, but if you check the settings, it says ISO 3200, so it's really high for my camera at least. So let's check the next one. The next one is only ISO to 100, which is better, but I think it's a little bit dark. Check the next one. And as you can see, it's ISO 400, which is pretty low. It's good. And we have 60 seconds shutter speed and no longer exposure noise. So in this, this frame, I turned on the long exposure noise reduction. That's why I choose this image as a, as a base photos. So I press number five, and now I mark this image with five stars. I need it for sure. Okay, let's go there. So my original idea was to walk here and light this, this other temple or church. And to be honest, I don't like these images, so I just keep them here. You can see I tried to eliminate the temple or church, was standing in or right next to it actually. And I didn't like these images as well, but you should try different ideas on the, on the, on location. You just, just collect as many data as you can. And later on front of the computer with a T next to you, you can decide what to choose, and I don't choose this once. And as you can see, this is where I changed my camera settings. As you can see, ISO 3200, F2, 0.8, 25 seconds, and all the images next to each other has the same setting. So this means this is the series for the sky. To reduce some noise, we can use multiple images with the stacking technique. We can get rid of some of these unwanted noise on the sky. Press here and you will see the image itself. And as you can see, it's pretty, pretty noisy. And then in the next episode we will talk about more of, of camera settings. So now all we need is some images of the sky. I usually use somewhere between five to 10 images to denoise the sky. Because as you can see, there are movements we cannot use infinitive amount of is to get rid of the noise because of this movement. But you will see it in the next episode and you will understand, I'm sure. So let's say I need 88 images and I right-click here separating three stars. So I know I will use these images with a free stars for sky. You can choose any, any of these because the only change is the position of the Milky Way. So if you prefer some of them on the middle or at the end, you can choose those. Of course, I prefer Dos at the beginning, the position is the best there. So let's check our last images. So as you can see here is a change. So here I changed my camera settings and I was just trying to find the perfect settings for. For the foreground, we have a few different images and how we choose one of, one of these at the, at the end. So as you can see, here is one without me, and here are two images with me. I choose the one. I didn't move, not blurred. Checkout. Actually both are good. I prefer this one, so I press F5 again. We have five stars here. And there is this filter. You can choose the one which rated. And now all we can see the images we will use for our scene.
4. Camera Settings: In this episode, I'll walk you through all the camera settings. So actually we used three different settings. One for the base image, one for the sky, and one for the lights, the lights in the church. So let's start with the base image. And on the top right corner you can see I used ISO 407 millimeter F 6.360 seconds. So start with the dinosaur. I think it's obvious the lowest ISO, the better the quality is. My lowest native ISO is to a 100. So I doubled it. Why? Because the longest shutter speed I can use without Bob mood is 60 seconds. So with the 60 second shutter speed, the image was a bit too dark. So of course I had to increase my ISO to 400 and the settings I end up The image I like. So it looks like a little bit dire, but as you can see, we have details everywhere and this is a night image. Don't forget, this is a nice image. We don't need to be super bright. We need to imitate. It's a, it's a night. So I need the details, but I don't need them super bright. We have seven millimeters and F6, 0.3. It starts with the, with the aperture. I could, I could just lowered the f-number and I could use ISO 200. The reason I didn't do that is to, to be sure, I have everything in focus because F6 0.3 is a good aperture for my camera. At least in here everything is in focus, but then there is a risk if I go lower, I use a bigger aperture of, of course I will have more light, but there is always a risk. Some parts of the image we'll be blurry or out of focus. So of course I just took some, some test images and then I end up with F6 point free. If you have a camera with a bigger sensor like APIC or full-frame or even bigger, there is a chance you won't be able to use F6, 0.3, maybe we'll go, go further to eight or 10 or even higher. And as you increase the f-number, you have to increase the shutter speed or the ISO as well. As you close the aperture, you will lose light, so you have to compensate somehow. So for my camera, these settings are perfect, may be for your situation or your camera. You will need slightly different camera settings. The last setting we need to talk about is the focal length. I use seven millimeters, that's the widest I have. But the full-frame equivalent is 14 millimeter. This is a micro 4 third cameras, so I have to double it all the time. And let's have a look on the second image. This is for the sky. And as you can see, I have relatively high ISO, ISO 3200. And actually this is the easiest, easiest part because the night is always night. So everywhere you go, in the middle of the, middle of the night, probably will use the same settings for Milky Way at least. Because for me, you need a pretty, pretty dark environment. So if you are a middle of nowhere and there's no full moon on the sky. You will need the same settings all the time. And it's usually somewhere between ISO 3200, 6400, F2, 0.8, and 25 seconds. For me and I explain these settings as well. It's really, really important. I choose ISO 3200 because we have some artificial lights and I didn't want to blow them too much. And actually the resort is fine if your skies really dark or, or let's say black and only this, there are some stars. That means you underexposed. So this guy shouldn't be too dark, just like here, seven millimeter, so it didn't change, but the f-number, our aperture changed. So the lowest I can go to point a, that's the biggest aperture I can use on this this lens. And for the sky image, you need to use the lowest f-number you have. Let's say you can go down to F2. That means, uh, the difference between F2 and F2, 0.8 is exactly one stop of light. So actually you could go down to ISO one hundred six hundred, let's say if you have the F4 as your lowest aperture, you need to increase your ISO because F2 point between the F2 0.8 and F for the difference again, exactly one stop of light. So you need to double your ISO from ISO 3200, ISO 6,400. So as you change your F number, you need to change either your ISO or your shutter speed. But for the sky. Actually you can only change your ISO. Our shutter speed is always limited because we have a rule, it's called 500 rule. I will show you what it means in a moment. So we have seven millimeters, which is 14 millimeter equivalent on full-frame. So to know what's the longest shutter speed we can use, we need to use these 500 joules. So here's a calculator and I put 500 divided by our focal length. So divide it by 14, the full-frame equivalent of focal length. So it says the longest shutter speed I could use is 35 seconds. But as you can see, I used only 25 seconds. Why? Because with 35 seconds, I end up a little, little blurred sky. If you have a full frame camera, we had lots of megapixels. Maybe you can use $500, but I can't. So let's say 400 divided by 14 millimeters and I end up in the 28, some things. So the longest shutter speed I could use is 25, maybe 30 seconds. So I end up with 25 seconds. So ISO 3200, 14 millimeter F to 0.825 seconds. And all of the images here are the same. They have the exact same settings. Let's have a look on the last image. All we need to use from this picture are the lights. I set up a torch because there is no light naturally. And AMD to the back, backside of the tempo, the back wall. And in this way I end up with this nice soft lights. If I point the torch directly towards me and towards the walls, it would be too harsh and the camera settings are adjusted to these lights. This part is really important, so we need to have a nice detailed, not noisy image. The higher the ISO, the noisier the image gets. So of course, I tried to use the lowest ISO I can. So again, I use f2, 0.860 seconds as the 60 seconds is the longest I can use. F2 0.8. Preacher is the biggest aperture I can use because these two are fixed. All I need to do is to choose the ISO With that gives me that brightness I need. So of course I took a couple of testimony and I end up with this ISO 640. So just took some test images in the middle of the night. So actually this last one is pretty easy to all. I changed here from the infinity focus. I focused here to be sure everything is in focus and nice and sharp here and the foreground, that's all we need to know about camera settings. In the next episode, we will start editing our images.
5. Preparing files in Lightroom: Here we are again in Adobe Lightroom. In this video, we will go through all the images and edit them. But all we need to do here is to bring all the details out we need and set up our white balance actually. So almost nothing else you will see in a moment. So we have our base image and we have the last image. These two images will make up our foreground. So start with this. So the first one, I just choose other landscape as usual. And I, I increase my exposure. 0.5 is nice and increase my shadow, let's say 70. And that's it. Then our white balance, a little bit of, I think it's too cold. So let's use a little bit higher. Let's say 6,300 temperature. And I think it's too purpose, so I just decrease the purple, let's say 00 it up. Okay, it looks nice. The next thing is, okay, close the basic and go to the details pano. So of course we have sharpening applied to all roll images, so we need to mask those, play those parts out. We don't need to be sharpened. So let's press Option or Alt and bring up the slider until everything is black or dark. We don't need to sharpen, let's say fifties. Perfect. And lens correction and just click these all the time. And that's it. That's all we need to do with the base image. Let's go to the last one. Start with the basic again and choose other by landscape. And I tried to set up our white balance. So because it was taken in really different time of the night, this was late blowers and this is in the middle of the night, so, so don't worry about the sky. We need to focus on our foreground. So I set up my white balance to get a nice warm artificial light here on the foreground, which is somewhere around 4,600. And it looks nice to me. I increase the exposure here by half-step up and increase shadow details. Now, It's a really important part. We need VBE a blend these, this image to this image. So the foreground here, that part we won't use from here because on this image we will use only the lights here. So, so everything else comes from this image. So this part should be brighter on the base image here than here. Okay, so I don't increase, I don't want to increase the shadow too much. I use, let's say 40. Okay? Then we have a problem here. This part is just too bright and to fix it, we could use a mosque. And let's say this radial gradient. Draw a gradient here. And we need to subtract. And you can choose here the luminance range. So if you press luminance range, can press here invert. If you don't see this red colors here, you can turn it off and on here, so it should be on. And as we press the invert and we start moving the left part of the slider to the right until only those parts are red, we need to change somewhere here. And now I can decrease the highlights. And as you can see, the only affect the brightest parts of the image here. And I think it's a bit too green so I can increase some some tint and maybe some temperature as well. And I end up with a similar color here. Down here. It looks really good, in my opinion. Okay, turn it off. Next details again, we can use the same mask, let's say 50. And on the Lens Correction tab I tick these boxes as always. And I think that's it. Yeah, it looks, it looks nice but a little bit. But I think it's not perfect yet. I think we should increase some white as well here, because I feel this part is not live enough and we need more white. We divide slider the mainly affect the brightest part of the image. Of course, these are the brightest part. So that's why I increase the, the white. Let's see. 35 plus 35. And it looks amazing. So we are done with the, with the foreground images. Let's edit our sky images. Again. Start with the profile other but landscape. And just increase just a little by 0.30 plus 0.30 exposure. Try to find a perfect white balance. So of course the sky should be blueish. So this is the natural color of the sky. I really like tint. So sometimes I increase tint and I end up some kind of purple sky. It depends on your, your style. Of course, Let's now let's stick to something, something more natural. Free 1600, let's say. And I increase the whites again by a lot, let's say 30 because I would like to affect the brightest parts of the image, the stars, of course. And now we lack contrast. As I mentioned, we don't need strong contrast to, to blend our images because it's it's not the best. But on this sky image we need to bring some contrast anyway. We need to get some details of the sky back. So if you increase the contrast, you see our sky. Just, just so much nicer, but you can use the Dehaze slider as well. The dehaze is really good. Don't use too much behaves because it's just super ugly in my opinion. So I used 25 here and I increase some contrast as well. Let's say 14. Increase more. The light here, let's say 40. And let's have a look before, after. So as you can see, our Milky Way is much more visible and we have some really nice natural colors. Maybe it's a bit too blue each. So 3,750. Looks good to me. We don't touch vibrance and saturation. And again, and I forgot to mention here, we don't touch vibrance and saturation. That's the last thing we will do. And most of the time if you did everything right, actually, you don't need to touch the sliders. I actually, I don't use them very, very often. So this is our sky image, as you can see, it's super noisy. So let's go to the details tab and I'll zoom in. And that is you press Option or Alt. You can check the mask as well again. And I go to all the way up to the 100. And in this way b, we get rid of some, some unwanted noise, but it's still noisy. So this is the image you can use a little bit of noise reduction, but don't use too much. As we have eight images and these images we will get rid of a lot of noise anyway. So you don't need to deal with all the noise here. So let's say 15, 20. Tony looks okay for me. Then we can use these radial gradient again. Draw an oval shape here somewhere. Our Milky Way is. And now we can affect only the Milky Way. And That's how we tried to bring more details out. So let's increase some clarity. And as you can see with the clarity, we have some, some nice local contrast. Don't get crazy. With clarity. It's, it's never nice. So let's say 30. And some dehaze. Just a little, not much seeks is enough. And probably increase the size here. And let's say some white, again, legs down. And that's how you can bring some, some nice these days out. So in now we need to increase the contrast. The best way to increase contrast is lower the black and, and increase the whites. But don't be crazy. It should look like, it should look natural to the eye. So, so plus 20 whites minus ten blacks plus 20 clarity. This looks okay for me. I will work with this mucus away a little bit more later. I think here it's just five. Close this. And now we need to copy all the settings to the other seven sky images. So press on the first one, press and hold shift, and click on the last one. Sink and check all unsynchronized. As you can see, all the sky images are identical. And let's see it. In the next episode, I will show you how to tag these images and, and how to get a nice sky image. Read less noise and nice fine details.
6. Stacking our Sky Images for Less Noise: Hello everyone. We are in Adobe Lightroom again, but not for long. In this episode, I will show you how to reduce some noise on the sky. So let's highlight our first sky image. Press and hold, shift and click on the last one. Right-click. And we have go to Export and Export. So choose your destination, I choose deck stop and create a new folder called Milky Way. Go down and we need to preserve as much data as we can. So I choose as a TIF as my image format. No compression, 16 bits and pro photo RGB. And this is a really important part. If you have the program I have, which is star landscapes Decker. This is an Apple software for image stacking. And this program can handle pro photo RGB color space. Let's say you have a Windows computer. And on Windows there's a program called sequitur that's completely free. You can download it and use it. It does the same. However, it works a little bit differently, but it's not complicated at all. So if you have a Windows computer, you will use SEC water, let's say cutter, as far as I remember, cannot handle a pro photo RGB. So if you are on a Windows computer, use Adobe RGB. And if you are on a Mac computer, use pro photo RGB. And that's it. Don't do anything after re-exported. So let's press export. The next step is to import sky images to our stack Staker program. So I use star landscapes Decker, as you can see, I choose my images and I press Open. You need to do the same. In seawater if you have a Windows computer. The first step is to find our sky. You can see here is the bottom and there are so many red dots. Let's have a look. Works and it looks Almost Okay. So we have some nice parts. So this is the sky again. This is the part of the sky and here, and we have some mistakes here in the corner, but everything else looks okay for me. So, so let's go back to the edit dots in sky part and delete our mask. So we need to add zoom in. I need to add some red dots here. Just to help the algorithm to find our sky. And we had some thing this part was okay, but just in case we had some issues here. And here. Nice. Let's say you have some dots on those parts that are clearly not sky. So if you just press on fine sky again, you will see some errors here. And if you just go back again to the edit dots part, here is an eras red dots. So I'll just choose this one and delete all the red dots. Those are not on the sky. Okay, That's it. That's it. It's super easy. Let's press F9 the sky and it looks good to me. So just press Align and composite. It's a similar process in Ecuador. But instead of dots, you will use a paint brush actually. And that's it. If you can. Now you can zoom in and as you can see, there are much less noise. The stars are still dots shaped, so it looks much better in my opinion. All we need to do is save our image so safe current image, sky teeth and to the Milky Way folder, that's perfect. And that was it. So we can close our image and go back to Lightroom. In the next episode, we start blending our images in Photoshop.
7. Blending: In this episode is really a blend our images, we are in Lightroom again. And as you remember, probably you remember, we will use the first image here and the last, and we created a third one which is not here for the sky. So all we need now these two images, so highlight both. Just click on the first one, press and hold Command or Control, and press on the last one. Right-click and go to editing. And there are multiple ways to do this. The first is just open as layers in Photoshop. The problem with this Photoshop, we'll rasterize these fires or we want have access to the raw data, which is not a big problem. If you didn't do any mistake and you don't need to touch these raw images again. So you can choose this one as well. If you are not a 100 percent and there is a chance you want to come back and change some settings. Choose open as smart objects in Photoshop instead of just layers. After a few seconds, you should end up in Photoshop. Both images are here and all we need to do is move of one of them. Let's save this and press and hold. And I press and hold Shift to lead gourd the left-click. And in this way, the image is centered automatically so we can close the other one. Because we opened smart objects. If you save these files, let's say Save As and save on your computer. Let's say index stop and save. If you save this image here, it will be imported to the Lightroom. And as you can see, this is maybe this one and this is our image. Everything you do here, it will be available in Lightroom as well. So this is knowing for someone or this is helpful for someone else. Just think it's interesting. So I've just shown you, okay, We need to blend these two images together and it's super easy. Just press on the top one. I usually start with the base image here and I add the lights later. So this is the way I usually work. The image with an artificial lights is on the top. Usually for me. Choose the lightened blending mode. This is, this is a magic blending mode. I love this. With this lightened blending mode. Whatever is brighter than everything else below it will be visible but nothing, yes, you can use it for car lights trails or star trails for artificial lights in the town or cityscapes. So it's really, really useful to use and to understand what happens with the lightened blending mode. But as you can see, there are parts we don't want. It's not good for us. For example, here in the foreground we have some artificial lights I don't like. And there are parts on the sky. We don't need to bother with the sky because we have a different image for the sky. So don't worry about the sky. But we have a part here I don't like and we have some lights here actually, I like those probably. So we can keep them. We can keep those. But I certainly don't want to keep this one. So I press here, this is a mosque. This is a white mask now, but let's go and choose a brush to black. Everything is 100 percent here on the top and brush here the black color. And as you can see, this beards. And that's it. We blended our images for the four around. It looks, looks amazing in my opinion. Okay, let's import our sky image. This is my sky image. Bring it here to Photoshop. Press and hold the layer. Bring it here, press and hold Shift and let it go. And as you can see, it's right in the middle. It looks amazing. So let's close this layer. All we need to do is to select our sky and lucky for us, we just need to go here to the Select menu and select sky on this image. As you can see, it does a perfect job. So yeah, actually we are lucky and be an active selection on the sky. Just press on this mask icon. And from the selection, now we have mosque on, right on the sky image. So as you can see, this is our mosque. And as you can see the super easy and it looks amazing in my opinion. And that's it. This is our blending and probably it was much, much easier than you thought it would be. And in the next episode, we start editing our blended images.
8. Adjustments: In this episode, we start editing our blended images. These are the images we blended together, so highlights or three of them, press Control or Command G to group them. I call it planning. The first adjustment could be our clean up. So there are few things I would like to clean up like here, for example, these grasses don't like them at all. So let's go here. You can use the spot healing brush and just go, Hey, looks amazing. It was super-easy. And these are okay. And here is a rock or a pebble. And don't like cool. Tuning everything as is fine. Except I just realize here is a star trail because because we made a mistake and the blending parts, so go back to the blending and checkout. So this is, this is the sky image. What we can do is to just use the healing brush and get rid of it. Or you can come back here to the layer it contains that star. Go to the mosque, use a black brush and get rid of it. And that's it. Easy, easy, peasy. And I think that's it. Everything else looks, looks good to me. We can go to the next phase. So this is the part we should ask, what could make this image better? What can I do to make this image better? That's probably the, the good question. So I think there are a few things like, for example, here where I am, it's a little bit dark. I would like to brighten this part. And if you remember, we opened these layers as smart object. So this is, this is the image on. So if you click twice Camera Raw, we'll open. And as you can see, all our adjustments are here. So we'll just zoom in here. I used this really unmask, really a gradient. Just upright and the shadows here. And maybe some books call. And I press Okay. Done. As you can see, it looks much mild weather. Command or Control Zero to fit our image to the screen. I think the next step is not necessary, but just for learning purposes. I show you how to change some parts of the image with the channel masks. So if you go here to the channels, you can see we have the red, green and blue channels and the RGB, the actually the RGB is a, has no colors as well, but it's, I can make a copy of the RGB. We the Control or Command. Click press here. And we have an alpha channel, I can call it RGB, just not to be confused. And this is our RGB. So everything is brides will be selected and everything is dark will not be selected. So, and of course there, this is the infinite shape of gray. So of course there are things just half selected and so on. So as you can see, the different color channels have different selections. And because we want to select this road, I need to find the one which the best for that road. And I think, I think, think, think maybe the blue one. So Control or Command, left-click on the blue channel. We have an active selection. Go here. And I usually use curves. You can use levels as well. I prefer curves, so I press on curves. And now we have a curve layer, feed our selection with a mosque. So Option or Alt, click on the mask. Now you can see the mask we are in the mosque and we need to increase contrast on this mask to do this press Control or Command M. And this curve only affects the mosque now, so as you can see, I can change the mask. So I just move this slider to derive until almost only the rod is visible here. And if you move to the right, to the left, can increase the brightness of those parts and the selection of the road. And it looks good to me here, so I press OK. And now you can go back to the curve itself. Click twice. To me. Oops. Here. And if I change anything in this curve, everything is selected, we'll be brightened it. So I just brighten image. Don't worry about the sky and anything else. All we need to see here is the road. So I just pride and roads. And now we need another mask. So because this mask effects a lot of the sky and some other parts and elements I don't like. So let's go and put it in a group. Call it, I don't know. Puff and give it a mask. So if you press on, if you just click on the mask, we will have a white mask. If you press Option and press and hold Option or Alt and click on the mask again. We will have a black mask on the black mask, everywhere we brush with a white color will be visible. So that's all I need. I need a bigger brush. I need a 0 hardness. And let's say capacity is around 50 percent. Go through he on this this road a couple of times. Let led the left-click go and go flew it multiple times. And as you can see, we brightened our road, emphasize that role. And as you remember in the composition lesson, we talk about this path. So these path leads to our stars, leads exactly to our Milky Way part of the sky. So that's why I really want to emphasize it. Good. And I think there were some other parts we should use, like for example, here. We can't emphasize this part, the image, but careful with this guy, don't frighten the sky. If you go here as you can see, the sky, we'll be brighten as well. I don't want that at all. And the tail it looks, looks good. Next step could be our Milky Way. Again, let's emphasize our Milky Way. We can use channel masks. So let's go through again. And I, being the RGB, RGB is the best for us now. So let's click Control or Command click on RGB. Go back to the layer and curves again. Now we need to go into the mask again. So Option or Alt, and click. Then Command or Control M to open the curve. And this curve only affects the mosque. So what we need to do is make a selection. Make a nice selection of our Milky Way galaxy. And now I use this S shape. I think this is the best way to select our Milky Way. It's not perfect, but it's okay. So now if we click twice here, now we have the curve that affects the image itself. So we can darken. We can. Brighton. And they can brighten the mid-tones as well. I think the midtones are perfect for us, so let's increase the midtones and you can choose our children are, so here are the RGB. Rgb affects only the, the luminance brightness over the pixels, but you can change the colors as well. Let's say if you go to the red, if you increase the red, you'd be more reddish. If you go to the blue, could be more bluish or if you decrease the blue, it could be more yellowish. Saw in this way, you can actually change some color. I, actually, I don't want to change so much. They wanted to show you. So let's go here. Let's decrease the green. If you decrease the green, we will have more purple colors. And that's it. Okay, That's more than enough. Now we affected the, some other parts of the image. If you are not happy with this, we need to group it again. So let's put it in a group, give it a black mask. Or actually we don't need a mask because we have a Mosque of the sky here, if you remember, so Control or Command, left-click on the sky image and just press a mosquito. So we need, we have a nice Moscow, this guy. So on the only effect, the image on the sky part, which is perfect, I call it ME a key way. In the shadow area, I have some purple color. I don't like, I prefer more bluish colors in the dark part. Let's get rid of this purplish colors. So I go here and choose Hue and Saturation. Here is this. I can just press on it and call, for example here. And as you can see, it's clearly purple and I want to reduce it. Or you can 0 it out and check out if it can change these hue to blue. So okay, so there's, the hue slider changes the color. As you can see. The saturation color decrease the saturation. So actually I prefer to change the color instead of the saturated. So let's say minus 25, looks good to me. Okay? Shadow colors highlight everything within a group and I call it adjustments. Okay? In the next episode, we will distort our image. As you can see, all our vertical lines are not ethical, so we need to fix this in the next episode.
9. Fixing Perspective Distortion: We will distort our images. You can see our vertical lines are not, not super article. So I think we should fix this. And of course, for educational purposes it's a useful technique again. So let's make a copy of everything on a Mac. Press Shift Option Command E. On Windows press Shift Alt Control E. And I call it this torsion. Before we start distorting our images, just press Command or Control R. And we have our rulers here. And I put a ruler here where this war starts on the ground and here to the top. And this will be important. You will see in a moment. Now, press Control T. And if you grab one of the coordinates, you can see everything is distorted at the same amount, which is good for us. So let's press Control Z. If you press and hold Command or Control, you can move on part of the image separately. And if you press Shift as well, you can stay in line. So let's, let's say it's okay here. Grab the bottom left part, common than Shift again and looks okay like this. And of course we need to distort the other part as well. So let's bring it to the right. Okay. It looks it looks okay to me. Now you can see the guidelines are on the same position, but everything else is distorted. So we need to stretch our images to the top as everything is a bit shorter now. So you need to press and hold, Shift and stretch it. And they will think, looks, looks, okay. And if you press Command or Control age, you can hide all the guidelines. Now we need to crop a little. So I press on, on the crop tool and I grew up some of the some part of the image. Because I don't like me be here. Try, Tried five by four ratio, which is a standard. Maybe it's a little bit too high. So I clear it and I cropped more. Guan be standard at this time. So I like it here. Have a look on this part. I don't want to cut off everything here. I thing this guy is nice on this part on the top, it's a bit empty for me anyway. So I bring here and I cut it here, I press Enter. Now I turn everything else off below. And as you can see, we have some missing parts. As you can see, we have maybe a pixel, just one pixel I'm missing. It's easy to fix. Click on this Move tool, select our distortion layer and press the Coors or down once or twice. And as you can see, it disappeared. So it looks perfect now, but we have two corners here to fix. It's easy to fix. Usually lead score here, use the magic one tool and select this part, press and hold shift and select the other part. It's not perfectly selected now, so we need to go here to the select Bart and modify, expand. And let's say 34 pixels is fine, breast free. Now our selection is expanded, so it's 100 percent selected. It. We selected a small part of the image as well as you can see if I zoom in, zoom out a little, and I press Shift F5. We need to choose Content-Aware, color, adaption, normal mode 100% and press, Okay. Be the Command or Control D, you can deselect. And let's zoom in these bars. It looks perfect for me. And this part is perfect as well. So in the next episode, we will do our final adjustments.
10. Back to Camera RAW Filter: We'll do our final touches. I guarantee you it will make a difference. So let's make a copy of this image. Call it, come in a row field as CRF. And press Shift Command a or Control a on Windows. And don't worry about this part of the image at all. Maybe we should start with this. Let's go here and go here to the crop tool. Click on it and delete cropped pixels. Press Okay? And this way, if we go back to camera raw filter, now we, we, uh, see only the imagery need to work with. Here. Really need to ask again the question, the most important question, blood changes can make this image better. I think at this stage we need to guide I a viewer I saw IB or brighten the middle part, the most important parts of the image. And I will darken the edges of the image. So let's go here to the top-right. Press on this icon and choose where the gradient oval-shaped here because, okay, what is the most important or main part of the image? Of course, the middle where i and the temple are and of course, the Milky Way. So let's place it here. The red part shows what our value will change. So if I decrease or increase the exposure, you can see what's going on. If you press Invert. Now the red part is outside. So as you can see now, I affect that part's outside. And that's actually that's what I want. So I want to change it. So I want to darken the edges of the image so I decrease by 0.3 exposure. Think it looks good. I need a new mask, radiant or radial gradient again to the middle. Now I want to brighten this. So maybe not with an exposure, but just, just a touch like 0.2 and green screens the shadow by 20, let's say. And it's already big change as you can see. Go here. As you can see, this is the before, this is the after we brought the attention to the center of the image. Now I want to emphasize the road again. If you remember, I told you it wasn't super necessary to use an adjustment to emphasize the throat because it's super easy to do here in column a row. So again, go to the mask, create a new mask. Radial gradient. Place seat onto our road. And I increase the clarity by 15 and let's say the whites by a lot like 60. And now you can see, go back here. You can see it looks amazing. It's, it's much, much more dominant than it was before. Then go back to the mosque, create a new mask again. Now linear gradients and for sure on to talk in this corner, because it doesn't need to be so bright. Like minus, minus 1. Is it too much? Let's say minus 600, 75. And think that's, it may be I need a new mosque again. In our gradients and dark and our foreground as well. By 0.75. And I would like to emphasize these slides as well. So again, a new mask. What are the gradients? And whites? Plus 30 and maybe temperature to be a bit warmer plus 15. Okay, So this is a before and after. And my favorite slider here is under calibration tab on the really bottom blue primary saturation. If you bring it towards to the right, you can see what's going on or the warm and green colors. You'll be super nice and more saturated. And usually if, if you increase the saturation on the blue primary, blue colors, we'll be oversaturated. And I think here everything is a little bit over saturated. So come here, reduce the saturation by five. And if you think the blue is too strong, you can come here to the Color Mixer Saturation tab and you can decrease the blooms, Let's say minus, minus 15. And here is a before and here is an after. So huge, huge difference in my opinion. So let's press Okay.
11. Spice up Your Photo with Lights: I usually add some extra lights to the scene, which I forgot before. But now we can, can, I usually do these steps, the light steps at here, at the adjustment part of the editing, but now you can't do it here. So let's call it lights an empty layer, call it light 001. And brush B for brush. So you choose the brush to white color. Everything is on a 100 percent. I just click on the middle of the image, doesn't matter where actually, and I duplicate it. So click on this layer and press Control or Command J. And I call it lights to. And between the two layers, I need a color layer, I need a solid color. This color should be orange, some kind of orange color. First, it doesn't really matter which color you pick. So I go for this one. It's like a sandwich. On the top, we have this white color, then we have this color, fill this orange, and we have a same white-collar. Again. What we need to do is to use a clipping mask, press Option or Alt, and bring your cursor here too, between these layers. And as you can see, it changes, there is an arrow and the square just click on it. And now this color layer only affects the bottom, bottom layer of the lights. As you can see, this is this is orange color and on the top there is a white color. So how light works? The center of the light deaths, that's the brightest, almost white or pure white. And as we go away from the center of the light, it will be less bright and, and probably will have some colors. So this is what we're going to imitate here. So click on the top, Control T or Command T and press option and make it smaller. Enter, go to the bottom layer, the light one, Control T or Command T, press and hold Option and make it much bigger. So as you can see now, we have light starts from the right and goes to these orange color. It looks super fake. Now, to fix this, just click on the group or the directory, go here to the blending mode and choose screen. Now it looks less vague, but of course, obviously it's too strong and it's on the wrong position. So start with the position as the group selected. Press Control T again. So now everything is selected in the group and you can move everything together. So move it here where our city lights are. And now we need to distort it again, as we already learned, press and hold Shift and Alt or option. And in this way we can distort our image, our lights. And I think it looks cool like this. Obviously it's too strong again. So let's, you can actually, you can reduce the opacity on everything Like, like this. Or you can just reduce the opacity of one layer like this one. Or actually we can use a mosque as well. So I turned it off. Select, oh, sorry. Highlight the camera raw filter layer, select, selects Cai. Now we have a selection of the sky again, go to the lights and press this. And now we can see it only the sky part of the image. But it's not super nice. We need to blur it because it should have. So the reason I do this is that this glowing effect, this nice glow ish, dreamy effect. If we don't have it. So click on this mosque twice and brings up the Properties panel. And here is this flight feathers slider. And if you increase the feather, we will have, this is glowing effect going on here. So I like it's somewhere 35, 40, let's say 35. It looks looks good to me. And now we can decrease the opacity to 50 percent. Okay, it looks gorgeous. So let's make a copy of this. I delete the mask now, and I press Control T and I distort it again. So shift, press Shift and Option and hold it. Then you can distort image. And as you probably see in many, many different science fiction movie, maybe do this science fiction effect here. So I stored my image until I like the effect. I like it like it like this. It looks gorgeous, but of course again, it's too strong, so let's reduce it to, let's say 20 or even to 15. Okay, so I highlight these directories and put them in a group and call it lights and turn it on. And often as you can see, it looks to me that it has these dreamy effect I, I really, really like. And of course we can emphasize some stars as well. I think our stars look really good, but of course we can just practice. So let's go back to the lights directory, create a new layer, call it stars. And now we need to choose two different colors. One could be some kind of warmer or orange, but really bright color like this one. And the other color could be a bluish run. Really, really bright blue. Minus 1. Yeah, Okay. And now we have two colors here with an X, press the X and you can change the color anytime. And another thing that we need to do is reduce our opacity to like 50 or maybe, maybe 30%. And zoom in and choose some, some stars. Let's say here is a nice star I would like to emphasize. Let's say you can choose either bluish or orange color. So I choose the bluish this time. Make it really, really small, almost as small as the star itself. And I press here, let's say twice. And I make it bigger and press it again. And if you zoom out, you can see we emphasize the star. But for, of course again it's too strong so I reduce it by a lot. Let's say thirsty person. Okay, looks good. Let's zoom in another part of the sky. In, let's say this one, it could be more orangeish. So brush, choose the orange color. Press one here, make it smaller and less twice again. And as you can see, we emphasized that star. I think this color is not not perfect. So I deleted with an eraser, press, I, and I choose a color from here. Make it much, much brighter. So again, I press here twice, make it bigger and expressed again. Okay. Maybe it could be a little bit bigger. Like this. Cool. And now you can choose some other. They're stars. For example, this one. I change the color to the blue. The blue. And let's see. So as you can see, we emphasize the five-stars. Now, probably you understand what to do so, so it's more than a in for us now.
12. Noise Reduction and Sharpening: The next step is sharpening and maybe some noise reduction. So let's start with the sharpening. Let's press Shift Option Command E and call it Shawn Fanning, right? So I show you the free version of sharpening. Zoom in on part 3, we see some fine details like myself. And choose the overlay blending mode. It looks awful, but don't worry because you just come here to Filter other and high-pass filter. And now we need to choose our radius. I usually choose one pixel, but you can increase it. I think if you over sharpen your images, it looks awful. So I just put one here and I press O k. So let's check, Let's have a look on the difference. So as you can see, it's nicely, nicely sharpened. Can move around and check our fine, fine, fine details. And it looks amazing to me. Have a look on the sky. And it looks okay. So we have some noise on the sky. This is a night image, so it's expected to have some noise. I have no problem with this. I probably could just save it now and the end that tip. But of course I want to show you how to denoise the sky as well. I make the sharpening layer invisible and I create an other layer shift Option Command E. And I call it sky. The noise. I open it in camera roll. So Shift, Command a, zoom into the sky. Go to the details tab and denoise it. So let's before-after. As you can see, we denoise it a lot. We can sharpen it as well. So you can sharpen and use the mosque. So press Option or Alt, bring it until only the stars are sharpened. And let's say, let's have a look. I think these red parts are annoying. So I turn this off here and let's have a look. It looks really good to me. So if you have a look on other parts of the image, they look mushy. I don't like it at all. So we lose these really fine details. So I really don't like it at all, but it looks really nice on the sky. So let's press Okay. And again, go here, select sky. And now we have an active selection of the sky. I just press here on the mask and here we go. We denoise our sky. If you watch it on a 100 percent, it looks really nice. Probably could be sharpened the little, so maybe I just delete the sharpening part and let's make a copy of everything again. Overlay. Hi path, and press. Okay, and now stars are sharpened as well. And it looks amazing. Okay, I have some noise here on my jumper. So I've come here to the sky, the noise, brush to white color. And I brush, you don't want these parts so noisy. That's it. If you have some other parts you don't like them, it's too noisy for you as you can see, you can just just brush and the noise disappears. I think it's more than enough. It's perfect for me, so I don't want to do that. So they scored sharpening.
13. Orton Effect: There are many ways to create Orton Effect that it helps to have this fairy tale vibe. I show you probably the easiest one. Now we need to make another copy. Shift Option Command E, and I call it affects. Choose the lightened blending mode. It doesn't change anything. But we already learned everything is brighter on this layer will be visible, nothing else. So now we need to blur this image, Filter. Blur, Gaussian Blur. I have a 20 megapixel image. That's why I usually choose around 2025 megapixel. If you have, let's say 13 megapixel, maybe you should go for 30, 35 or, or something like that in terms of radius person. Okay? And it looks awful. Of course we can just reduce the opacity and now it looks more dreamy. 20 percent looks amazing for me. Okay, that's it for this episode, we have our final adjustments or we need to do is to save our image, which is super easy. That's it for the final touches, all we need to do now is to save our image for the web. And we will talk about this in the next episode.
14. Save Image for Web: Now we have done everything. All we need to do is save our image to the web. So let's go to the File export. Save for Web. And this is a really, really important part. We need to tick this box, convert to sRGB, the internet use sRGB. If you don't do this and you upload your image to the web to blue reared and have some weird colors and contrasts. So it's really important to convert it to sRGB, optimized embedded color profile. And I usually use 85 percent quality just to save some, some space on my computer. So press Save and choose your destination. Safe. And that's it.
15. Summary: In this episode, we'll summarize what we have just done from a to Zed. So let's start down here at the bottom. So this is the originary role base image, and this is the edited row Bayesian inch. And this is the origin at all for the church and the lights. And this is how it looks like after we edited it. So what we have done here, just here is the edited row-based image and be blended together with the edited row church image we only used here to lighten blending mode and a mask because here is a part. We didn't want our Darrieus from dataframe. And then we edited our sky images and imported to do the story landscapes Decker, just to reduce some noise. And we imported it to the Photoshop. And here it is. It looks like this, but we only need the sky from this layer. So in me, the mask of the sky. And this way we only must the sky in from this layer. Then we cleaned up some unwanted elements. Then we emphasized that the law, this path and some part of the church, and we used a channel mask and a curve to do this. Then we did the same or similar VDD, the Milky Way and sum and the lights here. Then we reduce some purple color in the shadows. We changed it to more bluish color, which is more realistic. Then we distorted our image, made a copy which we opened in Camera Raw Filter and the edited the full image in Camera Raw Filter. Then we made some extra lights here at the horizon, and some extra lights here as well. Then we emphasized a few stars here. If you can see. Then denoise the sky, then sharpen the entire image, then an Orton Effect. So let's say this is the before and this is thereafter. So this is the before. And this is the after.
16. Thank You: This is the set part. When I say goodbye, I hope you went through all the lessons. You learned a lot and you will be able to use them on your own images in the future. Don't hesitate to ask any question about the course, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. If you try to replicate or use these techniques in the future, it would be much appreciated if you upload a project and you show me your result and maybe I can help you to take or make even better photos. Don't forget to check out my other courses and follow me for more and see you soon in the next course. Bye.
Zoltán Nagy, Olympus and Manfrotto ambassador
