One of my goals for 2017 is to do a print series featuring the night sky. I’ve been hooked on astrophotography for more than a year now. I’ve managed to get some decent portfolio, but I unfortunately can’t print my images very big due to the quality. They look great on Facebook and Instagram, but they would not hold up to my print standards.
I recently found a program that allows me to stack multiple images on top of each other called “Starry Landscape Stacker”. It’s allowing me to reduce the noise in the images and enhance their quality, getting me closer to having some robust print files i’d feel confident about printing big and selling. I’m going back through some images from earlier this year and I’m excited to render them through this new program. It definitely cleans them up.
One of the biggest limiting factors with astrophotography is the “noise” or grainy random colors that appear in the dark parts of your photographs during long exposures. I’ve been looking at upgrading my camera body (~$3,000 investment), but then I found this $30 program that “averages” the noise out by comparing multiple images. Boom! Way better deal!
Here is one of my first experiments. It will take some time to learn about this program and integrate it into my workflow, but I’m excited about the results.
- 6 images total
- 1st image at sunset – foreground
- night sky is the “average” of the 5 images taken around 11pm (iso 3200, f3.5, 16mm)
- blended exposures of the foreground and background for the final image.
Enjoy and hopefully more to come!
