Expert night sky photographer Ian Norman has created an easy-to-follow video guide on how to photograph and process images of the beautiful constellation Orion. Starting tonight using any camera and a standard prime lens, you too can get amazing results by following this tutorial.
According to Norman, Orion is an excellent constellation to photograph this time of year. It is visible to most of the world from October to May, and it contains interesting, bright nebulas along with some of the night’s brightest stars.
What’s great about Orion is that you can create wonderful images using just a standard focal length prime lens (something around 50mm) mounted to any camera. Norman recommends the lens have a aperture number of f/2.0 or lower so that it can capture more light in a shorter amount of time. For the images used in his tutorial for example, Norman is using a Sony a7S camera, a Sony 55mm f/1.8 lens, and the Sirui T–025X travel tripod to keep things steady for these long-exposure photographs. The video includes a handy starter guide to the settings you may want to try first and adjust from there.
Norman's recommended focal lengths and exposure settings.
For this exercise, Norman suggests shooting a minimum of 32 exposures that will be blended together using Lightroom and Photoshop. The post-processing portion of this tutorial begins in Lightroom where the 32 different exposures have their white balance and vignetting fixed by using some neat tricks that Norman goes over. From Lightroom, the images are merged and sent over to Photoshop where he begins to perform LRGB (Luminosity, Red, Green, Blue) processing. The purpose of editing night sky images in this way is it allows you to create a high contrast luminance layer to bring out detail you didn’t even know existed, and then merge it with RGB color layers to create a stunning final image.
From the before and after images shown above, you can see the dramatic effect Norman’s process is able to bring out in the photo. More information on photographing Orion is available in this full article which accompanies the video tutorial.
If you’d like to learn more about night sky photography, I recommend checking out Norman’s Lonely Speck website which contains an abundant amount of information to set you in the right direction.
A rather interesting tutorial :) Though I honestly have not found an interest in shooting Nebula's and stuff, seeing the post-processing of someone who is into it is very fun to watch. Some new techniques seen that could be used elsewhere :)
I dont know if its a good thing, or a bad thing, but the final image almost has "too many stars"... looks noisy... but if thats what its like, then so be it :)
A tutorial jam packed with great information,Thank you Norman.
Lots of work .........But GREAT results !
Forgive me if this is a stupid question but when 32-10 seconds exposures merged together should leave a trail, right?
Nope, not if you have a mount with a motor and a tracking system (which is the norm for astrophotography), or if you realign the frames and only keep the parts that are actually superimposed (which can do the trick in some cases).
First, be sure to read Ian's full article here:
http://www.lonelyspeck.com/photographing-and-processing-the-constellatio...
While photographing, you should keep your exposure set to a point that avoids the creation of star trails. Then when you are exporting from Lightroom to Photoshop, see in the video how he is auto aligning the images as he creates the PSD file. The stars should be able to match up and so you are left with 32 exposures in matching positions.
No motorized tracking mount required for this method.
Thanks for the link, it was a great read and solved my other doubts as well. And also thanks for taking out time to reply. Have a great day!
Fantastic tutorial, if not just for the creative Photoshop concepts & methods.
Great tutorial, needs a lot of work but Ian makes it look so easy.
This is what you can get with C8 Celestron telescope. M42 Great Orion Nebula (:
Orion is tops on my list for many years now. Here are a few images captured with a C8/Hyperstar/Atik 428ex. All were taken from a heavily light polluted suburban driveway. I'm heading to a dark site tomorrow and I think I might try my hand at a widefield camera shot since this tutorial looks to have taken much of the mystery out of the critical post-processing. Pretty amazing the images he gets without flats and bias frames, although I think he would get even better results using flats instead of filter algorithms. I don't have a suitable prime lens so I will go this route and see what happens!