I am working on my post processing skills, I know that the sky I used is not the best, I took it at iso 12800 or something like that for 10 sec, the foreground was a bluehour shot that had a much longer shutter speed at iso 100. I am wondering how I could improve this, sister said it just looked photoshopped which is not what I am going for obviously. Thanks for your feedback!
Well...Most blatant thing I will tell you is that the North end of the Milky Way does not line up in a manner to display over the Eastern Sierra like that. lol.
Beyond that...
1. I'd say your blue hour shot is still casting too much shadows on the south east facing slopes for my taste
2. The light falloff on the farther peaks should be darker in my opinion
3. Finally, There isn't a lot of light pollution looking west over the Eastern Sierra, but my brain says there should be a hint of it. You've got a very hard transition from black sky to bright foreground. I think you need to create a "softer" transition by addressing #2 and also ensuring a hint of light pollution remains.
Direction of the Milky Way point taken haha certainly not something that I would have noticed myself though!
I will see if I can figure out how to more naturally darken the peaks further back, I was hoping since this shot was taken almost an hour after sunset that it would look right...
I think that the light pollution looks missing because the left side of the image has a little but the right side does not.
This is looking from generally the airport south towards convict lake.
Like always Ryan I appreciate your feedback!
edit:
I gave it a shot, I think this looks better but maybe I need to look again in a few hours hahaha
If you want, put the RAW files in a google drive and share it out in a Personal Message. I will do a blend in Photoshop, save as PSD, and you can then open it to see what I did.