Hi, I recently went on a trip to Portugal, and I saw the milky way at night which got me excited. I dont usually shoot astrophotography and its only my fourth time shooting the milky way.
However, I got home and I couldnt blend my bracketed exposures satisfactorily. The range is simply too huge and I wonder if there was something i could have done better at the time of shooting or is there a better way i can blend these exposures. I normally use auto-HDR blending via lightroom, for this set, I also tried using manual masks to blend in photoshop but the results are still terrible.
How do people shoot extremely bright foregrounds vs milk way backdrops?
Attached are low res jpgs to show what i got out of camera but can also provide raw files if you think its amenable to a better blending method.
Judging by these images it looks like your exposure wasn’t long enough and your iso wasn’t high enough. If you’re exposing for a detailed Milky Way the cross would probably be blown out. You could take two different exposures one for the sky and another for the foreground and blend them together. As a starting point your sky exposure should be around 20s at 2.8 and iso 6400
I think that's what he was trying to do.
@Chin Yong: Having such a bright item in the foreground is very challenging as it will not only blow out your foreground but also "bleed" into your sky.
You would have to expose for the milky way with the settings Nathan gave (not knowing your lens, camera or anything else). Then you can take an HDR of your foreground only. Create the HDR in the usual way in lightroom, ignore the sky.
Then process the milky way photo and ignore the foreground.
Then jump to photshop and blend the HDR foreground with the Sky.
I actually think you can use the images you have for a somewhat good result.
thanks I'll try that then (was a 16mm f4 max 30 sec iso3200 exposure stopped down from there till all highlights were recovered) the problem i had was like you said the lights had eaten into the sky with a loss of colour information as well giving it a green cast. i haven't tried your method though and will give it a bash. thx