Took another shot of one of our old antennas with a decent aurora that showed up. My edits were to try and bring some honesty to the image. Most aurora images are jacked all up to appeal to the masses but aren’t what is being seeing with the naked eye. This gets close.
Controlling the exposure on the antenna from the flood light was a challenge and taming the purples that seem to want to show up where there should be dark sky was another.
I really wonder if all the purples are really there or not. When I took the shot I certainly didn’t see them but obviously there is sensor data for them…
I suspect yes, but obviously I have really lifted them beyond what the human eye would have seen. I am not saying it represents reality, but I like the colors and I know aurora photography can bring out colors not visible to the human eye.
I have never seen aurora IRL unfortunately so I just went for something which seemed more or less right. I wanted to darken the antenna but was having a hard time isolating it with a mask.
Yeah, I had trouble there too. The parametric mask combined with a path was pretty good but I had to feather it pretty heavily to not have the mask effect become pronounced.
The funny thing was I went out to take a shot of the milky way and the aurora got in the way. Oh well, we don’t have the best milky way sections available up here most of the time.
Had to give this a shot…but I lost the purple somewhere early in the mix. I may have lost it with with my placement of the AGX or demosaic module in my workflow. Regardless, I used an instance of color calibration in an attempt to bring some back to it at the end.
Still getting used to some of the new tools, but will keep plugging away at it.
By the way…this a a fantastic shot, thank you so much for letting us have a chance to edit it.
EDIT: Looks like I lost some of the green that I’d tuned as well…could that be a result of adjusting the primaries after export in AGX?
