To capture natural color of the moonless night sky, set your camera to daylight white balance! A lot of people use artistic values of 3800K but then the stars do not have their natural color nor the night sky. Well if you want to have an artistic night sky then you can do that, but why should I change the beautiful colors of the night sky and turn them into blue? Do you make trees pink in your landscape photographs?
I try to avoid pink trees, but just applying a daylight white balance in this case does actually turn the tree lines into some odd shade of red.
I think the prevalence of the blue / yellow color grade might also have some other reasons like the Purkinje Effect. Color Constancy might have another interesting role to play, because we mostly perceive the color of the sky at day time we have an expectation that it is blue.
I made another interesting but purely subjective observation in bed last night. The room was dark with only a bit of light coming in from the sodium street lamp. The light from the outside had a orange hue, the darker parts of the room appeared blue in contrast.
I had a bit of time to look into the colors of the stars, part of the problem is the aberrations of the lens another big one lies in my processing to reduce the light pollution and bring up the brightness of the fainter features compared to the stars. There is definitely room for improvement there.
I think the way I subtract the air pollution using a low cut filter might also not be optimal and have a part in the red, cyan, magenta gradient.
Here is an attempt with a white balance closer to daylight, a slightly improved process and less color distortions. There definitely is something to the almost monochromatic look it gives
It also definitely still needs a bit more work to match the foreground to the sky it looks very cut out in places.
@billznn
It’s taken from the Axenstrasse looking towards Altdorf. So I’m nearly certain you’ve been there given that you are Italian and based in Zurich.
Clark his milky way photographs are simply stunning. Clark also updates his website with new articles so it is a good idea to revisit it often
You say you did 9 exposures. Did you do them on a fixed tripod? Could you document the steps you did in Siril (it sounds like you did it without any dark frames).
The only small bits of feedback i can possibly think is
the haloing on the framing cliff face to the left could be fixed.
Just a style thing…the top of the mountain range to the right is quite luminous/bright, and i find my eyes wandering over there. I think if it was darkened it would serve the image even better. But just my stupid opinion.
PS. I do like the first variation the best. #3,4,5 just feel like filtered variations of that image to me. #1 has the best sense of atmosphere, both figuratively and literary. I like that feeling of atmospheric haze hanging over the town, it fights overall contrast of an image but i think it adds a lot.
I’m familiar with Clarks articles and I also enjoy his results quite a lot. But good point about revisiting them.
You say you did 9 exposures. Did you do them on a fixed tripod?
Fixed is maybe a slight overstatement. Yes, I worked without a tracker but the very light Sirui travel tripod that I use is not exactly sable in windy conditions. I’m actually surprised that worked as well as it did.
Could you document the steps you did in Siril
I will do that once I’m done iterating. There are also some details which I still need to read up on, especially regarding color management. In my preferred world I would keep the image linear, not corrected for black or white point and in camera neutral white balance until after stacking but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet nor if it actually yields any benefits.
As it stands it’s far from a perfect process but the simplicity is somewhat attractive, probably even more so for beginners.
(it sounds like you did it without any dark frames)
I did do it without dark frames - because I forgot to capture them. With the fixed camera moving sky it’s not so bad as single pixel defects can still be rejected because the sky is moving over the sensor the more low frequency thermal effects remain however. They get partially removed by the low cut I use to remove light pollution but I still see some artifacts that likely come from thermal noise in frequencies between what the stacking/rejection removes and what the low cut cuts.
Looking at the more daiylight whitebalanced version again today it looks a bit like a scene in Mordor.
@PhilipB Thanks for the feedback. I plan to redo the foreground once I’m happy with the sky so that comes in handy.
