Night Sky Photography - Milky Way and Star Trails

Set your camera to manual mode with shutter speed, ISO, and aperture, using a wide 14 mm lens for Milky Way shots, plus tripod, remote, batteries, and red-light foreground lighting.

set iso 3200, aperture f/2.8, and shutter up to 30 seconds using the 500 rule; focus manually at infinity, shoot raw, and plan star-trail stacking.

Explore white balance and camera modes for night sky photography, using tungsten for cool tones, and choose single or high speed continuous shooting for Milky Way and star trails.

Capture star trails when the Milky Way isn’t visible by locating the North Star with the night sky app, rotating around Polaris, and stacking exposures for a timelapse.

Learn to straighten the Milky Way image and enhance its color and detail using gradient filters and adjustment brushes for a blue, less magenta night sky.

Adjust levels and curves to boost contrast in the Milky Way, then selectively mask and brush to reveal color detail, balancing blues, yellows, and greens for a natural sky.

Organize your edits by grouping Photoshop layers and use a top layer to reopen camera raw, then adjust color balance, saturation, and clarity to refine night sky photos non-destructively.

Sync settings across similar night-sky images by using a reference image, enabling adjustments for shadows, highlights, clarity, and other local edits, then fine-tune crops as needed.

Apply the night sky preset to Milky Way and star trail images, then sync adjustments across all tripod shots—white points, blacks, noise, color, and sharpening for a cohesive look.

Learn to fine-tune star trail images with manual adjustments, exposure and saturation controls, and local adjustments synced across frames to achieve balanced, natural results.

Blend multiple exposures to balance sky detail and foreground in a night sky panorama. Use a tripod with separate sky and foreground shots, then blend in Photoshop before stitching.

In this ACR editing walkthrough, straighten the horizon, adjust highlights and white points, reduce noise, tweak warmth and vibrance, apply selective masking, and finish with minimal Photoshop tweaks.

Apply color lookups, masking, and selective brushing in Photoshop to enhance the Milky Way, adjust contrast and warmth, and sharpen with Camera Raw clarity.

Learn to import from Bridge into Lightroom, apply the same development steps as in Adobe Camera Raw, adjust exposure, contrast, color, crop, lens correction, and use presets, brushes, and gradients.