Night Sky Shooting / Astrophotography on X-T2 : ETTR? ISO 1600?

Astrophotographer 10 wrote:

tradesmith45 wrote:

Many people think the night sky is slightly blue. That can only happen if the sun/moon are near the horizon, you have rare blue air glow or your not dark adapted. Its really easy to be fooled that that the night sky is blue if you have ANY light pollution or your camera monitor is on & bright or you haven't had your red head lamp off for at least half an hour.

Best way to know what the real colors are at night is to shot a neutral daylight WB jpg along w/ your RAW. That's especially helpful if you have aurora w/ its wide range of possible colors or sky glow.

Sorry totally wrong. I think you've been listening to Roger who love red/yellow images and hates blue stars.

If you want horrible orange/yellow images that look like you are wearing cheap subglasses then go ahead use daylight white balance.

On my Sony A7r3 daylight versus auto is black and white. Daylight produces horrible yellow/orange exaggerated images. Keep in mind you are imaging the night not the day so obviously it will be different.

If you manually set white balance you will see its at a much lower point than the something like 5400 degrees temperature of daylight white balance. More like 3800.

I can always tell an image done using that advice. They are totally whack.

There are literally thousands of nicely done Milky Way images out there. I suggest you pick some you like and see what settings they used. I bet none use daylight white balance or 5800 degree temperature for white balance.

What is correct colour is always a minefield and always someone with a heavy opinion about what is right and what is wrong. Take it with a grain of salt and make up your own mind. After all you can actually see the Milky Way at a dark site and it does have a slight colour you can pick up with your eyes only.

Greg.

I have been arguing with Roger as well. I can see his point of view that daylight white balance gives the technically correct natural color. However, his own processing then increases contrast and saturation so much that it exaggerates it all.

Human vision for colors at night is pretty poor, and these days to find a site unaffected by light pollution and digital screens is almost impossible. So my own reality is that most of the Milky Way looks pretty neutral if not slightly cyanish, with certain stars displaying color, and the core of the Milky Way a little brownish. I tried not to look on screens for like 30 minutes, but never noticed changes from what I can see within 10 minutes.

If you photograph a scene in full moonlight, the daylight white balance shot will give a heavy orange cast. Is this how we see it? In my case, it is always rather desaturated and cyanish. The eye may not respond well to the weak red light, or the brain may quickly auto-white balance the excess of a dominant color.

So, I believe for landscape with night sky photos, having an astro-corrected color is not what I want to achieve, rather impression I had on the spot. Some added saturation does make it more attractive, but deep blue or orange just don't look right.

On the workflow, I found that subtracting excess light pollution glow with red and green curves is very tricky to do consistently from one shot to another. White balance between 3800-4300 seems to give more consistent results, as starting point. To get more star color, it helps to reduce contrast in the Lab part of RawTherapee (towards -30).