Re: First attempt to shoot milkyway: critique and post-processing advice
allematic wrote:
Good first attempt. Here's what will get you the most improvement quickly:
1) Move to a darker site. I would go to the south of your city based on that map. With so strong light domes it's just not worth it unless you're doing it for practice.
2) A faster lens would help getting a cleaner result. A cheap tracker like MSM would help immensely and even make the fast lens redundant. But if you can't have any of these you can still get decent results. Just make sure you shoot several frames and stack them with Sequator. 10-20 is a sensible amount of frames.
Thank you very much for the tips. I am looking at the new Skywatcher Star Adventurer GTi and hope to get it soon.
3) Affinity Photo is fine for what you shoot. I use it myself to stitch and process panoramas like this: https://www.instagram.com/p/CdvzHdWtPYm/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Tone mapping in Affinity works well for astrolandscapes in many occasions. Fundamental tools like Curves and Levels will help you bring out details in the milky way but you will need to use masks. I have found Color Efex in Nik Collection by DxO to be very useful too. Different style of editing and results that I can't replicate elsewhere.
That's a great photo. Thank you once again for sharing your experience in using Affinity Photo for image processing.
Regards
Suman