Have you ever wanted to capture the motion of the stars in your photos? These are a ton of fun to make and they’re not very difficult. This blog post will show you how!

In The Field

Use the Big Dipper to find Polaris

This starts with finding an interesting foreground and aiming north. The star we’re aiming for is Polaris, also known as the North Star, which can be somewhat difficult for people to find. The best way to do it without all the fancy tools is to look for the Big Dipper. If you can see the Big Dipper, you’ll want to look for the bottom right most part of the ladle, and it’s always going to point towards Polaris.

Now, there are some other ways to do it as well.

Useful Tools

You can use some popular smartphone apps such as Stellarium or PhotoPills and look up Polaris. I prefer to use an Inclinometer, which is kind of a fancy tool I used when I was a satellite technician.

I like it nowadays because I use my red headlamp light and shine it inside to get an idea of where Polaris is even at night. If you’re trying to line this star trail up with a point or the top of a building just perfectly, it’s going to help to have that accuracy over the smartphone options.

For this example, I set my camera up on a tripod on the south side of the Lighthouse and I did a three shot HDR, with my focus on the Lighthouse to use specifically for my foreground. Then, very carefully, I adjusted my focus to the stars. I changed my settings and then I put the camera in interval mode.

My Star Trail Settings

These were the settings I used that night. Knowing what I know now, I probably would have lowered the ISO a little bit. Normally, I like to leave the camera running for as long as I can. Usually, two and a half hours is sufficient to make long star trails. In this situation, I only had it going for about 50 minutes.

Editing Later At Home

Image Stacking

First, I brought all of my star images into Lightroom and did an automatic lens profile correction to take care of the dark corners and make small global adjustments.

Afterwards, I used Sequator and stacked those images by clicking star images and importing them. If you have noise images or vignette images, then great! I didn’t. These kinds of frames are extremely helpful for subtracting noise and correcting some of the vignetting patterns. It’s almost essential if you’re using a telescope, and in this situation, because I’m using built-in lens profile corrections, I didn’t think it was necessary.

For the foreground, I used three separate images and combined them as an HDR image in Lightroom. In retrospect, I should have created my own HDR with much longer exposures using an intervalometer. It’s also quite popular to use a blue hour shot instead of shooting them with the stars at the same time.

I just learned a lot of great information on this website called Photons to Photos. This includes interactive charts that show how the dynamic range of your specific camera changes while changing your ISO. Essentially, the higher you increase the ISO, the more dynamic range you lose.

I’d be best keeping my camera at its native ISO of 100. In this case, it was more run-and-gun. Just like with the star images, I also brought these photos into Lightroom, used the lens profile corrections, and made very subtle global modifications.

Finishing Touches

I export my foreground as a Tiff file.

The first thing I did in Photoshop was clean up my background star image. My clean layer basically just involved me getting in and using a lot of the eraser tools and spot removal. I had to go through and eliminate all of the planes, the satellites, the International Space Station, and anything else that detracts from the image. This part can be extremely time consuming.

Then I start with curve adjustments. The rule of thumb that I have followed is to use small curve adjustments, and just use more of them rather than overdo them. So a lot of mine are very subtle, but they kind of do specific things. I tried to keep an eye on my star color as I make changes.

At this point, I’m trying to pull my shadows up a little to separate the background and the stars. I’m really starting to get some beautiful star color. I can also tell that I’m introducing some noise in the clouds back there and I used a mask to take some of that out. A lot of times, I copied the mask over and reused it for similar adjustments.

Then I add a vibrance layer and again mask out the bright spots at the bottom that are already oversaturated. This helps me just add saturation to the part of the image where I think it’s needed the most.

I do the same thing with my saturation levels. I don’t need anymore saturation in the clouds at the bottom but I would like some more in the stars up top. This can be achieved by simply masking the bottom area.

With my contrast layer, we are again isolating the parts of the sky where contrast is needed and ignoring the parts that it’s not. Sometimes I paint my entire mask black and then come in with a white brush to add the areas the effect will be used. In this case the area I would like it to be a little bit more contrasty. The change is subtle but it does make a difference overall. It helps the image stay cohesive.

At this point, I start to introduce my foreground and I mask out the sky completely.

I create another clean layer here for me to clean up my foreground just like I did with my backgroud earlier. I went in and OCD cleaned all of the artifacts and pixels one at a time using the spot healing brush.

I added a curve adjustment just to bring up the highlights on my foreground a little bit. If you right click and hit “create clipping mask”, this effect will stay tied to the layer below it.

At this point, I usually just make small final adjustments with color balancing and any other items I think might complement the overall image. I decided to accentuate the light coming from the Lighhouse by painting white onto a new layer and changing the blend mode to soft light.

This helps add to the light that’s already there and helps complement an already cool image.

If you are interested in learning how to create these star-trail compositions check out this video: