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My sister's comment on my star trail photo made me question my editing style
I showed her a stacked image of the Milky Way from a trip to Joshua Tree last fall. She said, 'It's pretty, but it looks like a screen saver, not a real sky.' She pointed out how I'd pushed the blues and greens so far that the natural dust lanes were gone. I'd never thought about losing the real feel for a 'perfect' look. Has anyone else had a moment where they realized they were over-editing their astro shots?
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mary7761mo ago
Yeah, I used to crank the saturation sliders way up on my Milky Way shots too. Then a friend asked why my night sky looked like neon paint, and I actually went back to look at my raw files. The real sky is so much more subtle, all those soft grays and browns in the dust. Now I try to edit just enough to show what I saw, not turn it into a cartoon.
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Drop the magenta slider and watch your natural sky come back. I did the same thing with my early Andromeda shots until someone showed me their processed version that actually looked like space. Pushing blues and greens that hard kills all the real color in the interstellar dust. The real Milky Way has those warm browns and faint reds hiding in there, not just cyan and purple. Took me a few months to retrain my eyes, but now I barely touch saturation. Just stretch the data gently and let the natural tones breathe.
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