Tag Archives: blobulous

Blobulous Revisited – Part 2

Last installment we covered the basic idea behind creating a star trail where a foreground element is moving. In this case the moving element is a radio telescope peering into the sky to discover planets and black holes.  A normal “lighten mode” stack produces the image at the left, below, while with just a little bit of work we can get the image on the right.

Before_After

To recap, we use a single frame from the sequence and some careful masking to remove the blurred part of the image. For effect, we also don’t use the stack in 100% mode. See the prior article for details.

In this article we’ll show you step-by-step how we achieved the total look.

Of course we start with the stack.

Illustration_A

Then we layer in a copy of the stack and a single frame (the last or nearly last frame).

Illustration_B

Here we have set the background (stack) to 36% Opacity, effectively darkening it. The single frame is 100% opacity and in Lighten blend mode. What we want to do is to remove the blurred part by replacing it with the unblurred single image. It’s easy to do. Select the STACK, create a “Reveal All” mask, and then go to town painting black on it (be sure to select the MASK, not the image). When done, the mask we create will look something like this:

Illustration_C

Notice how we used a slightly soft brush to “blend” the background and the still frame. We could stop right there, but I notice that the ground and the telescopes are a bit too bright, and I’d like to make the stars pop out. So the next course of action is to apply a curve, select the “Increase Contrast” option. Here I’ve adjusted the result just slightly.

Illustration_Ca

Next we want to tone down the bright stuff. We add another adjustment layer, and a “Hide All” mask and then paint white back on the mask to tone down what we want. You’ll notice that in the process, the colors intensify a bit.

Illustration_D

The next step we’ll want to take is to reduce the saturation – our radio telescope is moving from white to yellow. So the next step is to add a Hue and Saturation layer. As before we mask off everything, and then paint in only the radio telescope. We could cheat and use the same mask from the Brighten stack layer – and just invert it, but it’s not a complicated thing like a tree, so it’s pretty easy to change the mask to only operate on the radio dish and pedestal.  At the left, you can see how strongly we moved the saturation – and we upped the brightness a bit, too.

Illustration_F

If we didn’t mask off the telescope and instead applied the saturation adjustments globally, we’d see this – not what we want. (Shift-Click on the mask turns it on or off – in this case we see that the mask is off by the red X through it)

Illustration_G

You won’t notice in the small size, but the large image has a number of Hot Pixels (red, and blue) that stand out. To solve this problem we use “Alt-Ctl-Shift-E” (Command-Option-Shift E for you Mac-o-philes) to make a copy of the layer. I named the layer “Heal” because I then used the spot healing tool to fix up those little problems.  I recommend making the healing tool diameter just slightly larger than the area to be healed.

Illustration_I

To make the Radio dish pop just a little more, a little sharpening is in order. In fact, sharpening the ground will work, too.  Duplicate the Healed layer (Ctl-J or Command-J). Name it Sharpen then use Filter -> Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen.  However I don’t like sharpening my stars, they look harsh. As before we’ll create a Hide-All mask for our Sharpened layer and use a white brush to reveal the areas we want to have sharpened. This is called selective sharpening.  In the small image here, the effect is not as obvious as in the larger image.

Illustration_J

To get just a bit more pop, a little more contrast is in order. I created a curve and pulled up the midtones a fair amount while making minor negative adjustments to the highlights and the darks.  But, that adjustment brightened some areas a bit too much so I created a reveal-all layer mask and painted black on the areas that were then too bright.

Illustration_K

Et Voila, we’re done!

 

Blobulous Revisited – Part 1

It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with just a little bit of effort.  Below you’ll see a star trail formed using the Blobulous technique that I described in an earlier column on Advanced Star Trail Tricks.  There are many ways to achieve this effect. The method I described in the prior article – adding the last frame using Screen or Add blending – works especially well if the skies are dark. But here, I used high ISO shots about an hour before moonrise. Because of the high ISO exposures with a soon to rise moon the sky was blue not completely dark.  Adding the last frame to the stack as described earlier will work but it makes the Milky Way blow out and the sky overbright. I wanted the Milky Way to remain noticeable.

C_072887-935+934_AFTER

Selecting Images to Work With

There are few important things to note here. The radio telescope tracks the sky and slews from location to location causing blur. Each 20 second exposure was shot at ISO 3200, f/2.8 using a 15mm fish-eye lens on a Canon 5D Mark II. I carefully picked a range of images where the start of the sequence through to the end of the sequence included only images where the dish did not move “too far”. The next four frames show how dramatically the dish moved in subsequent shots. Had I included them it would have made quite a mess.

JPG

The dish moves far in 80 seconds…

To say it clearly: looking at the individual frames is what allowed me to zero in on the specific images I planned to stack. After selecting the range of images (C_072887 to C_072935),  I stacked them using good ‘ol brightness mode stacking. You can stack using a ton of methods but our favorite, of course, is to use the Advanced Stacker+ from StarCircleAcademy.com though the free TEST Stacker can do the job, as can a variety of free tools that we describe in this article and in our Star Trails Webinar.

To create the shot below on the RIGHT you’ll need Photoshop or some equally featured program that allows layering and masking like GIMP. Even the lowly, stunted Photoshop Elements will do the trick. After doing a normal brighten mode stack, the output looks like what you see on the left.  After some image manipulation magic, we achieve the result on the right.

Before_After

Before (left) and After (right)

From BEFORE to AFTER

It would be tedious to show step by step what I did, so I will start with a “one shot” view. You’ll notice there are 9 layers that contribute to the final image.  The top – SLC-SCA – is obvious, it’s my watermark.

Results with all layers shown.

Results with all layers shown.

However you can also see the brighten mode stack (at the bottom), and a copy of that same stack with a layer mask.  If you look carefully it’s pretty obvious that the black on the mask corresponds to the upper part of the moving dish.  Sharp eyes will notice two additional blacked out parts corresponding to the other radio dishes.  Notice that above the stacked layer is a single frame: C_072934 – the next to last image from the set used in the stack. All the layers above the single frame are adjustments to correct color, white balance, hot pixels (the Heal layer), and to do some sharpening.

BlendModeLighten

The single frame (934) is blended in Lighten mode with the stack. The stack is at 36% opacity.

The essential bit of magic here is that the Brighten layer is only used at 36% opacity. 36% was chosen by eye. I slowly reduced the opacity until the Milky Way became noticeable rather than a blur and yet the star trails remained noticeable.

The image was nearly complete by painting out (excluding) the blurred stack areas using a black brush at 100% opacity with a small amount of feathering – i.e. a brush that was not 100% hard.  It’s easy to paint on the mask and watch how the blurry dish from the stack is replaced by the non-blurry single image from C_072934.  If you’re wondering why I didn’t use the final image, C_072935, it’s because it was a tiny bit blurrier than the preceding image.

The rest of the adjustments are straight forward – they were all meant to fix contrast, darken the overbright areas and then correct for the color saturation increase that occurs when you darken an area with color.

We cover complete details in the PhotoManipulation webinar series.

Here is the image obtained from the next set of exposures after the dramatic dish move. This image used the “Streaks” stacking method available in the Advanced Stacker, but is otherwise identical in creation.

C_072941-67

For yet one more take – using yet another Advanced Stacker Mode (long streaks), there is this.

Long Streak Runnin'

In the next column I’ll show all the steps I took to produce the first image on this page.