How To Make A Constellation Stand Out Using Photoshop
In Astrophotography probably the biggest mistakes that beginners make, is thinking that you have to capture all of the stars in the night sky. It’s much better to go out with a specific subject in mind to capture. Anything from the Milky way to a Nebula or Constellation. Align your camera and snap away, successfully capturing your chosen subject. The difficult part now, is showing our viewers what it is that we have captured. In this tutorial, we have an excellent example. An image of part of the Orion Constellation, but it is almost lost in a crowd of thousands of other stars. How do we remove some stars?. We’ll show you in this tutorial, How To Make A Constellation Stand Out Using Photoshop.
Make A Constellation Stand Out Using Photoshop Tutorial
Even though the title is How To Make A Constellation Stand Out Using Photoshop. The same steps can be followed in any Astrophotography post-processing to control the stars in the same way.
1. First thing you need to do is add a blank layer. You can do this by pressing Ctrl+Shift+N (PC) or Cmnd+Shift+N (Mac).
2. On this new blank layer you need to paint over the stars that you want to stand out, using the Brush Tool and Red (#ff0000).
3. Now go to the Channels panel.
4. Click on the Blue or Green Channels to see which one hides the rid spots that you painted but reveals the most stars. In this case, the Green channel did a really good job for us.
5. Hold down Ctrl (PC) or Cmnd (Mac) and hover over the layer thumbnail. You should see a small square icon appear on your cursor. Left-click on the Channel layer thumbnail to take an active selection from it.
6. Go back to the Layers panel.
– Tutorial continued below –
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How To Make Stars Stand Out More In Photoshop
7. Now, go to the Select menu and then Modify, when the sub-menu appears select Expand.
8. When the Expand Selection window appears, enter 5 in the Expand by window and click OK. This will expand our selection to include the edges of the stars as well.
9. With our expanded selection, we then click on the Create New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon.
10. From the list select Exposure.
11. Slide the Exposure slider to the left to dim the selected stars.
12. Select the layer with the red dots and go back into the Channels Panel.
13. This time we’re going to hold down Ctrl/Cmnd and left-click on the Red Channel thumbnail to take a selection from.
14. And like before, go back to the Layers panel, go to the Select menu, and down to Modify. This time we’re going to select Contract.
15. Contact the selecting by maybe 1 or 2 pixels and click OK.
16. Add another Exposure Adjustment layer as we did in steps 9 and 10.
17. Hide the layer with red dots.
18. Now in the Exposure layer Properties panel we slid the slider right to emphasise the stars within the selection.
If you slide the below image slider all the way over to the right you will reveal the original image. It’s difficult to make out the Orion Constellation when it’s surrounded by thousands of other stars. Slide the slider to the left to reveal the same image after using this technique To Make A Constellation Stand Out Using Photoshop.
Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash
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