Astrophotography Photoshop Tutorial | Star Size Reduction

This astrophotography photoshop tutorial covers one the best post-processing techniques for nightscapes: star size reduction. The goal is to create clean milky way photography and other nightscapes; the approach is to edit your landscape astrophotography using Photoshop to diminish the brightness of the stars and direct the viewer's attention to more prominent features in the night sky. I’ll cover two different approaches: the first being a fairly common Photoshop technique, and the second is a new technique that I used in a recent Deepscape that included the Orion region.

I use star size reduction in all of my milky way photography and nightscapes. It's an incredibly powerful and useful Photoshop technique that allows the viewer to focus on the parts of the night sky that you want them to see. The result is very clean, focused astrophotography that does a great job at communicating with the viewer what your night photography is about.

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#astrophotography #photoshoptutorial #nightphotography

The photo was photographed with a Nikon D800e and a Tamron 70-200 2.8 lens.

[Creativeinc]

Great tutorial Scott! keep up the great work

[darianpark]

helped me with my Pleiades shot I took tonight shooting with a Tamron 70-300 mm and the stars where very bloated helped a lot thank you <3

[armanphotos]

What a wonderful shot Scott! I remember the first time I saw this shot, I was absolutely surprised. spectacular perspective from the earth to a deep space nebula. I'm so very happy to find you in youtube and this particular video just made my day! at the end I must say that I can't stop thinking about a time lapse of rising of this nebula. how would it be? :)

[PMP-ei]

have you thought about eliminating the haloing first then doing star reduction... In LR-Optics-Fringining....

[adriancapraru]

Hi Scott, are u using a filter for the stars glow? thank you. Amazing image

[danielmeier]

Thank you! Whats the way to make that picture?

[chasingluminance]

Was this a single image for the sky or a track n stack?

[Antsullivan]

Hi Scott, really great tutorial! I've been using the first method of star reduction for quite a while now and I'm happy with how my images look on screen, however when I print the photos the star haloing is really exaggerated and looks like little holes in the image.. have you experienced this at all when printing? Like I say, on the screen the images look great and have no noticeable haloing. Any help is very much appreciated!