Post-processing help - Northern Lights

[furtive]

I was in Iceland earlier in the week and took some photos of the Northern Lights, but I've no idea how to go about post-processing them to get the best out of them. Can anyone suggest some tweaks? I've shot them RAW but below is a JPG sample straight off the camera:



RAW file can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nw47zlyg2xop1l9/D71_3272...

Edited by furtive on Thursday 15th February 15:58

[StevieBee]

Haven't much time so just a few moments in Lightroom.

You've a lot of noise going on there. ISO 3200! I think the 7100 has in-camera noise reduction but at that iso, it's quite a challenge.

Boosted Clarity all the way, same with vibrance and about 70% saturation. Upped the exposure a tad. Reduced the blacks (easy Nigel!) sharpened then upped the smoothness. Black vignette to hide the worst of the noise.

The red star near the middle of the shot is, I think, a nebula star of some kind.

Anyway...there you go!

Edited by StevieBee on Thursday 15th February 18:17

Edited by StevieBee on Thursday 15th February 18:19

[furtive]

Great, thanks.

I'm annoyed that they are so noisy. The guide said to use ISO3200 and my fingers got too cold to work the buttons to change it after a while

[KobayashiMaru86]

Astro stuff can be tricky. Personally I never use about 800 ISO for astro stuff just because of the noise past that, although there are tools in PS that can reduce this a bit.

[furtive]

I had a play to see what I could do and came up with this

[JonChalk]

furtive said:

I was in Iceland earlier in the week and took some photos of the Northern Lights, but I've no idea how to go about post-processing them to get the best out of them. Can anyone suggest some tweaks? I've shot them RAW but below is a JPG sample straight off the camera:



RAW file can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nw47zlyg2xop1l9/D71_3272...

Edited by furtive on Thursday 15th February 15:58

You're lucky - we were there 4th to 8th Feb and tours got cancelled every night, as every night either completely and fully overcast or blowing a blizzard and roads not safe.

Well done for getting something and I'm jealous in an entirely not-being-unpleasant way :-)

[JonChalk]

Only you can "remember" what you saw, but I tinkered a bit (mostly noise and red channel reduction):

[furtive]

JonChalk said:

You're lucky - we were there 4th to 8th Feb and tours got cancelled every night, as every night either completely and fully overcast or blowing a blizzard and roads not safe.

Well done for getting something and I'm jealous in an entirely not-being-unpleasant way :-)

Oh no! Our tour was cancelled twice but managed to get out on our last night there. And even then it didn't get off to a promising start as there was a snowstorm, but once that cleared we had quite a good show.

[eltawater]