This was a rather complex shot. I set up my tripod about a half hour after sunset to capture what would become the foreground of the image. At around 11:30 pm I woke up and with the same tripod set up, shot 19 images including 3 black frames of the night sky/Milky Way. In post, I stacked the 19 frames using a program called Starry Landscape Stacker and this reduced the noise considerably. With that as my Milky Way sky I went into Photoshop and blended the stacked night sky image with a couple of the images I had taken for the foreground. Once the blend was complete I did the rest of the post processing in Photoshop using Tony Kuyper’s TKv6 luminosity masking panel. My biggest concern with this image was trying to get a “plausible” tonal balance between the foreground and the night sky. I would be interested in getting feedback on that and any other issues that folks may have that would help me improve this and future images. Much thanks.
EXIF: The image was captured with a Fujifilm X-T1 using a Rokinon 12mm f/2 lens.
Foreground: 12mm, ISO 400, .6 and 2.1 sec, f/14
Night sky/background: 12mm, ISO 3200, 15 sec., f/2 focused to infinity.
Sadly this image has lost a lot of its clarity and pop in compression, I guess. A lot of the detail is being lost unfortunately. Is there a way to rectify this? Anyway, I hope you are getting a reasonable facsimile.