Stars Zoom
Hello guys! Here I am again with a night picture from the beautiful Rocca Calascio. What you see is the castle, with the path that leads to the slopes of the fortress. The way was glimpsed in the darkness and the atmosphere created by this photo was something that catch me imediately I like very much that mood and I also like the light pollution behind the castle that seems a daylight lighting
Speaking of the sky and the stars this time I tried to do something different, I enjoyed playing with the zooming and Photoshop levels to create something original and slightly different from the usual, one created is a startrail zoom made by copying the same level multiple times and changing the blending mode into lighten, the sky full of point-like stars seemed to me too reductive for this beautiful castle 🙂
WORKFLOW EXPLANATION
After created the images stack I changed the blending mode into lighten to create a zooming effect, than i merged the result into a final frame. Using TTS PRO I launched luminosity masks with I increased the lights of the darks and decreased the highlights curves. I created contrast zones to fix the light and the contrast over the main part of the picture
The next step was to fix colors using auto correct, that give me a very good color tone, than I slighlty changed it by reducing blues and increasing yellow using a warming filter.
I used dodge and burn to lighten the path that lead to the castle, I also launched orton effect decreasing the opacity to 8% to create a soft and dark dreamy atmosphere in the image. The last step was to darken the image e and to launch a noise reduction with very low opacity just to give the last touch
All the effects I mentioned above are inside my brand new panel TTS PRO, that I recommend to download to fasten your workflow and to have all the effect in one click application!
I hope you will find this usefull. I love to hear that from you!
TECNHNICAL STUFF
Camera: Nikon D-800
Lens: Nikon 14-24mm f/2,8 (Shot at 14mm)
Single Exposure
ISO: 3200 at f/2,8
Software: Photoshop CC2018
Plugin: TTS Pro