BLENDING/COMPOSITING A SILHOUETTE WITH THE NIGHT SKY

introduction

Ever felt that you’re destined for something bigger, something sublime, something out-of-this-world? Well I did too, but I can’t really help you with that. I can however show you how to create an image that encompasses these feelings, where reaching for the stars is still a metaphor, but a little bit more of a tangible one.

I’ve been shooting the night sky and particularly the milky way core for about three years now. It’s a learning process that is dependent on the time you invest, on the gear that you can afford and to a certain extent on your editing skills. Lots of trial and error, lots of cold nights out, lots of driving to get to a little bit darker areas, lots of stumbling around in the dark, lots of sleeping uncomfortably in car and in highway rest areas.
But in the end, when you see the images on the computer screen, it’s pure satisfaction. That is, if the pictures are in focus, if there weren’t thin clouds drifting around unnoticed, and if you didn’t kick the tripod without noticing.
Until recently I was very much focused on getting a decent sky image. I tried single exposures, stacked exposures, tracked exposures and stacked tracked exposures, with or without dark frames. I shot 14mm, 24mm, 35mm and 50mm, horizontal and vertical and panoramas and stacked panoramas. I was so busy with the shooting that I hardly ever had the time a peace of mind to have myself or someone else in the image. When I did, I usually had no light or a headlamp or a flash, but it just wasn’t right – it bothered me that the person in the image was always somewhat blurry or just a black blob, while the night sky that I was capturing got better and much nicer to look at the more I practiced.

So I began to play with other techniques, my favorite of which was blending a blue hour foreground image with a night sky image taken from the exact same spot a few hours later. The advantage is that you get a sharp single image that you can later darken to your taste. The disadvantage is that you have to get to the location before sunset, shoot during or shortly after sunset and then wait till the milky way core rises. It’s no big deal in summer, when the core rises relatively early; it can be quite challenging in spring, when it rises early in the morning and the nights are frozen, particularly when you don’t have the car around and you have to camp on a top of a mountain in minus degrees centigrade, when everything freezes and batteries die and you really don’t want to take your hands out of the gloves.
But still this technique is a good solution. It allows you to see a sharp and impactful foreground and an even sharper and more impactful sky, something like this:

And with a little more exercise and some clear, gorgeous sky:

how it’s done

In this tutorial I’ll demonstrate a relatively quick and easy way to create such an image using Lightroom and Photoshop, and also on a mobile phone with free apps.
The process is quite straight forward. You need:
1. An image of the night sky - milky way, star trails, anything else (for shooting tips, click here). This can be done with any equipment that you may have, even with some of the latest mobile phones.
2. An image of a person taken before darkness

To keep the process simple, the most important thing is that the person is shot on a bright background so the contrast is as high as possible, best done on the horizon line. For this demonstration I’ll use this image:

This image is pretty dark, as we got to the location at sunset, but there’s still enough contrast to make it work. In Lightroom, or any other editing software, just pull up the Exposure and the Whites. This should produce a high-contrast image. With such high contrast I should be able to make an accurate selection pretty easily for erasing the sky.

In this particular case I’ll need some more horizon line, as the dancer image was taken with a longer focal length, and I need enough horizon line to match the sky image. So I’ll take another image and increase its contrast so I can erase the sky from it in Photoshop.

In Lightroom, highlight the two brightened images and the sky image, right click, Edit In > Open as Layers in Photoshop…
Once the three layers are opened, make sure that the person is on top, the extra foreground is in the middle and the sky is on the bottom.