General info
Images taken in downtown Ghent, in Flanders (one of the most light-polluted regions on the planet).
New Tokina 11-16 mm f/2.8 lens with Nikon D3500. Manual focus, white balance on incandescent.
Intervalometer is qDSLR dashboard (android app).
200 images at ISO1600, f/3.5, 15 sec shutter speed.
RAW file out of camera. Something went wrong with the focus on the left side, but this is cropped off later anyway.
Basic edits
Import in camera RAW, boost stars by adjusting contrast, exposure, highlights, clarity, dehaze and blacks/whites. White balance is also adjusted in this step.
Stack +/- 20 images in Starry Landscape Stacker (macOS).
Import the result in lightroom and apply edits to further bring out the stars.
bringing out stars with clarity and texture
Open in photoshop to mask the over-yellowed foreground with a base image.
Afterwards, some edits in lightroom to adjust the blues in the sky and denoise the complete image.
Masking the foreground with a different base image, denoise and change the blues so that they appear more cyan.
Stack all 200 images with StarStaX after removing planes from all individual images.
Crop in lightroom and do some basic edits.
StarStaX gap filling mode + basic adjustments in lightroom
Open both the stars-only and star trail images in Photoshop and blend them together with Lighten and 50% opacity.
final edit after blending with star-only image.
Old image with standard 18-55mm lens for comparison, taken in july 2019.
