#STARTRAIL MAKE MOVIE STARSTAX HOW TO#
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He has written numerous magazine articles on the art and technique of photography, and his images have been published in over thirty countries around the world.

#STARTRAIL MAKE MOVIE STARSTAX PLUS#

He is the author and photographer of The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, Yosemite Meditations, and Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters, plus the eBook Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom. Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature.

Related Posts: Photo Critique Series: Star Trails and Cathedral Peak by Rick Whitacre Tips For Photographing Lunar Rainbows When the result matches your visualization it’s really satisfying. You have to visualize how your lighting and the sky’s motion will come together, come up with an idea that might work-and, you hope, capture some of that nighttime mystery-and then execute that idea. But the great thing about night photography is that it allows your imagination to take flight. Like a lot of night photographs, making this involved considerable work.

#STARTRAIL MAKE MOVIE STARSTAX SOFTWARE#

I then stacked all 24 frames as separate layers in Photoshop, and changed the blending mode in all but the bottom layer to “Lighten.” (There’s also specialized software for doing the blending, but I’ve never tried it.) Rick Whitacre used this technique for his beautiful image of Upper Cathedral Lake that I critiqued last October, and you can find links to more information about image stacking in that critique. So each of those four-minute exposures has little noise. Instead I took 24 four-minute exposures, with only a one-second interval between them. The total exposure time here is about 90 minutes, but one exposure that long would end up being quite noisy. With image stacking the idea is to take a series of short exposures and blend them together, rather than doing one long one. Okay, yeah, this does sort of resemble that.Īnyway, I “painted” this wonderful tree with a flashlight, and used the image-stacking technique to get noise-free star trails. What? I didn’t get it either until he explained that a bowsprit is the bent figure with arms splayed back at the bow of old sailing ships. My friend Mike Osborne calls this the “Bowsprit” tree. Here’s a new image, made last Tuesday evening near Olmsted Point in Yosemite. You can then save your image and import it back into lightroom for further colour correction.Juniper and star trails near Olmsted Point, Yosemite Once all of your images are selected you click Edit & Start Processing. To the right you will find the Blending Mode, this shows the different types of automatic options for your trails, the best option in my opinion is the Lighten mode. To import your images into StarstaX you can either drag and drop all of the files straight to the software or click File/ Open Images and select all from there. Once that is finished you can then export your synced photos to work on them in StarstaX. Once you’ve finished editing the first image you select all by clicking Ctrl + A and click Sync on the right hand corner. Be sure to not go overboard with it as you can edit the final image towards the end. Once they’ve been imported you can mess around with the exposure/contrast and highlights just a little bit. For better results be sure to take more than 100 frames.Īfter you’ve taken your pictures you then import them all to lightroom. With these settings you will be sure to capture some great star images. To create your startrails, you’ll first need to go out and take some long exposures, the settings I use for a single long exposure frame are: You can however point the camera in any direction in the sky and get similar results.

#STARTRAIL MAKE MOVIE STARSTAX FULL#

So a brief explanation of what a startrail is: this is a set of long exposure images taken of the motion of stars in the night sky, the camera is usually pointed at the north star (Polaris) in order to give the image a full circular look.

#STARTRAIL MAKE MOVIE STARSTAX HOW TO#

In this written guide I am going to explain how to create startrails using adobe lightroom & a free software called StarstaX.

Startrail make movie starstax