How to Edit and Process Milky Way Photos (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

In this step by step tutorial I show you how I edit and post process my milky way photos in Lightroom and Photoshop. We'll stack multiple tracked sky exposures and blend them with a separately shot foreground. However, most of the shown techniques can also be applied to your single exposures or stacked images.

Chapters & timestamps below

00:00 Intro

00:38 1. Sky

00:43 1.1 Pre-processing in Lightroom
01:12 1.1.1 Lens corrections
01:25 1.1.2 No sharpening
01:49 1.1.3 White balance
02:37 1.1.4 Color adjustments
03:24 1.1.5 Sync settings
03:39 1.1.6 Export as tiff

04:03 1.2 Stacking in Sequator

07:14 1.3 Processing in Photoshop
08:00 1.3.1 Levels adjustment
08:25 1.3.2 Stretching
09:06 1.3.3 Camera Raw global adjustments
10:30 1.3.4 Camera Raw local adjustments
16:12 1.3.5 Star reduction
20:27 1.3.6 Gaussian blur
21:42 1.3.7 Noise reduction & sharpening
22:51 1.3.8 Nik tools

25:16 2. Foreground & sky blend

25:38 2.1 Processing foreground

27:29 2.2 Blending sky & foreground
27:45 2.2.1 Crop extension
28:58 2.2.2 Sky replacement

33:29 2.3 Finishing touches