R e d W r e c k o n i n gB a s i c w o r k f l o w

For this shot I used this gear:

Canon EOS 6D Samyang 24mm 1.4 lens Manfrotto 190PROBX tripod Manfrotto RC2 ball head

Settings:

20 seconds 3.4 10,000 ISO

After the shoot, go home (have a nap if need be) and Load all your images into Lightroom.

1 52 63 4

12 811 710 9

13 1714 1815 16

1 52 63 4

12 811 710 9

13 1714 1815 16

How to shoot the panorama:

How the panorama will actually stitch:

Edit an image, then sync the settings to the rest of your images. Export all jpegs or PSDs tot heir own folder.

RAW unedited RAW edited

Open the images in Hugin, then Align them.

Under the Move/Drag section, have a play with the sphere on the left hand side to get your composition how you want it.

Also make sure you in your crop you have ALL the image in there.

After alignment, the images arent merged but are in their right places.

Create the panorama, for ones this size I set it to 10,000px high and no compression on the TIF.

Open the TIF in Photoshop, notice the top bit stretches outwards? This is what causes the stretched stars.

Crop in from the sides, and OUTWARDS on the top/bottom.

Move the image down to the bottom.

Use the warp tool (Transform/Warp) and warp the top third upwards, and bend the corners in. This will help reduce the stratched stars. Then just warp the rest of the image to fill in the gaps. This is a very high resolution image so the loss of quality will be very minimal.

This is how she looks, not bad but a little flat.

Add a contrast layer or two to get the Milky Way popping a bit more this is where I noticed my white balance was set to Auto on my initial LR export (DOH!), dont worry, we can still work with it.

Mask the adjustment layers in a group, otherwise my foreground will be too dark.

As the AUTO WB set the right side a bit too blue, and a little red, I added a couple of Hue/Saturation layers to counter the colours, and mask them accordingly.

Heres how she looks now, save the PSD then open the PSD in Lightroom.

Add a couple of minor touches to the overall image lift shadows and a bit of clarity.

Add a little colour to the galactic bulge using the LR Brush tool - note the Flow isnt at 100%.

Add more clarity to just the sky.

And reduce the noise a bit more on the foreground its ok to lose a bit of details here.

And the final result, a 19717x9594px (167x81cm @ 300DPI) image for the wall.