Category Archives: Post Processing

Night photography: Stacking star trails and clouds in the same image

Posted on by joe
Out in the weeds behind the bus yard -- by Joe Reifer

Out in the weeds behind the bus yard -- by Joe Reifer

This 15 minute full moon photo was taken at a yard that restores and repairs vintage buses. The image was lit by a combination of moonlight, and light from the nearby highway. The green glow on the underside of the power lines is from a light outside of the building. Three 5-minute long exposures were stacked together for the final image. The image stacking technique allows you to shoot without using in-camera noise reduction, which helps with shooting productivity and battery life. The star trails look the same as one 15 minute exposure, but sometimes this can create a strange effect when there are clouds in the sky.

When you’re shooting long exposures, the amount of cloud definition depends on two factors: how fast the clouds are moving, and the length of the exposure. For full moon night photography, fast-moving clouds usually show a good blend of movement and definition when exposing for 2-4 minutes. When the clouds are moving more slowly, longer exposures are possible. If you expose too long, the sky can simply turn white without definition.

In the photo above, each 5 minute exposure captured a distinct amount of cloud movement. When the image was stacked for star trails, the additive cloud definition created a slightly ribbed pattern in the sky. If I hadn’t pointed out this effect would you have noticed? Because the sky is about a 50/50 split between stars and clouds, I think it works in this image. The clouds can start to look unnatural if you try to stack more images, or use shorter exposures.

Each image could stand on its own if I decide that I don’t like the effect. Stacking also allowed me to have different options for the amount of light from cars on the highway and road on the right. The highway shows the cumulative 15-minute exposure, and the road ended up looking better with just the red tail lights of one exposure.

If you’ve tried stacking images for star trails that also have a lot of cloud movement, how did they turn out?

Unreal Estate: Further adventures in 360 night panoramas

Posted on by joe

I’m continuing to refine my pano gear, shooting, and post-processing techniques. Photographer Tong Lam emailed recently to let me know that he’s been enjoying the night 360′s, and referred to this growing body of work as unreal estate. The most common use of 360×180 panoramas is for virtual tours in the real estate world. The locations that I’m interested in photographing, and the surreal nature of long exposure night photography make unreal estate a very fitting play on words (even if it is already the title of a death metal album).

During last month’s full moon I made a total of ten 360 degree night panoramas at Big M Automotive. Using a technique that’s common in virtual tours, I’ve been experimenting with adding hotspot areas that allow you to move from one panorama to another. If you click on the workshop building in the panorama above, you’ll be taken to another panorama inside the workshop. Click above the red Fury in the interior pano to go back outside.

Linking between panos only works in the Flash version, not on the HTML5 version that’s viewable on an iPad and iPhone. After putting together the rest of the panoramas from the Big M, I plan to experiment with linking them all together for a virtual full moon tour of the yard. Stay tuned.

Night panoramas: Abandoned cement plant

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Abandoned cement plant night panorama -- by Joe Reifer

Abandoned cement plant night panorama -- by Joe Reifer


This night panorama shows the back of the abandoned cement plant in a 300 degree view. I shot 14 images but only ended up using 12 for the pano because the brightness of the full moon was too distracting. The distortion produced by the cylindrical projection option in Photoshop CS5 Photomerge works well with the long cluster of buildings on the right leading up into the nearby hills. The cylindrical setting also bends the clouds into interesting arc shapes, providing a rhythmic connection between the different groups of structures. These were 2 minute exposures at f/8, ISO 400 with a vertically mounted Canon 5D Mark II and a 24-70/2.8L lens at the 24mm setting. The graffiti on the small stone in the left foreground says “Musk,” which cracked me me because I encountered a rather aggressive skunk while shooting this image. I must have set my tripod up close to the skunk’s den. No skunks were harmed in the making of this picture.

Abandoned cement plant night panorama -- by Joe Reifer

Abandoned cement plant night panorama -- by Joe Reifer


For this alternate view of the plant I chose to center the big tree and buildings, and have the dirt path enter the frame from both sides. The impact of the cylindrical projection is minimal on this image. The increased space between the camera and subject matter gives the image less impact at web size, but would help achieve a more documentary spirit of place in a large sized print. Exposure and camera setup details were the same as the previous image.

Abandoned cement plant night panorama -- by Joe Reifer

Abandoned cement plant night panorama -- by Joe Reifer

The view from the SE corner of the plant also shows an  irrigation channel on the left. The cylindrical projection creates a very natural looking flow on the left side of the image with the pond, telephone pole, and domed building. The right side of the image has more intense distortion than the other night panos, because I was closer to the stone walls. I am still experimenting with the post-processing on this image in Photoshop, and may also try some of the tools in Autopano Pro.

I hope you enjoyed this series of full moon night panoramas!

Night photography post-processing: Save your test shots

Posted on by joe
Through the lunch truck -- by Joe Reifer

Through the lunch truck — by Joe Reifer

I’ve been preparing for next week’s night photography workshop at Paul’s Junkyard, and found the image above while putting together my post-processing demo. In the past, I’ve covered how to develop night photos in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. The all new post-processing demonstration for this workshop will primarily focus on making subtle adjustments to tone, color, and sharpness in Photoshop. These techniques will help workshop participants learn how to finish their images for web or print.

Notice anything different about the night photo above? This image is an ISO 6400 test shot from a Canon 5D Mark II. Noise reduction was applied in Lightroom 3. Is it a little bit noisy? Yes. But the file is fine for web use, and with a little bit of work it would make a nice print. Save those test shots! Who knows what you may be able to rescue from your archive as the post-processing software gets better and better.

Low light sensitivity and high ISO performance are improving with every new generation of digital SLRs. Will it be long before we’re doing night photography hand-held? Star trails may start to look pretty old school in the not too distant future!

Lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error

Posted on by joe

When I travel for a shoot, or work on organizing a new project in Lightroom, I often create a new separate catalog just for a particular set of images. The smaller catalog runs faster and keeps things simple. When everything is processed, I’ll then import the smaller catalog into my master catalog by going to: File — Import from Catalog:

Lightroom -- Import from Catalog

Recently I encountered an issue with this workflow — when trying to import one of these small working catalogs into my main Lightroom 3 catalog I got an error message that said: Lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error:

Lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error
Not a very helpful error message, huh?

After some troubleshooting, I figured out the conditions that cause this error to occur, and how to fix it. The problem occurs if the catalog you’re trying to import was upgraded from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3, and there are photos in the catalog that are offline or missing, as indicated by the question-mark icon in Library Grid View:

Lightroom Library Grid View question mark

The question mark indicates that you’ve moved or deleted photos outside of Lightroom, and Lightroom no longer knows where to find the file. To remedy this situation, click the question mark and locate the file, or turn on the external hard drive where the images are stored. If the files have been deleted, you can click delete and remove the images from the Lightroom database.

When you have resolved all of the images that are offline or missing in your smaller catalog, you will be able to import the catalog into your master catalog. If you haven’t created extensive collections in this catalog, another solution would be to create a new catalog for these images in Lightroom 3. Catalogs that are native to Lightroom 3 don’t seem to have this problem (i.e., catalogs native to LR3 with offline or missing images will import into another LR3 catalog just fine). If you choose this fix, make sure to write your metadata changes to XMP so you don’t lose your work.

I hope this bug fix saves you time!

Note: I’m running Mac OS 10.58 10.64 with Lightroom 3.0.

Update: I ran this issue by Victoria Bampton, The Lightroom Queen, who let me know that duplicate files can also cause this error message (i.e., the same photo is in both catalogs). Hopefully this issue will be fixed in LR3.2.

Update: Tom Hogarty, the Product Manager for Lightroom at Adobe, let me know they’re working on a fix for this issue.

Update: According to a reader’s report, this issue looks to be fixed in Lightroom 3.2 (release candidate).

Update 8/29/2010: I found another variation of this bug. I was trying to import a working catalog that I recently created in LR 3.0 into my master catalog. The Library — Find Missing Photos command did not yield any images, but I kept getting the Lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error message. Turns out there were 3 images that WERE missing, but Lightroom wasn’t finding them. Here’s how I figured it out:

  1. In the working catalog, go to Library — Show Photos in Subfolders, and make sure this feature is unchecked. This will give you an image count for each individual photo in your catalog.
  2. In the Grid View, make sure you have Index Numbers turned on to count the actual thumbnails. You can turn on Index Numbers by right clicking a thumbnail in Grid View, choosing View Options, and then checking Index Numbers.
  3. Now go through folder by folder and match the folder image count on the left, to the index number count in the Grid View. In my case there were 3 TIF files that Lightroom was not seeing.
  4. Next I saved the metadata to the files in the folder with the missing images by going to Metadata — Save Metadata to Files.
  5. Highlight the folder on the left, right click, and select Remove to temporarily remove the folder from your catalog.
  6. Now go back to the file menu and choose Import Photos to re-import the folder. In my case the image counts now matched up, and I was able to import the working catalog into my master catalog.