Milky Way Editing Workflow

Explore Landscapes #35: As you get into dark sky photography/astrophotography, whichever term you prefer, there’s much to learn. In this post I focus on post-processing/editing.

Before Editing (L) and After Editing (R)

One of my Dark Sky workshop attendees and newsletter subscribers requested this post, and I'm happy to oblige (thanks for the request, Dean). Here’s the workflow I use to edit my Milky Way images.

There is no one ‘right or wrong way’ to edit your images, but this is the workflow I use, and it gets me where I want to go with my final images.

I use Lightroom (and sometimes) Photoshop for all my post-processing and editing, so my workflow refers to the specific tool panels in Lightroom. The workflow should read across to other editing software; however, some features/panels may be called something slightly different.