Processing Aurora Australis Images | Kevin Prince Photography

How to Photography Guide, Night Sky Photography

How to Process Aurora Australis Images

My experience is in processing both Sony and Samsung Raw images. The processing settings summarised in this blog are those applied to these images. The suggested approach to processing is generic and can be applied to all Aurora images regardless of the camera they were taken on.

There are numerous approaches to Aurora processing and you will have to experiment to see how the settings I use apply to your images and to your style. The object is to achieve a processing result that suits you, while maintaining the integrity and tone of the original image.

BREATHTAKING AURORA AUSTRALIS Lake Tarawera

Aurora Image Processing

Import the image into Lightroom and process either in Lightroom or Lightroom Classic – the images on this page have all been processed in Lightroom Classic.
Straighten and crop the image as needed.
Try Auto on WB and Tone sections and see if the result suits you – if not begin to process further.
White Balance – Use a fixed WB when shooting (I use 3800K) and adjust the WB in processing to keep the reality of the black sky areas appearing as they should – in the images on this page WB ranges from 3200K – 3600K. Using a fixed WB when shooting allows you to get a consistent view from each night’s images on the camera screen.
Enable Lens Corrections – Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections.
Adjust sliders to suit the image – Suggestions:

6a. Basic

Exposure – adjust to achieve correct exposure – may need to increase depending on the image – the trick is to have the histogram readout for the sky close to the Shadow vertical line in the Histogram (don’t worry about underexposed elements on the left of the histogram as they will most lbe dark foreground in your night time shot.)
Highlights – Reduce as needed to compensate for increase in Exposure – reducing Highlights slightly and then use the Whites to get pop in the Aurora colours should work.
Shadows – may need to bring up slightly to bring a subtle bit of colour/light into the foreground – depends on the image.
Histogram - check to ensure 2 peaks are showing correctly - hard left peak for foreground and Shadow vertical line peak for sky
Contrast - Increase as needed
Whites – Increase to create pop in the image.
Blacks – May need to take black slider down into -ve and compensate a little by taking Shadows up slightly – again depends on the image
Finally check the before and after image by clicking the eyeball icon top left in the ‘Light’ section

6B. Presence

Texture – reducing texture by a small amount may help the image
Clarity – reduce slightly to cause sky to have a little more glow
Vibrance and Saturation – adjust to taste – increasing these sliders will will increase the presence of colour however with strong Aurora images Vibrance and Saturation will probably be quite strong so use these sliders sparingly.

6C. WB (White Balance)

Important to get WB right Texture – reducing texture by a small amount may help the image
Adjust Temperature and Tint to reach of balance of accentuating the Aurora colours captured while maintaining a background sky that looks true – that is black sky and stars are realistically displayed and are not washed out or muddied by false colour

6D. HSL/Colour

Be careful not to overdo any adjustments in this section
Start with Luminance – adjusting sliders up will make colour less saturated but a little brighter and taking it down will result in less saturation and not as bright
Sliding to far up will result in strange bands appearing
You may decide not to adjust any colour sliders at all
If you adjust any colour Luminance up and therefore reduce overall saturation then you can adjust the Saturation slider to compensate
Again, check the eyeball at top left of section to see what the before and after looks like before moving one

6E. Colour Grading

I leave untouched for Aurora images

6F. Detail

Hold Alt or Option key and drag on Masking slider – anything that is showing white will be sharpened, anything that is black will not be sharpened and anything that is grey will be partially sharpened.
Make sure there is a clear white edge around any foreground subject that you want sharpened – Zoom in when doing this (Command + on a Mac and Ctrl+ on PC)
Move Detail up to 100 and Radius down to 0.5
Move the Amount slider up and down – moving the slider up will apply sharpening – avoid moving the slider up so much that it causes noise on the edge of the subject – sharpen as much as possible without creating noise on the edge of any subject in the image – 30-50 will probably suit most images.

7. Masking

7A. Sky Mask

Click to add a new mask – select Sky for Mask 1 to be created and set Mask Overlay Mode on ‘White on Black’ – anything that is white will be adjusted and anything that is black will not be adjusted – anything that is grey will be partially adjusted.
Go down to ‘Curve’ and create a very slight S curve on grid – do not go overboard on this or it will look bad – drag up blacks point bottom left slightly up the left axis and then highlights (top right point) to the left along top very slightly – this will result in bending the curve in the middle to accentuate highlights as it adjusts the middle of the curve.
Adjust Exposure to brighten or darken - Highlights and Saturation to taste for this Mask.
Finally check eyeball for before and after to check you are happy with adjustments.

7B. Brush Mask (Only if you want to go to this detail with your editing – not something I do much) – is used for highlighting the Aurora streaks.

Create New Mask and select Brush – bring Exposure up to about 1, Density of Brush down to 10, Size of brush small approx. 2.5
Brush streaks in flick lines in same direction as they are on the image – has to be same as streaks in the Aurora or will negatively affect your image.
To get these brush line accurate click brush at top of streak to be accentuated, hold down shift key and click where brush stroke is to end – this is a much more accurate way of doing this.
Do multiple times to accentuate the streaks but do not overdo it as the image will begin to look unreal. Bring up Saturation in this mask if needed.
Now return to Basic Tab.

7C. Adding a Vingette – only do this if you want to direct the viewers attention to the foreground subject of the image and the associated Aurora.

Reduce image size on screen (Click on Command- or PC equivalent Windows-) – opposite to make image larger again later Command+
Add a new Mask and create a Radial Gradiant drag it over the image and enlarge then invert (right click on mask in menu and select Invert Mask or tick invert box on right) so only the edges will be selected for this mask
Bring Feather down to 30-60
Reduce Exposure to darken the edges
Check Eyeball for Before and After to make sure you are happy with the adjustments

PEAK AURORA Blue Lake

8. Denoise

Noise reduction should improve your images. However, noise removal will potentially reduce image detail. The noise removal process smooths out noisy areas, which gets rid of unwanted artifacts but also obliterates fine detail. Be wary of this and use denoise carefully. There are two types of noise in photos - colour noise and luminance noise. Colour noise appears as multicoloured pixels and Luminance noise is monochromatic so it’s less colourful and similar to grain.
Click Denoise if available for your image and use Lightroom Classic AI denoise function OR denoise manually with Manual Denoise Reduction adjustment.
For RAW images, Lightroom automatically applies colour noise reduction during the import process resulting in default settings - the Color slider will most likely be set to 25 (but in bright images may be lower), Detail and Smoothness set to 50. Luminance set to 0, with Detail set to 50 and Contrast set to 0.
Zoom in on the image to find out what type of noise is affecting your image. There may be only one type present or both. Boost separately the Colour and Luminance sliders to their maximum and see what happens – if colour noise then the slider should make a difference, if luminance noise then the luminance slider will make the difference – if it’s both then both will make a difference.
Once you know the type of noise present dragging the correct slider to the right should help – don’t go too far or you risk losing detail
Then adjust the sliders below each – for Luminance adjust detail and Contrast sliders for best effect and for Colour adjust Detail and Smoothness but be wary increasing these sliders increases noise.
After Colour adjustment you may need to adjust the Luminance slider to remove any remaining Luminance Noise.
Experiment with different slider strengths and see if you improve your image – if not happy with the result you can always reset and try again.

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AMAZING Aurora Australis Mount Tarawera. (Cell Phone Image)

Thanks so much for taking time to read my Processing Aurora Australis Images. I hope this inspires you, assists with the processing of your Aurora images, and results in some amazing Aurora Australis Photography.

If you are interested in prints of any of the Landscape Photography images on my site, please browse my Photography Gallery, and check the images in my Online Print Store, or get in touch to purchase images from this post.