Plitvice Night (edit)

[Kyle Jones]

I just returned from two weeks exploring the Adriatic coast from Dubrovnik, Croatia up to Trieste, Italy. The landscape highlight of the trip was two days in Croatia's Plitvice Lakes National Park. I'll be sharing a bunch of photos from there over the next few weeks but this is the first one I wanted to process. For most photos I can process the RAWs in LR on my tablet to see how they came out, but night shots require more effort and I wanted to see how this one came out.

I smart-object stacked three 1-minute exposures for the ground layer for noise reduction and then used a single 20-second exposure for the sky, all at f/1.8 and ISO 1600. The skies had been clear all week but the clouds started rolling in on this evening, along with some haze near the ground.

Any thoughts are welcome.

Here's an edit with less smearing in the foreground and (hopefully) some darker background stars

 

[JimFox]

What an awesome location! There are so many waterfalls cascading down!

Maybe darken the sky a bit more with Clarity or Dehaze? The image looks great overall, the ground layer is perfect. And the sky looks great, but I would try to darken the background of the sky a bit more to see how it looks, or if it causes problems with those clouds.

 

[AlanLichty]

Wow - beautiful foreground detail for this night shot. Can't wait to see more from this trip.

 

[Beth]

stunning view!

 

[JimFox]

Actually looking at this some more, I don't think you could really darken the sky without really losing some of the finer MW details. So I take back my suggestion.

 

[Kyle Jones]

Actually looking at this some more, I don't think you could really darken the sky without really losing some of the finer MW details. So I take back my suggestion.

Yeah, there was enough haze that it's tough to separate the stars from the sky

 

[Kyle Jones]

Actually looking at this some more, I don't think you could really darken the sky without really losing some of the finer MW details. So I take back my suggestion.

I added an edit with a little bit more darkness in the sky. I also ditched adobe's AI noise reduction in the ground layer since, as we've seen before, it adds too many weird artifacts. What looks like a halo above the hills on the right is actually in the image - it gets more pronounced as I bring out star detail.

 

[John Holbrook]

Kyle, excellent initial capture and succeeding edit—nice!

 

[AlanLichty]

I like the edit.