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Astrophotography (or star photography) for beginners: How to shoot and edit the stars & Milky Way
This is my new series on astrophotography. It's a getting started guide to for photographers that want to learn how to take picture of sharp stars (and the Milky Way!) I will teach all the basics of astrophotography: the right weather, finding dark skies, choosing the right location, selecting the camera settings and how to edit the shots in Adobe Lightroom CC. This first part is intended for beginner photographers or intermediate photographers that want to get started with astrophotography and don't know how to capture sharp stars or the Milky Way! I also go in depth to explain how to edit the shots in Adobe Lightroom CC to make the sky pop and bring out the details of the stars.
🔗 📸 High-resolution photos & written guides: https://astrophotography.lbaphotographie.ca
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✨ ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY SERIES ✨
- Capturing & editing star trails : https://youtu.be/r0Rzd07gSd0
- Create star timelapses (upcoming)
- Use your phone to capture the stars - Pixel 4a (upcoming)
- Capture the stars with the Osmo Pocket (upcoming)
📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:28 - First tip
00:43 - Weather conditions
00:57 - Moon position
01:18 - How to find dark skies
01:52 - Choosing the right location
02:15 - Setting up the composition
02:54 - Gear I use
04:40 - Setting the aperture & focus
06:02 - Setting the shutter speed
08:00 - Setting the ISO
08:44 - Second exposure
09:13 - Locating the Milky Way in the sky
12:33 - Editing a Milky Way shot in Lightroom CC
17:38 - More edits
18:28 - Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:28 First tip
- 0:43 Weather conditions
- 0:57 Moon position
- 1:18 How to find dark skies
- 1:52 Choosing the right location
- 2:15 Setting up the composition
- 2:54 Gear I use
- 4:40 Setting the aperture & focus
- 6:02 Setting the shutter speed
- 8:00 Setting the ISO
- 8:44 Second exposure
- 9:13 Locating the Milky Way in the sky
- 12:33 Editing a Milky Way shot in Lightroom CC
- 17:38 More edits
- 18:28 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
good evening everyone welcome to my new series on astrophotography if you want to learn how to take sharp stars star trails time lapses or use your mobile devices like the dji osmo pocket and your cell phone to take pictures of the stars this is a story for you now let's drill the intro and get right into it [Music] for those who don't know me yet i'm like ben mahalford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at desire my first step is to wear warm clothes because it can get quite cold during the night in the wild so let's fix it right away now we're ready to go take the pictures before going outside to a perfect location there's a few things you want to check on your cell phone the first one is using your weather app you want to make sure you have a clear sky so no clouds at all because even small clouds are going to block the stars the second thing you want to check is how bright the moon is and for this i use a knob called photo peels that allows me to see how bright the moon is but also when it goes up and goes down because a full moon is great if you want to light up your foreground but it's not great because you won't see the stars as much so i'm searching for somewhere where the moon is either not there at all or not too bright for the night the last thing you want to check and it's by far the most important one is the light pollution around your area so if we look at my hometown montreal here we can see it's white and gray and red and that's because there's too much like pollution to see the stars so we're here in a yellow area which is okay to see the stars but if you really want to get the most detail you need to go in a dark area that you can see in the map but you can see it's actually pretty hard in north america to get places that are perfectly dark if you're wondering what i'm doing in the middle of the lake right now it's actually a really good question to ask and i'm heading towards a rock in the middle of the lake because i want to have a nice open view of the sky and this is what you're looking for when you're searching for a place to take the picture is that you want to have a location where you can see the entire sky to get the most stars inside of your shop so the sun is almost gone but it's still not dark enough to take pictures of the stars so we're still going to have to wait about i would say 20 to 40 minutes before the stars start coming out but in the meantime it's a really great occasion to scalp the location and find what you're going to be putting in your shot so you want to have as much as possible the stars because that's what you're taking picture of but i still like sometimes having a foreground so for me because i'm on a rock right now and there's only the lake around a good thing as a foreground is using my kayak that's yellow and it's gonna come back come out pretty nicely in the shot as a foreground interest [Music] then let's talk about the gear i use so right beside me here i have my 6d mark ii and the important thing to know about this camera is that's the full frame sensor the full frame sensor is gonna mean you can have more light inside of your shot and if you have more light you're gonna be getting better results because you're gonna be able to take pictures with a foreground in front of it but also get the better details inside of the stars because you won't have as much noise um but if you don't have this camera i'm actually be doing another video on how to use your cell phone in the dji osmo packet that have tiny sensors so it's still possible to get good shots with these type of cameras the second important piece of gear i have is my lens it's a 16-45 f 2.8 and there's two things that are important about that lens the first one is that it's a f 2.8 lens so that means again more light inside of the sensor and more like better pictures of the stars the second thing is that it's a really wide lens and you want a really light white lens because you're gonna be able to get more of the sky inside of the shot it's also important if you want to have a foreground to have a wider lens because having a wider lens can allow you to get the foreground inside of the shot but also a lot of stars so you're gonna get the best of both worlds uh by having a very wide lens but if you don't have a wide lens like that one just do like me i used to do before and use my 24 millimeter lens f4 that was still good enough to take most of the pictures at night so really don't sweat if you don't have this lens don't go buy it just for taking pictures start with whatever you have and i'm almost forgetting the most important piece of gear actually and that's the tripod so we're taking pictures with a long exposures it's going to be multiple seconds about like 10 to 15 seconds so if the camera moves just a slight bit during that time the shot is not gonna be good [Music] now let's talk about the camera settings you should be using and the first thing we're going to set is your aperture and that's the lowest one you're going to have on the camera so in my case here i have f 2.8 so i'm just going to go in my menu and make sure that i'm at the lowest right now which is f 2.8 if your camera as low as f4 go to f4 go to 3.5 if that's yours just go to the lowest you can because you want to get the maximum light inside of it you might be wondering right now what we're going to do about focusing because if we're at 2.8 we're first we're going to be having things that are really blurry but because we're taking pictures of the star that are really far away we don't really mind we can just set the focus to infinity and that's the next thing i'm actually going to do is just go on my camera switch it to manual make sure it's on infinity right now and now that i know it's an infinity i can actually take the shot and know that the stars are going to be sharp in the picture if we have a foreground subject and we're going to talk about it a little bit more afterwards i'm going to take another shot and in that case we're gonna try and see if having the blurry subject in the foreground is a problem if not we might need to use focus stacking but i really do that in the end usually just focusing on infinity is good enough so let's go take a shot um i still have my shutter speed at 30 seconds and for now i'm going to leave it like that and see what happens when taking that shot so let's take it so it's taking the shot right now and this something is going to be wrong in that shot and can anybody guess what it is let me know in the comments below so if we look into the details of the shot you might not realize right away that something is wrong but if we look into the details and zoom into the stars we actually realize they create smaller lines and that's something that most people don't even realize and it's that because the earth is tuning so fast all the time when we are looking at the stars they're actually moving in front of us so with a 30 second timer it's actually long enough to create small little lines out of the stars that are moving around so a fix for that is going to be reducing your shutter speed but you might not know what shutter speed to use and this is where the app i talked about earlier photos appeal is very useful because they actually have a mode where you can select your camera and select your lens and they're going to tell you exactly what's your maximum shadow you can use to get sharp pictures so let's go see on the app uh what settings they're recommending us and switch the settings on the camera to correspond to that so now we can see that they actually suggest two different values so there's one for the nfr rule which is 16 seconds and there's another one with the 500 rule which is 31 seconds and we're going to use nfr because the other one the 500 rule doesn't take into account the megapixels of the camera which can actually impact how it looks so now we can see that with using the nfr room we're getting nice crisp and sharp stars so i used a 13 second shutter not a 16 one because i didn't have that option inside of my menu i could have used the intervalometer for that but for now i just wanted to get the closest results i could inside of the camera so now we have sharp stars and that's the result we wanted so there's one last thing we need to check on the camera so right now i'm using a crazy high iso so i'm at 12 800 which is way too high so i'm going to bring it down to thousand six hundred depending on your camera that's really setting it's gonna depend on your camera so i know for me around a thousand six hundred is good enough i'm gonna get enough details inside of the shot but not too much to get too much noise so let's make that change and see what we get as a final result for this shot well this is our final shot that we got using these settings so just to remind my final settings i have a 13 um second shutter i have f 2.8 aperture and i have the iso at 2000. so let's go few shoot a few other shots and talk about them [Music] so i just placed my camera for my next shot and then for this one i actually want to get a few things in it so i want to foreground with my kayak inside of it i want after that to get the milky way in the shot and i want to get the rest of the stars for sure and i went with a vertical shot with for this one because it's easier to get a foreground and get a lot of stars inside of a shot when you're in vertical mode so this is what i'm doing and if you're wondering how i got to know where is the milky way i'm using the app i already talked about which is photo appeals and if you don't uh know yet this is a paid app but i'm not sponsored at all for the using it so i'm not making any money when i'm talking about it it just really helped me when i was taking my night shots and let's go see in the app uh where's the milky way we're gonna go inside of knight ar and this is gonna give us an augmented reality view of our surroundings so if we look at the top here we actually see inside of the shot we're gonna see where the milky way is passing by so this is a great way of knowing if you want to get the milky way in your shot where it's being situated and how you need to place your camera another way of seeing it is if i come down here and i go into planner mode so this is a 2d view of where i am right now sitting but if i go actually here and i move around the time we're going to see these little dots here that are going to appear and these little round dots actually show the milky way that is appearing during the night and where it should be in a 3d space you might have realized that in this shot the foreground which is my kayak in this case is actually quite blurry and i personally don't mind at all that it's blurry because it's not my main point of interest my main point of interest are the stars and as long as the stars are really sharp and bright that's the important part the rest of the shot is actually going to be pretty blurry so even if they're not that good i don't really care if they are blurry or not if you really wanted to have them sharp you could still use a technique like focus stacking but i'm not going to talk about it inside of this shot i hope you like theater shots i did like a few of them i didn't edit them yet so i don't know how they're going to come out but for now they seem to be pretty nice and now i'm taking a star trail and also time lapse at the same time so if you're curious to know how i do that be sure to subscribe below because the next two videos i'm going to talk about these two techniques so i'm super excited right now i got some really good shots of the milky way and i decided to do a time lapse it's almost 2 a.m so i have another an hour an hour and a half for the time lapse to complete so it's not going to be a long night of sleep but i think it's worth it and the milky way is just really nice right now it went up so now i have a nice view of it so pretty exciting i it's actually the first time i see the milky way like this so what a timing i'm filming this video and it's the perfect timing to see it for the first time [Music] [Music] so i'm arriving home it's 4am right now but while the shots i got are just incredible so by applying the techniques i learned here today you can actually get the same shots i got tonight you just need to be patient and be ready to pass the whole night outside to get these shots see you tomorrow good morning yesterday i was super lucky with the conditions because i was able to capture the milky way and that's because the weather was perfect with no moon also there were no clowns and at 4am the milky way came up and it was almost vertical which allowed me to get a better shot of it instead of having it only horizontally now let's go inside of lightroom and it did a first shot to show you how i do it now let's look at the first picture here if i use the exposure setting i'm actually going to be able to bring back a lot of details here and we're actually going to see right away that the milky way appears and this is a little trick to see what's inside of the image before i start editing it i think i forgot to say yesterday that's super super important is that you need to use the raw format when you're taking a picture because it's going to allow you to keep so much more detail especially for a milky way because you cannot see it that much when you're taking this shot so you really need to use editing techniques afterwards to bring it back out so if we bring back the exposure it's to its normal setting i'm actually going to just bring it up a little bit and i bring up the contrast bring up the highlights a little bit bring up the whites and maybe bring down the blacks a little bit i like using a s curve um here so in the curve setting and bring it up to blacks down here and a little bit more contrast by doing this but if you don't really understand how uh s curves work don't care too much it's not the most important thing that i'm doing right here after that i like having a little bit more blue so i'm going to bring back the temperature uh to the blues a little bit just because i like having sizes out like that some people prefer have it in it more dark or more yellow so that's really a question of preference i'm then going to bring up the vibrance um because i want to have all the colors inside of the sky come out i'm not going to touch the saturation here but one thing i'm going to do is if we look at the bottom uh left corner right here there's a lot of green that i don't really like so here you want to come and use the saturation on the color mixer bring it down bring down the luminance and that's looking pretty good now the next thing we're going to do is bring out the sky and this is the most important thing when you're taking pictures of stars is this step so we're actually going to use a linear gradient here that we're going to place on the picture we're going to make sure it's on the mountain and has a nice feather in the sky here so it's carrying on the sky and now this is a magic trick that's gonna make everything more alive and it's using the clarity too so if we take it here and bring it up you're gonna see so much detail appear in the sky so the stars are gonna be coming out and the milky way is starting to appear again so this is super useful when you get want to get more detail inside of the sky then i'm also going to bring up the saturation just a tiny bit to get a little bit more detail but i won't touch anything else on this linear gradient the next thing i'm going to do is actually because we have the milky way here and we want it to come out even more i'm going to use another mask and for this one it's going to be a radial gradient so i'm going to bring it here place it on top here i actually have a 100 feather because i wanted to be sure that it's nice and progressive and i don't want it to be too visible that we're applying a mask so that's where i have it i'm going to come back here on the milky way and add more clarity so it's going to bring it out even more we're gonna see a lot of colors coming out here then we're gonna bring out the highlights a little bit more to make it pop even more so this is starting to look pretty good um and i might bring the whites a touch up yeah that's looking pretty good now so if we look at the original shot right now uh we don't see much in the sky and if we toggle the control now we see so much more so many stars and the milky way quite nice now we have one big problem in this shot and that's when i was talking about light pollution it's actually really important to think about that because in the bottom left here we have what's called a light dome and that's the light from my hometown montreal that's about 100 kilometers from here but it's still affecting the shot so if i use um another greeting here i'm actually gonna have a nice feathered one here that i'm gonna place on top more or less like this i'm gonna come here and use the highlights and just bring down the highlights quite a lot because that part was quite distracting yeah i would go on that instead of going to see the milky way so i'm just going to move it around to place it more or less somewhere where i like it and that's pretty good now the next step i want to look at is the foreground so we're going to use another mask for that so here we're going to come in place just on top of the foreground here and this one instead of playing with the highlights we're going to bring up the shadows a little bit just to bring back some detail inside of the foreground so this is almost my final edit i actually did a lot more editing on my final version that i have right here and if you want to learn more about that let me know in the comments below and i'm going to make a full video about how i edit my star photography shots with the milky way and more advanced techniques now let's look at a few other shots i took that night the first one was the simplest one right here so there's not much going on on this edit because it's simply a nice guy here but i do have a linear gradient on the sky to bring out the stars like i talked about because this is what makes the sky really pop out and in this picture i brought the saturation even more towards the blues um right here because i like having blue skies like i said previously let's move to my next shot here and this is the one with the kayak and the milky way and the sky and in this one what's different is actually because i have a foreground here that i actually wanted to see so here i have a linear mask on it and i bring back the exposure of this and i don't bring as much highlights in the sky because i don't want it to pop as much because i still want your eye to go and see the foreground i hope this was a useful introduction to astrophotography and that you learned everything from choosing the right night choosing your location taking the shot and editing it if you liked the video please press the like button below because let me know that you liked it and also subscribe below because i'm already having more videos on this topic see you in the next one bye [Music] you
Video Links
- 🔗 📸 High-resolution photos & written guides
- 🔗 Lightroom Edits
- Capturing & editing star trails
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- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
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- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
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What is this video about?
I'm starting a new astrophotography series, and this first episode is a complete beginner's guide to capturing sharp stars and the Milky Way. Whether you're picking up a DSLR for the first time or you're an intermediate photographer looking to break into night sky photography, I'll walk you through everything you need to know.
Before you even head out, there are a few critical things to check. I use a weather app to verify clear skies—even small clouds will block the stars—and an app called Photo Pills to track the moon's brightness (a full moon lights up your foreground but drowns out the stars) and find dark skies. This is crucial: light pollution maps show you where you can actually see stars. My hometown, Montreal, is too bright, so I drive out to darker locations. Location is everything. Once you arrive, scout for a spot with an open view of the entire sky, and consider what foreground elements—a lake, a rock, a tree—might add interest to your shot.
For gear, I use a Canon 6D Mark II with a 16–35mm f/2.8 lens. Full-frame sensors and wide apertures both pull in more light, which means better detail in the stars. A sturdy tripod is essential because we're shooting long exposures—10 to 15 seconds—and any camera shake ruins the shot. If you don't have this exact gear, start with what you have; I had success with a 24mm f/4 lens when I was starting out.
The camera settings are straightforward: set your aperture to its widest (f/2.8, f/4, whatever your lens allows), focus to infinity so the distant stars stay sharp, and use an app like Photo Pills to calculate your maximum shutter speed. I use the NPF rule rather than the 500 rule because it accounts for megapixels. For ISO, I typically land around 1600–2000 depending on how much noise my camera produces at different sensitivities. Test and adjust.
Finding the Milky Way requires Photo Pills again. Its augmented reality mode shows you exactly where the galactic core will be at any given time, so you can compose your shot accordingly. Foregrounds will often be out of focus at f/2.8, and I've made peace with that—as long as the stars are sharp and bright, the foreground blur is acceptable and even adds depth.
In Lightroom, the magic happens. Shoot in RAW so you retain maximum detail. Bring up exposure and contrast to reveal the hidden Milky Way, shift the temperature slightly toward blue, and increase vibrance. The real technique is using a linear gradient mask on the sky: crank up the clarity to pull out star detail, increase saturation just a touch, and bring down the highlights in areas affected by light pollution. A radial mask centered on the Milky Way core adds even more punch. Don't forget to lift shadows in your foreground if you want it visible.
The results speak for themselves. With patience, clear weather, and the right location, you'll capture something extraordinary.