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Tutorial | Star Trails Photography for Beginners: START to FINISH
Star Trails Photography is a type of astrophotography that beginners can quickly master. In this tutorial, I will cover how to capture the pictures (location/composition/settings/equipment), how to edit them using Adobe Lightroom and merge them using StarStax to create the final star trails. This course in for beginners or mode intermediate photographer that want to learn how to create star trails. It's part of my new series on astrophotography.
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🔗 StarStax download link: https://markus-enzweiler.de/software/starstax/
✨ ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY SERIES ✨
- Capturing sharp stars (part 1): 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
00:48 - Things to check before leaving
01:30 - Composition
02:05 - Equipment
02:59 - Single exposure technique (settings + taking the shot)
06:17 - Photo stack technique (setting + taking the shot)
07:13 - Pros & Cons of the single exposure techique
08:02 - Pros & Cons of the photo stack technique
09:59 - Single exposure editing in Lightroom CC
11:00 - Photo Stack editing (Lightroom Classic + StarStaX)
17:55 - Photoshop for advanced techniques
19:12 - Thanks for watching!
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:48 Things to check before leaving
- 1:30 Composition
- 2:05 Equipment
- 2:59 Single exposure technique (settings + taking the shot)
- 6:17 Photo stack technique (setting + taking the shot)
- 7:13 Pros & Cons of the single exposure techique
- 8:02 Pros & Cons of the photo stack technique
- 9:59 Single exposure editing in Lightroom CC
- 11:00 Photo Stack editing (Lightroom Classic + StarStaX)
- 17:55 Photoshop for advanced techniques
- 19:12 Thanks for watching!
good evening everyone welcome to my second episode on astrophotography in this episode we're going to talk about how to capture star trails let's roll the intro and get right into it [Music] for those who don't know me yet i'm like bernard hawford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this art the first episode of this series was on capturing sharp stars including the milky way the next episode is going to talk about how to capture time lapses and the last one is going to teach you how to use your mobile devices like your cell phone and the dji osmo pockets to capture the stars be sure to subscribe below if you want to learn more about capturing the stars and astrophotography [Music] like i explained in my last video there's actually a few things you need to check before going out and taking pictures of the stars the first one is that you have a clear sky and here you can use your normal weather app to check that there's no clouds so this is good for tonight the second thing is that the moon isn't there because without the moon you're gonna see the star better and the third one is that you need a dark sky and you cannot take pictures in the middle of city because there's too much light pollution if you want to learn more about these free things you can watch my last video there's a link down below because i go in more depth to explain why these are important okay so now that we're at the location you have a nice bright sky let's talk about how to frame your shot for this we're going to use the app that i talked about before photo peels that's going to allow us to position the camera in the right direction what we're looking for when using the air mode is for the north star and this is because the stars are going to be turning around that star and creating circles all around it and this is probably the most common picture when taking star trails the other thing that's pretty common is turning a 360 degrees to the other side and taking half circles of the stars in the sky now let's quickly talk about the camera gear i'll be using so here i have my full frame camera s60 mark ii with my 16 to 45 f 2.8 lens and these are both great because i'm allowed to have a lot of light that's going to come inside of the camera and it's also a really wide lens which is gonna allow us to have more stars inside of this shot then there's a tripod and this is super important because we're using two techniques tonight to take uh star trails and they're both going to be using long exposures so you really need a good tripod to be sure the camera doesn't move at all during the shots then there's another piece of gear i didn't talk about in the last video and this is an intervalometer and this is very useful because most cameras have an internal limit of about 30 seconds when taking a shot so you can use this to take longer exposures and we're gonna see in a few minutes it's actually gonna be really useful for us tonight [Music] now let's talk about the first technique to take star trails and this one is to do everything inside of the camera and this is really great because you don't need to use anything uh other than your camera to get this type of shot an interval under here is still very useful because we'll be using a one hour exposure to take the shot so we want to be sure that we have something that allows us to take such a long exposure in this first shot we want to test if the stars are sharp and if the composition works well so we're going to be using exactly the same settings i talked about in my previous video on getting sharp stars so we're gonna have a 15 second shutter we're gonna have f 2.8 aperture and we're gonna have an iso of about two thousand to three thousand uh to be sure we can see enough inside of the shot so now let's take this shot and also make sure that we have our focus on manual and focus to infinity so that the stars are sharp so now let's take that shot and see what it gives now that we know that the stars are sharp and the composition is working we're actually going to change our mode to take a longer shutter speed and for this we're going to go in ball mode on the camera and this is really important because this is what gonna allow the intervalometer to control the shutter speed instead of having the camera controlling it so once we're in ball mode we'll actually also need to change the iso because we were at 3200 before now we're going to bring this down to about i would say 800 iso just to be sure we don't get too much light inside of the shot when taking a 15 minute shutter speed and we're taking now a 15 minute shutter speed not a one hour one because we want to be sure that the north star is dead centered inside of the shot and the composition is still working and i prefer feeling when taking a 15 minute shot then filling when taking a one hour shot so let's go and take this one so we're just going to set up the intervalometer here for 15 minutes and press the button and we should be good to go to take the 15 minute test shot now that we know that our composition is working and that our north star is nice and centered inside of the shot we're actually ready to take our one hour shutter speed uh shot and for this we need to change one sitting on the camera so because we're going from 15 minutes to one hour for the shutter speed we're going to bring the iso from 800 down to 200. so this is important to be sure we don't have the stars that are completely overblown and that we still have nice details inside of them so we're going to make this change on the camera and now we're ready um to set uh the intervalometer to a one hour shutter speed and to start taking the shot so let's do it right now [Music] i just realized i actually forgot something super super important for the shot and it's that you shouldn't leave your f-stop the same when you're taking the one-hour shot because it's such a long exposure that there's so much like that's coming in that if you leave it i have to put it it's going to be completely overblown so i'm just going to bring it up to like fl 8 or maybe 11 f11 so i'm going to put the settings down below to let you know what are the final settings i used [Music] now let's talk about the second technique to get start trails instead of taking a really long exposure inside of the camera we're actually going to take a lot of smaller ones and stack them all together with the computer afterwards so for this one we want to get sharp stars and i talked about in last video how to get sharp stars so we're going to be using a 15 second shutter f 2.8 aperture and i also have about 2 000 uh depending on your camera so we're going to set all this up but we're still going to be using the intervalometer because we want to get exactly 240 pictures so why 240 pictures that's because we're gonna be using a 15 second shutter speed and that means four pictures per minute and we have 60 minutes in another hour so 240 pictures in the end so let's set everything up and start taking the pictures and see the result afterwards [Music] while the camera is finishing taking the shots let's talk about the pros and cons of these techniques so taking a star trail inside of the camera actually has a few pros in my opinion the first one is that's a little bit easier to understand because you don't need to use any post processing software so it's actually a little bit easier when you're starting out and you're not sure what to do the second thing is that the file size is actually a lot smaller because you're only taking one exposure so you don't need to have all these files at the end which means you're gonna get one raw file which is about 30 megabytes in my case with my cat and canon dslr instead of getting 240 pictures which is a lot more data then there's also there's more visibility in the foreground because you're taking a really long exposure you can get a lot more details inside of your foreground so if your foreground is important in your shot that's a good thing to keep in mind now let's move on to what's good and bad about the photo stack technique for taking star trails and the first thing i like about this technique is that it's a little bit easier to realize when you're making an error on field because you're taking so many smaller shots you can quickly test ideas and see if they're working or not and correct your path instead of having to wait a full hour to see the result the second thing that i like about this technique is actually have more control when you get in post-production so because you're bringing all the pictures on the computer to process them and i'm going to show you how to do it just in a few minutes so stick around to see that and you're going to get a lot more control on how you want to the star trail to look like at the end one thing that most people really like about this technique is that you get brighter stars in the end so you get better start trails too but i don't really like that look because it's a little bit too surrealistic in my opinion uh but this is something like i said you can probably correct because you have a lot more control on the computer another really really great thing about this technique is you can actually create time lapses with the pictures you took for your star trail so this is great for somebody and that wants to create both a time lapse and a star trail but only want to take the pictures once this brings me to one of the downsides and it's this file size that you end up with so because you're taking so many raw pictures so we're taking something like 240 rough pictures you end up with something like seven to ten gigabytes of data only for one picture or one time lapse so this is really a downsize of this technique because you're getting so much data for only one picture another thing to remember is actually because your iso is so high you're going to be getting so much more noise inside of your shots the last thing that's not as great with this technique is that it requires a lot of post-processing and that means you probably need a better computer if you don't want to be passing too much time working on your post process for these shots now let's look at how i did the shots so the first one we're going to look at is the one hour exposure that we got in body and for this one it's very similar to how i added my sharp stars so for this one i highly suggest you go check my last video to go uh more in depth on how i did these types of shots but if i quickly go over the settings here i have my exposure settings where i just bring out a little bit of detail then i have a s curve to add some contrast i bring down the temperature because i like having a blue sky and then i add some noise correction because it was a little bit too noisy and i apply chromatic aberration and lens correction but just like i said in the last video the most important part of this edit is actually adding a mask here and then adding um clarity to bringing out the sky so if i bring it down we really see here that this really makes uh the star pop so that's about it for this edit really simple to do like i said one big advantage of going with an in-body shot is it's a lot simpler to process it overall now let's talk about how i did my shots for the photo stack technique and for this one we're going to go inside of lightroom classic because that's where i have my shots and if we look at the settings here we're going to see they're very different compared to the previous shot we just edited and so i just bring up the exposure a little bit i bring the contrast up to make separation between the stars and the background and then i add a little bit of shadows and a little bit of white just to make the stars pop a little bit more but i don't touch to anything else except adding another um a layer here a layer mask just to add some clarity inside of the stars but that's about it for the edit right here and you don't want to play too much with it because the more you're going to play with it the more noise you're going to have inside of your shot and if there's too much noise and you stack them together the noise is just going to start to add up and if the noise is adding up it's just going to create a terrible result so usually when i do photostack i try and keep my edit as simple as possible so now we can select all the pictures here we can use the sync mode to sync our settings i won't do it right now because um i already did it before and then we can come inside of the library here and export our shots as jpegs but again i already did this to save some time and i already have my final shots that are right here so now to merge the shots together so we have the 240 pictures right here you have two main techniques that i usually use the first one is using photoshop that i won't show inside of this episode because it's a lot more complex and a lot more time consuming because it's really hard on my computer to process all the shots as layers so i use here a free program that works on mac windows and that is really great to doing uh star trails is car start star stacks so i'm going to put a link down below so you can go and download it it's free so really if you want to try out it's probably the best way to do it so for this you're going to select all your shots here you're going to drag them inside of the program right here it's going to take a second for the program to import them and now that we have the pictures here we can actually see a preview right here and we have our different options on the side so usually the one you want to use is either lighting or gap filling that feeling is better because we're going to be able to uh reduce the gaps when we create the star trails this is a really cool mode that is integrated inside of this program um i won't be using commit mode because i don't like it it's kind of surrealistic the look that it gives the picture and the other options are not very useful for what we're doing right now now for the image head setting here you don't have to touch it it's simply like the background here of your image so that's not really useful and usually you can use compression i don't mind using a little bit of compression and i better just sleep it to the best setting to not get too much detail out of the shots and here it's just your normal setting so for now we don't have to touch anything but now we're going to come up here and we're going to click this button right here that's going to allow us to start processing the shots so we're going to sit down here a little bar is gonna start uh working and i'm gonna speed up this process so you can see but we're gonna start to see uh the pictures uh creating uh star trails inside of the shot here so we know it's working but it's a pretty long process that's going to be about like 20 minutes to create the final shot so i'm just going to speed it up and get right into the pictures so once you're done you want to come up and click on this little icon here and save the image so i stopped the process so i have an error message but once it's done it's gonna save the image here so if we open it right now we're gonna see there's actually a few problems inside of the shots so if you look at this shot the few problems i have with it is first of all i find the star shield just to be way too intense like there's way too many stars here that are being taken up and also in the foreground here we have some red that because of a light i was using and also there's too much noise inside of the shadows here so i don't really like that so we're going to go back inside of lightroom to fix all of this so if we come back on our picture here we're going to go back into the develop module and if we apply the settings i had at the end here and we look at difference you're gonna see it's a lot darker now so the big difference here is i brought the highlights down completely and then i went inside of the masks here and if i select the top mask um if we select it here we're gonna see i bring the contrast a lot so this is really gonna separate only the brightest stars that are gonna appear and i brought down um the clarity uh really down so we don't have as much stars showing up because i only want to have lines for the bright stars not every single star in the shot because it was just too much so if we export these pictures again we're going to come back here and i have them right here already exported i'm going to remove first of all the pictures i had inside of a star stack then i'm going to select all of these shots and i'm going to import them right here so now we're ready to process them so we're going to click again on the button here to start processing them while we're waiting for the shot to be finished i forgot to talk about what i did with the shots that had red inside of the foreground so i actually just went inside of lightroom here uh one side of the library and found the shots here that had some red so if you look at this one here we can clearly see there's a lot of red in the foreground so i simply uh rejected this shot and i had 10 of them inside of the whole photo shoot so i just went in and removed all of them and because it's only 10 shots out of 240 it actually didn't affect the final result at all but if you have too many uh that were consecutive that have a problem it might cause cause a problem in the end so just be sure when you're taking the shot they don't have something like that a light that comes inside of the shot so the stacking finally completed and we have our final shot that's looking like right here and we can see that on the side because we selected um the gap fill blending method here we have an option on the side right here that appear and allows us to change how the fill is actually happening so if we zoom in inside of the shot here so we're gonna go in one we actually see that there's little lines here and they're not fully completed so this is a little bit of a problem that we have so we couldn't come here and show the threshold and now we want to play with it and make sure that only the lines of the stars are selected so here we see we have a lot of better result here and then we can use the gap filling mode here to play a little bit and fill inside the missing gaps here of the light so if we come back out here and we remove the overlay we're going to see we get a better result so once this is done we have our final shot here so we can actually export it here by saving it um so much i'm just going to save it on the desktop and here i have the final shot right here so if we look at this one right here um we're going to see weird lines inside the foreground so there's the last step i'm gonna do for this shot and that's because just with really long exposure you sometimes get these weird uh results stacking the pictures together uh but it's not a big deal we're actually just gonna use another shot and go inside of photoshop here so i took a longer exposure for the foreground here and if we look i simply stacked um the foreground here on top of dinner one so we have a nice foreground with more detail inside of it so this is how you can fix your result if you're interested in learning more about how to use photoshop at twitter these kinds of shots so for example if you want a change of foreground if you want to create the whole photo stack inside of photoshop and one reason to do this is for example inside of this shot i have right here you can see the lines here that are created by planes passing by you can actually remove them inside a photoshop quite easily so let me know in comments below if it's a video that interests you and that i should be making in the future i hope this video was useful and that you learned how to create star trails if you did please leave a like below to let me know you appreciated the video comment below if you have any question on the subject and consider subscribing if you want to learn more about astrophotography because i can have more episode on this the next one is about creating time lapses and if you want to learn more just in general about photography and filmmaking see you next one bye you
Video Links
- 🔗 📸 High-resolution photos & written guides
- 🔗 Lightroom Edits
- 🔗 StarStax download link
- Capturing sharp stars (part 1)
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- 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
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
In this tutorial, I'm walking through everything you need to know to create stunning star trails photos—from location scouting and composition all the way through to final editing. Whether you're just getting started with astrophotography or looking to refine your technique, I cover two approaches that work really well for beginners.
The Setup
First, I talk about the essentials: checking your weather conditions, scouting a dark location away from light pollution, and using apps like PhotoPills to frame your composition. I also share the gear I use—a full-frame camera, wide-angle lens, solid tripod, and an intervalometer—and explain why each piece matters when you're capturing long exposures.
Two Techniques Explained
The first approach is straightforward: one long exposure (up to an hour) captured directly in your camera. I walk through the exact settings—starting with test shots at 15 seconds to verify sharpness and composition, then scaling up to longer exposures. The advantage here is simplicity and smaller file sizes, though you need careful manual focus and precise settings to avoid blown-out stars.
The second method involves taking 240 shorter exposures (15 seconds each) and stacking them together using software. This gives you more flexibility in post-production and lets you create both a star trail and a time-lapse from the same shoot. The trade-off is more data to manage and additional processing time.
Editing and Merging
I show you how I edit both approaches in Lightroom—keeping single exposures straightforward while being more selective with photo stacks to minimize noise buildup. Then I use StarStax (a free, open-source tool) to merge all the images together. I demonstrate the gap-filling mode and show you how to refine the result by adjusting threshold settings to get clean, bright star trails without distracting artifacts.
I also touch on using Photoshop for more advanced fixes—like swapping in a better foreground or removing airplane trails—in case things don't go perfectly in the field.
This tutorial is meant for anyone curious about astrophotography, whether you're shooting with a DSLR or mirrorless camera. Download StarStax for free using the link below, and let me know if you'd like me to dive deeper into any of these techniques.