Originally posted by BruceBanner Can I ask, as someone who has never seen the Aurora's, how accurate are these shots (anyone's shots really) to how they actually look to the eye? I mean.. I know photography, I know in PP we can turn 'meh' into 'wow!' from some vibrancy and saturation boosts, stronger contrast, stronger whites and exposure and all that stuff.
I wonder if the pictures portray something quite close to what the eye saw at the time time, or stray into 'what looks great on a photo but doesn't really represent what was seen with the eye' territory?
Yes and no and maybe, at the same time.
A digital sensor is able to see more of the aurora (and other objects in the night sky) than the naked eye. So on digital, and to an extent on film, you get a bit more of the background radiation and bands that aren’t visible to the naked eye.
I’ve attached a SOOC jpeg from that night to show what a lot of my aurora shots start out as. This was taken before and slightly to the right of the shot with the Milky Way.
What I saw was between the two, but still very different. Still photos really can’t do even a moderate aurora event justice as so much of it is the motion and fast color shifts. Most of these shots are honestly from milder parts from the night because during the biggest part of the show the lights were moving so fast and changing colors so fast that they didn’t show up on the sensor or blew out. What you see is very rarely what you capture when photographing auroras, which I find odd and interesting since they’re so relatively easy to photograph.
My post processing is what I would consider mild typically, and I generally stick to what I would try to do in a traditional darkroom. I adjusted the white balance from daylight (as set in the camera) to 4500-4700k to get the greens closer to life and allow the purples and reds room to breath, bring up the exposure usually 0.5-1.5 stops, move contrast around till the stars look right, bring down the highlights and bring up the shadows to accentuate the details in the aurora and the landscape respectively, add a +5 or +10 on clarify, vibrancy and saturation, add a little sharpening, bring down the green saturation a little most of the time, and apply the default lens corrections. I’ve just learned about using the transform tool to fix some of the UWA smearing on the frame edges so that will probably become a thing I do regularly too.
The biggest part of the display from that night was absolutely brighter and vibrant and more amazing than I posted, brief as it was. The lights were out for the better part of the night, at least 5 or 6 hours, as simple plain green bands in the sky. We were prepared for the weather (-35F/-37C) and had the time and a warm place to wait fortunately. The truly exciting portion was roughly 5 minutes long. Most of my shots are from the hour or two on either side of the main event.