Following some advice on a Facebook group I did some reprocessing of my Milky Way shots from Friday night. This is just a single sky frame blended with the foreground but I've managed to recover a lot more detail and colour from the sky using the curves and tonal wheels. I've tried to keep it fairly natural looking whilst bringing more out. The original is far more what the eye saw although this one would probably be close to what you would see with the naked eye in a really dark site (although there is a lot of light pollution on the right side from Swansea). I'd welcome thoughts on preferences as I know opinions are divided on whether photos should represent what you saw versus being a form of art especially on this type of thing. I prefer this edit and hope it hasn't gone too overboard (I see loads of MW images that make me want to vomit, the same as with sunsets).
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For my taste, the revised edit appears to be an improvement over the previous version and looks great. Maintaining a somewhat natural look for the foreground while enhancing the Milky Way to be more pronounced than its actual appearance, would be my choice, if I could actually do it. Even NASA colourises and boosts their images. Ultimately, edit to your taste.
If you can extract a similar amount of detail from each of the original 24 shots, then stack them, would that reveal even greater detail in the Milky Way section of the sky?
