While some edits are pretty straight forward, others can involve multiple steps. Photography of the Night Sky can be among the most intense: even with the highly sensitive modern cameras, there is not a lot of light to work with. For single photos one has a choice of high noise, trailed stars, or atrocious color and absolute black shadows ... and frequently times all three!
The final image is made up from two component images, one of the foreground in late dusk, and the second of the night sky once it was completely dark. But to get good quality color and low noise, each of those images is a stacked average of many individual images.
The "Edited Single Foreground" image below is a single 30 second exposure. Sometimes I take the foreground images a bit earlier when there's more light and thus less noise, but this time I wanted to make sure the majority of light was coming from the waxing crescent moon. The single image here doesn't look too bad, but would look terrible at full size because of noise and bad color in the darker areas. So I stacked 10 of these images to make a synthetic 5 minute exposure that is clean, even printed at 30-40 inches across.
To keep the stars nice and round for the sky photos, I could only use 8 second exposures, and so had to boost the ISO (light sensitivity). A single brightened shot (Single Edited Sky Image) shows the relative brightness of the cliffs and sky, but again looks terrible at full scale. If you look closely, you can see the tracks of several satellites in this image; they are removed in the final stacked image.
So I used the Sequator software program to stack 50 eight second exposures; Sequator is nice in that it will stack the unmoving foreground, align the shifting stars (from earth's rotation), and combine the two into a single much higher quality image (Edited Stack of 50 Aligned Sky Images).
For comparison I've included a zoomed in section of the central Milky Way from a single image and from 50 stacked images: you can see the tremendous improvement!
The final step was to combine the two images, making sure that there wasn't a bright 'halo' along the transition from foreground to sky. I also removed processing artifacts from the star stacking process: sometimes the software had trouble telling the difference between a star and the glint of a moon-lit cliff!
I'm sure you won't be surprised by the quality of the auto-processed image - even small that the noise problems don't show!
Thanks for reading!