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[ 81 ]› › PHOTO EFFECTSshooting in RAW format. First, con-
centrating on the Sharpening section
in the Detail panel, drag the Radius
slider all the way to the left to its low-
est value of 0.5, and drag the Detail
slider all the way to the right to its
maximum value of 100. Next, move
down to the Noise Reduction section
and, using the Luminance slider, we
can reduce the noise caused by the
high ISO by sliding it to the right and
essentially smoothing out the pixels
slightly in the image.ADDRESS ANY
IMPERFECTIONS
The next thing on the list when
retouching the aurora is to address
any imperfections caused by the lens.
The reason this is especially important
with the aurora is that where these
imperfections appear, they’re exag-
gerated, or they can stand out a little
more. A simple way to address these
universally and at the same time is
to deal with the darker corners and
any halos that have formed around
stars. To do this, we need to go into
the Lens Corrections panel and check
two boxes: Remove Chromatic Aber-
ration and Enable Profile Corrections.
When we check the latter box, the
correct lens profile is selected further
down the tab.
Now, we’re going to do a very
simple retouch to enhance the night
sky, and the stars in particular. In the
Basic panel, we can use the Clarity
slider to add a little extra definition
to the stars by shifting the slider to
the right (in this case to +20). This is a
good idea with the majority of night-
time photography, but especially in
this image, it will enhance not only
the stars, but also the definition and
structure of the aurora itself.see that where there’s little information at the high-
lights end of the graph, we can get away with mak-
ing harsher adjustments because we’re only affecting
a small portion of the image.
ADDRESS ANY NOISE
OR SHARPNESS ISSUES
Next on the agenda as we process our northern lights
image is to address any noise issues as a result of shoot-
ing at a high ISO, and any sharpness issues caused by
finding focus in the dark. If we simply grab the Sharp-
ening Amount slider, we’ll lose some quality (and this is
a bit too much to elaborate on in a short tutorial), but
one trick I use to maintain the quality while enhancing
the sharpness is to apply an adjustment that restores
some of the sharpness we inherently lose when