Here’s a photo that I’ve been sitting on for almost a year and a half. It was during my first visit to the Cana Island Lighthouse in Door County when I first got into Astrophotography more than a year ago. For the longest time, I didn’t process the photo out of fear that I wasn’t good enough at processing yet to do it justice. I’ve been working on it on and off for several months now and finally decided to push hard to finish it. As you can see in the before and after, the photo required a lot of post-processing as I had shot it very underexposed originally. I increased the exposure value over 2 stops in Lightroom to get it to this point.

Location

The Cana Island Lighthouse is located in Door County, Wisconsin. There is a causeway that leads to the island which is sometimes above water and other times up to a foot below water depending on how high the water in Lake Michigan is at the time. I’ve only photographed it twice at night and both times it was a little under water. The 2nd time I brought some rubber boots along and it wasn’t an issue to cross it.

Needless to say, when you’re shooting at Cana Island you might be alone or only see one other photographer. I consider Cana Island to be the #1 location in Wisconsin for photos particularly at night. The island faces south with makes it ideal for Milky Way photos and has very dark skies behind it. Before visiting it for this photo, I had stopped at it during the day to scout it out which is something I frequently try to do for new locations. During the day it costs $20 to visit.

Composition

For this composition I used the very typical angle of view that most people do at Cana Island. I was also limited due to the position of the Milky Way and I wanted that closer to the center of the photo. Depending on what time you visit during the Milky Way season, you may be able to try out some other angles as it moves across the sky. This was shot with a 14mm Rokinon f2.8 lens. I had angled it a bit up which caused some keystoning with the lighthouse. Typically I wouldn’t want this, but again it’s very common for this picture at Cana Island to have this and I think it adds a bit to the photo. For this photo I shot 6 shots at f2.8 to later be used in image stacking in Photoshop.

Post Processing

As you can see in my before and after photo, there was A LOT of post-processing with this photo. Perhaps more than 10 hours of work over several editing sessions spread out over a couple months.

Version 1

Below is the original photo taken straight out of camera with white balance applied to it. I usually crank the saturation and vibrance in Lightroom up to 100 and try to get the sky color as neutral as possible. After that I return it to zero. Also I remove all sharpening and color noise reduction.

Version 2

Below was a really quick edit I made of the photo in Lightroom to post online after getting home as I was really excited about the pictures.

Version 3

Fast forward a year and I started editing the photo again. In fact I did so many edits that Lightroom got really slow in the develop module and I had to quit making changes! Prior to these edits in Lightroom I did my usual exposure stacking technique in Photoshop to reduce noise. Without doing this, there would be a crazy amount of noise in the photo as I raised it more than 2ev. While I was in Photoshop I also cloned out the two windows with lights on using the window from the left. I found these distracting and drawing the eyes away from the main subject matter. At this point I was pretty happy with the photo but wanted to do a few more things in Photoshop so I sent it back to there.

Version 4

Next, I did a lot of small things to the photo to de-emphasize areas of it so that your eyes would be more drawn to the lighthouse and Milky Way. Some of these changes included adding an Orton Effect to the trees, adding contrast and saturation to the sky, removing color noise, removing brightness and saturation on the ground. Cloning out the bench on the right hand side. Cloning in some stars along the tree line that were removed during the stacking process.

After that I sent the photo back to Lightroom one more time to make some minor tweaks. So the photo went from Lightroom to Photoshop to Lightroom to Photoshop to Lightroom!

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the photo and glad I decided to wait until my post-processing skills caught up with my photos of unique locations. Some people may not like all of the post-processing that went into the photo, but hopefully they can appreciate all the hard work it took to create it. Thanks for reading!

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking

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