Milky Way at the beach

I found this shot of the Milk Way I forgot I had taken last year. I had a quick stab at some PP on it though its still fairly noisy. Feel free to share any advice on ways to improve the editing side of things.

Thanks,

Damien

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/neimad19/950475​9217/

Perhaps a little noise control in LR might clean it up a bit.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/neimad19/950760​5616/

Wow never nice photo indeed...

Nice shot, good composition.

the jimmy wrote in post #16208614
Nice shot, good composition.

agreed... i like it a lot. What did you use to "spray" the foreground? I personally prefer silhouette... (hard to do since its a beach!) but this came out good.

andykim7 wrote in post #16211124
agreed... i like it a lot. What did you use to "spray" the foreground? I personally prefer silhouette... (hard to do since its a beach!) but this came out good.

The light filling the beach was from a pub right behind me that boarders the water

neimad19 wrote in post #16205963
Perhaps a little noise control in LR might clean it up a bit.

6400 ISO is a bit high, eh?
Great pic, though!

spotz04 wrote in post #16211981
6400 ISO is a bit high, eh?
Great pic, though!

Haha I know, I know. I would have switched to bulb and used my timer remote for a 40-60 second exposure instead of 30s, but I left it at home! Doh! I had to wind up the ISO to 6400 so the Milky Way was exposed bright enough.

Next time..

It looks good, one thing you could do to fix the noise on the water is duplicate you layer and apply noise removal and color noise removal at the highest level possible so that the entire image looks soft, then layer mask the water area only over the original layer below. Another thing that helps is taking dark frames, bias frames, and flats.
Bias frames would be the easiest because your camera does not need to be a certain temperature. Dark frames can be taken if you look in the exif data and find the temperature you sensor was during the shot, If you have a night with temperatures 3-5 degrees similar to the night you shot the milky way then take about 30 dark frames. Flats can be taken also to reduce vignetting and dust spots. It really helps alot when you go to stretch an image out.

Neimad, hope you don't mind but I was bored in class so I started tweaking you image a bit to see what I could do to the jpeg. I really just used astro tools for white balance, used a layer mask to apply hasta lavista green to the sky/water, and not your beach or grassy area, tweaked the contrast, and removed some magenta fringing. The water did not have much detail so I blurred it and pushed the shadows in the levels so that it made it a little darker at the bottom and made the milky way pop more. I don't know if this will help you or not but it was fun for me. The foreground is really cool, almost looks like daytime.