Light pollution & banding

Can anyone give me any processing tips on this image please?

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/oX6t​1S

I'd like to help but LP in an image is extremely hard to remove . Only thing I can suggest is take test shots of the area all around you and try your best to shoot away from LP . If you have no choice you might try to find a Filter designed to help reduce LP .

My answer is to wait till what you want to shoot is either higher in the sky or on the horizon that is not lp if you have one.
Having said that Orion is only now rising and I'm shooting it in LP sky

The banding is usually due to stretching an 8 bit image. Are you working with the jpeg or in Gimp ?
If you have photoshop, change the image to 16 bit before stretching it.

I like the result you have. It reminds me more of a deep twilight than light pollution.

Steve.

Steve's right. As soon as you said banding I thought you must be working from a jpeg. The great thing about 14-bit raw images is you can stretch them quite a way before you get that, as long as you're working in 16-bit mode with your processing software.

Cheers guys.. I'm working from a RAW file in lightroom. The banding becomes more prominent when I re-size and convert to JPEG, but I can just about see it before the conversion too!?!

May be its my old laptop that doesn't allow me to see what has made you unhappy.
But as is, I like what I see, as is.

There is a known banding issue with Canon Cameras. PixInsight has a filter to deal with it. Its background extraction tool might fix your image too. Complicated but there are some excellent video tutorials by a guy named Harry online. 45 day trial check in the resources section for the tutorials. I've been looking at it for almost a week now and I'm pretty sure I'm going to purchase when my trial runs out. I looked at three and I like this one best.

Griz

samsen wrote in post #17248762
May be its my old laptop that doesn't allow me to see what has made you unhappy.
But as is, I like what I see, as is.

Thanks Samsen

griz11 wrote in post #17249634
There is a known banding issue with Canon Cameras. PixInsight has a filter to deal with it. Its background extraction tool might fix your image too. Complicated but there are some excellent video tutorials by a guy named Harry online. 45 day trial check in the resources section for the tutorials. I've been looking at it for almost a week now and I'm pretty sure I'm going to purchase when my trial runs out. I looked at three and I like this one best.

Griz

Really? I've never heard about this issue before!?! I'll take a look.. Thanks for the heads up.

I don't see banding but I do see a pretty strong gradient created most likely by compressing the image for upload. You really can't remove light pollution from an image, the best way to combat is to look at a website like jshine and find a dark location. A careful application of curves in photoshop can help neutralize some of the light pollution but it is nearly impossible to entirely remove a gradient and make it appear natural with the rest of the sky. One thing I have always wondered is if you could use the black card technique to slow the exposure of the light polluted half of an image in order to better expose the sky.

I'm in the South East of the UK. There is no getting away from light pollution here, so I practice with what I have. Hopefully, when I do finally get to somewhere dark, I'll be able to do something with it hehe! Why use a black card? Surely you could just use a grad? Or does it give a different effect!?!