If you’ve read our previous blog post, or if you’ve been reading the news, or if you’ve been outside at night in the past two weeks, then you are already aware of the fantastic displays of auroras that have been dazzling observers even at latitudes that hardly ever see the phenomenon.

We were fortunate to have experienced these auroras on our recent photography tours to Iceland and Norway’s Lofoten Islands, which was the subject of last week’s post (“Spring Solar Storm Brings a Week of Amazing Auroras”), as well as the subject of our Instagram feed all this past week (and next).

If you’re outside shooting at night, such an amazing display of northern (or southern) lights tends to generate a lot of of frames to bring home. And that translates into a lot of post-processing on the to-do list.

We’d like to help. So we decided to create a tutorial on how to process your beautiful aurora images.

In This Video

In the following video I’ll show you how I use Lightroom to maximize the visual power of auroras in your night photos. I’ll cover:

• techniques to control contrast and brightness

• the Dehaze, Exposure, Shadows and Whites sliders, and how they can be used to better separate auroras from the surrounding sky

• using profile corrections to even out the sky

• local and global adjustments to target individual areas of the scene

Your Turn

Have you been out photographing the auroras? We’d love to see your photos! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight).

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT