The Great Searcher brought to you by didjakeenator for you. Thank you so much, didjakeenator for supporting The Great Searchers. The Great Search is Lady Aida's attempt to share her wisdom of searching for parts. And boy, is that a useful skill now, because there ain't no parts. There's not a lot of parts. It's true. So what's The Great Search this week? Okay, so The Great Search this week is, it's actually interesting. This week I had a little bit of a scramble.  And I know we did crystals on The Great Search a while ago. We did 16 megahertz crystals for a design. 32 kilohertz RTC crystals are tiny bit different. Not like super different, but you know, they're very common. There are a couple of things to look for. So I thought I would show on didjakeenator.com and also looking for the data sheet for this chip how to find the right crystal for this new design I put together. Okay, let's do that. So you're going to go to the computer? So this board uses the SAMD51 and one thing that's interesting about this chip is, you know, some crystals, sorry, some of the controllers need like a 12 or 24 or 48 megahertz crystal. Those numbers particular 12, 24, 48 are pretty common because, and 16, because they divide evenly down to a USB frequency of 12 megahertz, which is the kind of the frequency that a lot of USB native chips want to use. The SAMD51 does have native USB, but it doesn't use a 12 or 24 megahertz crystal. Instead, it uses a single one 32 kilohertz crystal. And you're probably like, hey, USB doesn't want on 32 kilohertz, true. But inside the SAMD51 is a phased lock loop. And that is a circuit that takes the 32 kilohertz frequency and multiplies it up to like 12, 24, you know, 64, whatever megahertz it needs. In this case, the SAMD51 actually runs at 120 megahertz on the inside. And it can do that dynamically scaling by phased lock looping onto the 32 kilohertz crystal. There is an oscillator inside, but it uses the 32 kilohertz crystal to tune it to make it nice and precise. So the crystal we use here is 32 kilohertz. So you know, why 32? Because if you want to go into a low power, like ultra low sleep mode, you can actually run directly. Not on USB, you can run off a 32 kilohertz. Or if you're having a real time counter inside the chip, also 32 kilohertz is really common because it's a two to 15 divider of one second. If you have a counter that's 15 bits, you count up every cycle tick, you'll get to one second when it rolls over. Great. So in the datasheet, there is a little section on this crystal. And they tell you here's what you need to do. This is the crystal itself, which they model as a sort of complicated, you know, LRC circuit. This is a true capacitor. This is a true capacitor. And this is a C-straight. This is not a true capacitor. That's the internal capacitance of the pins and the PCB and the pads, which is going to be very low. It's going to be, you know, picofarads, maybe femtofarads. So basically they say, look, you know, make this crystal 32 kilohertz and make the load capacitance no more than 12.5 picofarad, which is quite common. You'll often see 12.5 picofarad, 6 picofarad is also very common. And then the external crystal value is calculated down here. It's basically two times the load, minus a little bit. So for 12 picofarad, you multiply that by 2, you get 25. And then you subtract a little bit for that C-straight, which is, again, a picofarad or two. And you basically get 20, 22 picofarad, which is why you're going to see often 22 picofarad, right? Two times the load capacitance. Now, when you're buying 32 kilohertz crystals, especially now during this semiconductor shortage, and by the way, these are not considered semiconductors, but there's a shortage of crystals, probably because people are hoarding them, because if you have a semiconductor, you need to have the matching crystal, and, you know, they're not cheap, and there's not that many suppliers, so you want to get them, have them in stock and ready for when the rest of the components come in. And so these are kind of having a, there's like a secondary shortage of crystals and oscillators. So that said, you know, you saw in the data sheet it said maximum 12.5 picofarad, you can go less, sometimes you can get six or seven picofarad, and then just don't forget to change those load capacitors from 22 to 14, but that's easy to do, you just swap them out, you know what I mean? The most important thing is the physical package. The capacitance itself doesn't matter. 12.5 picofarad, again, is the most common, but if you're picking the load capacitors, you can go with six or nine, just FYI, I haven't had to do that yet, but I'm ready to do it if I absolutely have to. All right, so we're doing stuff in TikTok now, too. Oh, there's our cat. Cat passed away a couple years ago, that's a monster. Hi. We use Eaglecat, but we also use Geekat, and we publish all of our files, and before anyone gets hung up on it, it doesn't matter what tool you use, just publish your files. It doesn't matter if you use Windows or a Mac, you still can do open source. Don't get hung up on that stuff, everyone needs to chill out. Do you think that the TikTok teens are angry about open source life? TikTok teens are cool. They're actually chill. Okay. So next up, someone says how bad is the shortage, is the components are gone, or they're much more expensive, both? Both. Actually, this is the SAMD 51 I wanted to show. This part, if you look, you can actually get 8,000 in the next two months, which is not bad, but if you want more than that, you'll have to wait exactly a year until 2022. So it's one of those things where sometimes you can get the parts, and then sometimes you're getting, I'm getting lead times about a year right now. So it was a year back in January, and it's still a year. So it's going to be basically two years of not being able to get semiconductors at a regular rate. I'm going to call it. TikTok questions are great. Do you manufacture the trinkets and the feathers in New York City? Yes. Yeah, we do. Yeah. Not here in my room at the factory. Yeah. This is our tiny apartment as you can imagine. It's a very tiny apartment. Yeah. And it looks like, you know, as you can imagine, this is what our apartment looks like. It looks like an apartment. Yeah. But good questions, TikTok. All right. Okay. So you want to find this 32 kilohertz crystal. So at the top, you can type in 32 kilohertz. Now technically it's a 32.768, especially if you type that in, 768 kilohertz. I always shorthand it to 32 even though like you'd think it would be rounded up to 33. It's not. Um, and then under crystals, okay, so lots of crystals and they come in lots of shapes. That said, you know, one of the things that makes it easier for me is all of my boards use the same size components as much as possible, like we reuse the components. And that actually helps a lot in a shortage because you only have to source that one part. Even if it's harder to get that one, like it's easier I've found to get a lot of one part than to try to get lots of multiple parts, especially something like a crystal where there's multiple sources. Yeah. So this is the low part, the low part counts the cause of things going out of stock, almost as soon as they are, they hit the store for our stuff. Yeah. It is. It's hard to get stuff. And another thing is when things are out of stock, we have people signed up to not backwards, backwards, but they get notified when we're in stock. And so the longer it's out of stock, the more people are signed up. And then when we do go in stock, it just goes that much faster. Yeah.  It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like I heard everything's out, so I'm going to buy everything all the time. I heard everything's out. Yeah. That said, we're doing pretty good. We're able to keep most things in stock. Some things are totally ridiculously unavailable, but most things are. Okay. So for this part, this footprint is 3215, 3.2 by 1.5 millimeters. So here's the thing, with crystals, you can actually go a little bit smaller and they'll probably even fit on the footprint. So if you're absolutely desperate, you can do that. That said, I think I'm going to try to get a part that's exactly going to fit. So this is 3.2 by 1.5 millimeters. So undersized in dimension, I think it's visible, I'm going to do. And this is weird because it inches and millimeters. So three points, well, first off, let me do only surface mounts. I'm going to answer a question while you're doing this. Yeah. I noticed that Digikin Micro Center has stock when you folks are not. Should I wait and order from Adafruit? So here's what you should do. Sign up on Adafruit. And the second it comes back in stock, order it. You could potentially order from Digikin Micro Center, but usually our retail customers on Adafruit.com, they get it first. But either do both. Yeah. I mean like, yeah. Do both. We try to supply everybody. That's the world we live in now. So the next thing is I'm actually going to get rid of these parts with four pads because my package is definitely, it's a two pad package. Let's see, front Vabprint. Sorry. Second this is, so this is the crystal, it's a two, this is the crystal and it's a two pad package. So going back here, let's do two SMD only. Okay. So now we're, we have only these. So now we have to actually do the size. So okay, size dimension three by two by one point two and three point two by one point five. I think I'm going to grab the three point three by one point six and two point five by one point two. Because again, I think those will probably fit on the same pads. And then finally, I'm going to select only stuff in stock because I want to get this now. Okay. So there's actually quite a few options. And this is where we can start looking at the load capacitance. Like I said, you have a couple load capacitance decisions to make. And if your chip, some chips actually have internal tuning capacitors, or if it's like a real-time clock, sometimes whatever it's internal and they really do say it has to be six, seven, nine, whatever, pico farads. For me, I kind of want to stick to the same, like I don't want to have two crystals with different load capacitances if I can get away with it. So 12 pico farads and yeah, there's some in stock. So I can sort by price. And you know, this one is kind of nice when there is a 51,000, I'll say that this is a marketplace product, which means it can take a lot longer. So this one is like, you know, 50 days to ship. If you do not want to wait that long, you can always exclude marketplace. Just click on exclude marketplace and then apply it. And then you'll only get ones that are like really in stock at DigiKey. And so this one by Citizen, Fine Devices, just a great name. So they have 90,000 in stock, which is great and about, you know, 40 cents a piece. Look at the specs, but it's got what I need, 32 kilohertz, 20 ppm, 12.5 pico farads, fundamental, SMD, 3.2 by 1.5. So this is good. You know, I think that they recently restocked these because I don't remember seeing 90,000 crystals in stock before I would have purchased them. But yeah, this is, you know, if you have a design and you are waiting for components, you know, definitely the semiconductors and the chips of course are out. But I'm also seeing a lot of annoying lead time issues with crystals. So I do recommend if you need a crystal to order it early. You can always wait on the capacitors and resistors a little bit. But crystals are definitely, they're being hit by this semiconductor shortage. Probably it's a secondary effect. But lots of these. So this one is good. Good for all sorts of uses. That's a great search. Yay.


Hello everybody, welcome back to another Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 tutorial, this one I'm going to show you how to create your own unique filter or filter type look using a fill gradient, so like a gradient layer. So let's just dig right into this and get the ball rolling. If you want to work along with me, I've just downloaded a stock image off of pexels.com. They've got thousands and thousands of free images and just work along with me. But the technique works no matter what. So let's dig right in. The first thing you want to do is make sure you're select on your layer and now you want to go up to the top here. You want to go left click on layer, new fill layer, drag it across to gradient, left click on that and you're going to see this pop up and it's going to say gradient fill. I'm going to call this InstaFilter1 because this is our first new gradient InstaFilter. Left click on OK and the first thing that happens is the default gradient fill or the last gradient fill, depending on if you've used this before, loads up. In a lot of cases you guys are going to be seeing the black to white gradient fill because that's the default one, especially if you're newer. But I've got the blue one here, so this is one that I've been working with recently. But again, it doesn't matter. Whatever one shows up is fine. I just want to walk you through the process.  When you left click on inside that box of the gradient, you're going to see all of the different presets and I've got a bunch of presets, including some that I've snapped on. More importantly, you're going to see the stops here. You're going to see these four rectangles or these four little boxes. Here's the thing. If you double click or even just click, pardon me, double click on the different squares or the different boxes, you're going to notice here that you can change the color. I'm going to move that a little bit. I double clicked on this square here and this is what showed up. Now if it's default right now, it's selected to dark blue, but this is a pretty serious looking, pretty dark. Let's lower it. As I lower the saturation, you're going to see that we're getting a much subtler look over here. This isn't even the final copy because we've got to change the blend mode. The bottom line is to create a filter. You can go ahead and experiment with this. I'm going to go ahead and use the bluish color because the blue is very, very common in scary movies and stuff like that. Whatever. We've got this pretty girl in a hallway. We're going to make it a scary movie, but again, you guys can go down to red and orange or whatever the heck it is you guys are wanting to do. All good. We're creating our own filter. I'm going back to the darker blue. I'm going to desaturate that a little bit and go with that. I'm going to left click on OK. The other thing you'll notice here is on the right side, you've also got another box. I'm going to double click on this one as well. This one actually also happens to be selected at the darker and the blue spectrum. I'm going to maybe add in, for demonstration purposes, I'm going to make this a little bit greener or a little bit more cyan-y, whatever you want to call it. I'm going to desaturate it a little bit and again, this is a little bit rougher than you'd probably use in your own filters because there's a lot going on here. But again, that's not the point. The point is to demonstrate the technique. So now that I've added that in, let's just say I've got this lightish blue at the bottom and I got this greeny magenta-ish, well not magenta, pardon me, but cyan. That's the color. Come on, Curtis. Cyan-ish at the right. I'm going to click on OK. And the next step is you can go ahead in here. You can change the style. I don't usually recommend it because they're not really filter-ish. The reflect is OK, but really linear is the one you want to work with in almost all cases. And then I'm going to hit OK. And now this is not the end of it, though. So just so you guys know, there's a big mistake that I used to make and I've seen a lot of other people make is you want to change the blend mode from normal, even though this does look pretty nice. If you change the blend mode down to color, now take a look. You'll see that the darks and the contrast is there. We're in the previous blend mode and the regular one. It's not really there. In color, color ignores the luminance. This is a blend mode, if you're not familiar with that. So we've changed the blend mode to color. We've added in our own gradient fill layer. And now, if it's too strong and you're like, hey, that looks really, really good, but it's just a bit too strong, we can dial down the opacity to taste. So let's go to 0%. Nothing's happening, right, obviously. But as we increase the opacity and let the old processor catch up, you're going to see here that as we go up and up and up, we're getting a more gradual effect. So let's say that's the effect we go for. This is awesome. This is a filter that I might even use, especially if I was doing black and white photography with adding in some tints. And literally, that's all there is to it. There are so many different ways inside Photoshop to get your own look. This is another one. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, guys. I got a lot more stuff coming up. Be back soon.


Hey, this is Nico Carver. Today I'm going to show you how to take this basic stacked image of the Milky Way and turn it into this using just basic stuff in Adobe Photoshop. I'd encourage you to edit along with me to get my free Milky Way data that I'm going to be using in this video. Just visit the link below in the description and sign up for my email newsletter. Don't worry it's not spammy, I'll send it most like four emails a year and you're welcome to unsubscribe whenever you like. Once you sign up for the newsletter, within a few minutes get an email from me with the download links for the Milky Way data. Go ahead and download all three TIFF files. So you'll have the starlist.tiff, the stars.tiff, and the single.tiff. I prepared these ahead of time all from the same data set so that we can skip the boring time intensive stuff. But if you are new to astrophotography, I'll put a card in the upper right part of the screen right now to my Andromeda start to finish video which will take you through the whole process. Alright, let's go. So with those files downloaded, go ahead and just open them up. I'm going to hold down shift and click to open up all three here into Photoshop. And so we have our star's picture, our starlist picture which is just our star's picture run through starnet plus plus and our single picture which we're going to use the foreground from. So let's start with the starlist picture. I'm going to start by just adding a gentle S-curve using the curves adjustment layer. So up here I'm just going to click on curves adjustment layer and I'm just going to pick a point on this side of the histogram and bring it up a little bit and pick a point on this side of the histogram and move it down a little bit just to add in this very slight S-curve which as you can see added contrast to the picture. If I turn it off and on, you can see the picture is a lot more punchy now. Meaning the dark parts of the picture got darker and the mid tones were raised up a little bit. Alright, next I'm going to just grab my lasso tool here because I want to select all of the nebulae in the picture and give them a little bit of a saturation boost compared to everything else. So I'm going to start up here with this huge sharpness object. I can't remember the name right now. Here's the blue horse head. Here's Ro Ophiuki. And you might think, what is Niko doing? Why is he just doing these very crappy, not very precise selections? Well, you're going to see here in a second why it doesn't matter how precise I am with this. So it's just going to give us a little bit of an impression of a little bit added saturation. Alright, and the eagle. There we go. OK, so I've circled all of the nebulae just with the lasso tool. You could use a different tool if you want. When we have made a selection on the image and then we add an adjustment layer, it automatically uses that selection to make a mask. Just to show you how that works, if I click on hue saturation, you can see right here in the little thumbnail, there's the mask. If I alt-click it, it does two things. One, it brings the mask up here so I can see what it looks like. And two, it shows the mask properties right here. And I want this window up because what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the feather slider and drag that way over so that all of these sort of loose selections that I made are now really feathered out. So there's a nice gradient, no hard edges. Then I can click on this little icon right here because we haven't actually done anything yet, or double-click it, sorry. And then it opens up the properties for the saturation. And I'm just going to go ahead and grab that saturation slider and bring it over to about 30, 35. This is going to be pretty subtle, especially in the video recording. But if you are following along, what you can do is turn that layer off and on. And you should see all the nebulae that we made those feathered selections on get a little bit of a boost of saturation, which is what we're going for. All right, with that done, I'm now looking at this again, and I think I just want to bring down the black point even a little bit more. So I'm just going to do that. OK, with that done, let's go ahead and add in the stars. I'm just going to click on the tab here for the stars layer. I'm going to select all, Command A or Control A, and copy Command C, Control C on Windows, and Paste. And because this is the exact same image, one was just starless, one was with stars. It's all lined up already. We don't have to do anything there. I'm going to go ahead and change the blend mode over here in the Layers panel from Normal to Screen. And what Screen does technically is it inverts this layer and everything below it to inversions and multiplies them together and then inverts it back. That is not really important, but what's important is that what it does is it brings the mid-tones way up and also blends whatever you've put on top here with everything else. So here's just the starless, and then here's when we add the stars. One thing it does, though, is that the overall picture is a lot brighter now. So we're going to go ahead and add a curve again. So we're going to go up here to the Curves adjustment layer. This time, instead of drawing an S-curve to begin with, I'm going to first just grab this black point and drag that over. And then I'll add an S-curve. There we go. OK, that looks pretty good. The one thing that I noticed about it, though, is that it's overall just a little bit yellow-greenish. So I want to just cool it up a little bit, maybe add a bit more blue to the Color Balance. So you could do that with the Color Balance tool, but I'm just going to use Curves again. But this time, I'm going to go into the Color Channels.  Maybe I'll go even a little bit more. I'm going to do the same thing with red, but even subtler. OK. So this looks pretty natural. I like how it's looking. Let's go ahead and add in the foreground. So to do that, I'm going to go jump over here to the single.tif. I'm going to grab my quick selection tool, which is four tools down. I'm going to draw on the foreground. Just click and drag on the foreground here. It should try to find edges, but it doesn't do the greatest of jobs. If we zoom in, you can see it's just doing a very basic job on finding the edges. You can also see a single exposure is pretty noisy. We'll deal with that a little bit later. But first, we have to clean up this edge here. So to do that, I'm going to go up here to the quick selections options and click on this one on the far right that says select and mask. If you don't see a red overlay, if instead it looks like that, just click on the view and choose overlay.  Click on refine edge brush tool, the second one down. And just paint in around the edge of the trees here. I'm really just clicking and dragging the paint just to get rid of this bright stuff along the tree line edge. Even though we're probably actually going to bring this back in, I just find you want to start with a fairly clean edge, and then you can gradient it back in later. But that looks good. So I'm going to hit OK. It makes the selection. And then we can go ahead and click on the add later mask button, which is this third little button over from the left in the layers panel. And we're going to go ahead and copy this whole layer. So just do edit copy. Move over here to my starless.tiff, which is no longer starless. And we'll do edit paste. OK. And it drops that in right there. We can, of course, move it down like that. But I want a little bit more room down here at the bottom for the foreground, because I like a little bit more foreground than this. And so let's go ahead and we could use image canvas size to do this. But I know I'm going to want to crop to 4 by 5 at some point. Anyway, so let's go ahead and just do it now. And I'm going to expand the crop box down below where we're at now, like so. And we'll just take off a tiny bit of that top edge there. OK, that looks good. Oh, and one thing to note is you can see we have a little bit of room down here, too, still. So we could still move this foreground around a little bit if we need to. So I could grab my move tool again and see I can get a little bit more of the sky this way. And now you might be wondering, well, you're not being super precise about where the Milky Way is compared to where the foreground was in your picture. The thing is, the Milky Way was moving across the sky in this foreground throughout the night. So basically, any orientation here with the trees will be accurate at one point in the night. I'm not too worried about that. OK, so I'm going to do something like that. OK, and then to add in a little bit of more of a blend, what I usually do is you can see this is sort of like a hard blend right now. What I usually do is I just take a really soft brush, want 0% hardness and maybe 15% opacity. And I'm just going to add in a little bit of the foreground along the edge here just to show you what that looks like, something like that. And this just, I don't know, this just always just to me sells it a little bit more that it could be a single image, even though we are mixing a tracked sky with a foreground. The more that I'm looking at this, the more that I think the whole composition should move down a little bit more, though, because I don't need all this stuff up here. And I want a little bit more, just a tiny bit more foreground. So I'm just going to bring up that crop box again and just move the whole thing down like this. Just basically get as much foreground as we can. There we go. Accept. OK, this is looking good. The next thing that I want to do here is because I've now blended in a foreground with everything below, I want a new layer from visible. This is a weird keyboard shortcut. On Mac, it's Command-Option-Shift-E. And on Windows, it's Control-Alt-Shift-E. But all that did is it just, you can see nothing changed here in the canvas. It's just over here. We now have a new Layer 3. And I'll just call this Combined, because we've now combined the three images that we started with, Starless, Stars, and Single. We've done enough work at this point. So let's go ahead and save this off. I'll call it just Milky Way 14 millimeter. And I want to save it as a Photoshop document. All right. OK, at this point, there are cosmetic issues that we have to fix. And then there's the stylistic choices. So this is basically like a base edit of just getting the three images together. And then from here, it's a lot of just like your creativity that would finish a Milky Way edit. OK, let's start with the cosmetic adjustments. I noticed that over here and in this corner, especially, it just looks like a little bit too bright. Remember, I didn't take any calibration frames here. So that might have been fixed with something like Flats. Who knows? I'm going to go ahead and just grab a Curve Layer. And I'm just going to draw. First, I'm going to fill this mask with black. So I'll just do Edit, Fill with black. And black means that most of this Curve Layer, I don't want to affect the picture. I really just want it to affect this corner. So I'm going to raise my opacity back up to 100, but leave the brush nice and soft. And I'm just going to paint in that corner and then bring down the curves on that a little bit until it sits with the rest of the picture a bit better. And I think I overdid it just a little bit in terms of painting that in right there. OK, OK, so here's before. You can see the edges just look a little bit too bright. And then there's after. Now, big stylistic choice is how much contrast and color changes we want to make to this. This to me right now is a very sort of low contrast, very naturalistic color-looking Milky Way. And so you might like it just like this. But if we want it to be a little bit punchier, let's go ahead and grab the curves. And I'm going to take the green curve and bring it down. And again, I just want you to try this on your own monitor because just bringing the green curve down, we just did a tiny little bit, makes a huge difference here to the image. We can also just on the normal RGB curve add in a little bit more contrast at this point. This is making it, again, what I call punchier. So there's before, there's after. And these are stylistic sort of decisions. You don't have to do this. Let's go ahead and stamp a new visible again. So I'm just going to do Command Option Shift E on Mac or Control Option Shift E on Windows. And here's another thing you can do, maybe a little bit controversial, dodging and burning. So many great photographers dodged and burned their prints. You can do it right here in Photoshop. It's a selective permanent kind of adjustment that you're making. And so basically dodging is brightening parts of the picture. Burning is darkening parts of the picture. And in Photoshop here, you can choose what range you want it to dodge or burn.  The more you raise this exposure up, the more dramatic the burn is. So I'm going to say, let's do 20%, just affecting the shadows, OK? And then if I just sort of, OK, that's a little bit too much, I think. Let's bring that down just a little bit. I'm going to do 16%. There we go. And then if I just sort of bring it out here and I'm just going to do a little bit of clicking on some of the major dark nebulae in the Milky Way to make them stand out a little bit more. I like to do this pretty subtly. I don't know how well you can see that in the video. But don't overdo it. Don't set the exposure to 50% or something. It's quite easy to overdo and make the Milky Way look really fake. But I think that when you do it correctly, the dark nebulae have this feeling like they are in front, which they literally are. Whenever you see a dark nebulae, it's covering something up, meaning it's closer to us. And so by darkening them just a little bit, it helps add a little separation and give that sort of 3D effect to the picture. OK, from here, we can continue making it a little bit more fantasy, a little bit more crazy if we want. And the main way that I would do that is, again, just continuing to mess with the colors, basically. And so if I take down the green a little bit and add a little bit of blue saturation in the highlights and then bring back the red a little bit, here we go. That's before. That's after. And it just adds a little bit more color variety. And I'm not sure exactly. Yeah, it is adding more color variety. It's taking the picture away from natural Milky Way colors into much more of a fantasy. So this is where it's really up to you. So this is where I'm pretty much agnostic. I've shed a lot of Milky Way at this point, but I don't have a strong side in terms of this is more natural color. This, what I just did, where I put in more blue into the highlights and took out a little bit more green, is definitely not natural color. But I think it looks better, maybe. It just really pops by adding more blue to the highlights. And so I like it. I'm going to leave it like that. Really, we're almost done here. The last thing I want to do is just address the foreground. And so I'm going to stamp yet another visible, stamp from visible, which is Command Option Shift E on Mac or Control Option Shift E on Windows. And the main thing that I want to do here with the foreground is do some noise reduction, because I'm sure it is quite noisy. So I'm going to do that with Filter, Camera Raw Filter. And I'm going to open up the Detail one here. And I'm just going to drag the Color Noise Reduction and the Noise Reduction way over. And we can zoom in and turn that off and on to see what it's doing. Good. I'm also actually going to bring up the vibrance and the exposure of the foreground a little bit and maybe make it just a tad bluer. And I'm only looking at the foreground when I'm doing this because I'm going to draw a gradient that is going to basically only apply this to the foreground. Now, you might like what it did to the whole picture. It's sort of cool. I don't know. I think it's going a little bit too far for my taste. But let's go ahead and apply that. So since what we just did in Adobe Camera Raw, I mostly just want to apply to the foreground. I'm going to add a Layer Mask and, again, draw a gradient on that Layer Mask. Like so. Maybe I can have it extend a little bit into the Milky Way. I did actually sort of like what it did with the vibrance there to the whole picture. So I'm going to go ahead and just add a Vibrance Adjustment Layer and just bring that up a bit. And at this point, I just think that the foreground and the Milky Way just look a little bit too separated still. And I think it's a color balance issue. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just open up a Color Balance Adjustment Layer. I'm going to Alt-Drag this same gradient that I used here onto this mask. And then I'm just going to play around with the color balance of the foreground until it matches and blends a little bit better with what we have going on in the sky, which has a little bit of a purple feel to it. So basically, I just took the foreground and made it a little bit more sort of purple like it's motivated from the light of our fantasy Milky Way here. OK, at this point, I think I'm done. But I always just hit the F key a couple times just so I can sort of see it without any distractions. And I like to zoom in and look around a little bit. I mean, it has still a fair amount of noise everywhere when you zoom all the way in. But for Instagram and that kind of thing, it'll still be quite impressive. I would have had to just maybe stack the foreground and take even more exposures in the night sky or done tracked exposures to bring the noise down any more than I have. But this looks good. I'm happy with the overall presentation of it. I also like to just maybe get up, have a coffee, and then come back and sit back down and look at it and think, is this overboard? Do I think it's a little bit too much? Because one nice thing about working how we did in Photoshop is you can always go back in here and play around with, OK, maybe that was like a little bit too much vibrance. So I can just turn that down just a little bit, maybe meet it halfway, that kind of thing. But when you are happy with it, what I always do, let's say you want to save this for social media, like sharing it on Instagram, I go to File, Export, Save for Web, Legacy. And basically, any option in here is going to be good, because just I always leave on this Convert to sRGB. And let's do Fit in View to see how it looks. Because this color representation when it converts to sRGB should stay consistent on any device. So the other thing that I like is right down here, it tells me the file size, so 17 megabytes. I can still email it to myself to get it on my phone. And if you want to, you can resize here. So if I wanted a smaller version for sharing on the web, I could resize it right here. I usually use the bilinear for resizing astrophotography. So for instance, I could do 2,000 by 2,500. And so I can keep the full size for myself, but for sharing, I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. All right, that all looks good. I'll click Save. And there's our final picture. It's not perfect, but this was a quick edit that shows you, again, what we did was combine a starless image, an image, the same image, but with the stars and the foreground all together in Photoshop, and then just played around with color and curves and saturation, a little bit of noise reduction to get to this final image, which I think is pretty impressive. And especially considering this isn't from the darkest site out west or anything. This is just a portal foresight here on the east coast of the US. And the foreground isn't anything special, but I think that it does add to the presentation when you can put in foreground, even when it's something sort of very basic like this, because it really gives you an impression of the size of the Milky Way compared to the tree line here. Well, I hope you enjoyed this edit along. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com. Clear skies.


Hey guys, how are you today? So I got this really great Box of happy mail slash early Christmas present from my dear friend Michelle Mitchell over at Lady Blue Studios And I wanted to share it with you guys. Of course, I've already gone through it and unwrapped it So you can't see how pretty Lee it was wrapped inside the box But all of this stuff was wrapped in this really pretty turquoise color tissue paper and then wrapped with some really great twine in beachy sandy colors and turquoise. I love that So you know, I'm going to be using that again. In fact, I've got I've got to make some journals and I think that that twine is going to use be used for some of the binding. So She sent me some of this decorative packing tape that I've been looking for I have trouble finding it I used to be able to get it at Target. Anyway, she found me some look This is the turquoise one with the leaves on it. I love it. And this is the tissue paper It was all wrapped and isn't that great And my most one of my most favorite things to collage with this tissue paper I think it's easier to work with than napkins and I also like deli paper. So yeah, thank you Michelle I love this she sent me these really great straws that look like birch trees and Actually, I have a really cool idea for these for a project. So I'm going to try to put them in a place where they'll be safe Hopefully when I have time to do the project, I'll remember where that safe place is But I do have an idea to take these like decorative paper straws and do something with them I have an idea and it actually kind of goes with this. So I've got to put these in a place together Hopefully I'll remember where that place is when the time comes. I got these really great Journaling cards that say things to do with a date and a list a checklist. I love that I'll clip together with that pretty paper clip a white paper clip. I love these cards. These cards are fabulous She made this little tag with my name on it. I love that. I'm gonna put that over on my table with all my other little Small findings and things that you guys have sent me over the years. My table is actually But I love it. Okay She sent me these really great page flags. She knows I love sticky notes. Look at oh these wait I thought they were page flags. They're not I think they're erasers. Hold on. Oh No, they're page flags they're like Vellum paper plastic coated paper I Don't know they're really cool, but they're page flags and they're look at the colors That's gonna come in handy when I'm going through some of my you know Books where I'm reading up on new techniques and things and I like to mark page flag the pages that I want to go back and actually Try what they're talking about on that page in one of my journals. So these are gonna come in handy I'm gonna put these by the sofa where I do that kind of reading Look at these sticky notes They're like craft paper and they have can you see the pink journaling lines on there? She knows I love a good sticky note Here's some more journaling cards as she sent me with look at these decorative paper clips that she sent Aren't they cute? I love the little birds and then a couple of pieces of ribbon With different words on them. I love that. Thank you Michelle Some DVD sleeves these are great and I'm gonna put them in my envelope box because they'd be great to add to Some junk journals that I want to work on making more junk journals next year I haven't really kind of slacked off on that and I have some more of these somewhere You know in a safe place. Yeah, I don't know where that safe places. I'm gonna have to think about it She sent me a few things in these little Decorative bags, which is great This one had oh, yeah, okay. This one had a couple of small stamps in it and then this book is a What do you call this? This is one of those labels that you put inside of a book to say that it belongs to you. I Forget what it's called right now. I Have that on my coffee. It's just it's one of those days. I don't know And then this one look at this little bag and I love your washi tape Michelle. You always have great washi tape So this one was full of die-cut hearts in different colors of paper and then some wooden pieces. I Love this star one and I have collected quite a few of these wooden pieces from y'all over the years I've been on YouTube and I'm thinking I was thinking the other day I wonder what it would look like if I scattered a bunch of these on some like Like deli paper or a drop paper and then sprayed the deco art Media sprays over them And then let it dry and then lifted these up now the deco art sprays are not like the delusion sprays They're permanent after they dry and so they'd be really great to not only color these But if I did it over these then I'd on a piece of paper Then I'd also have decorative paper like it two for one, right? So we may do that on an upcoming Monday with deco art Try not to lose any of them All right, and then this was all clipped together This is a Library card pocket back in the olden days when you used to have to pull the card out and sign it to check the book out And give the lady the card. Yeah, but I love that and then there's a label And some bags. There's another label. I love that. These are going to be great in some junk journals and stuff Thank you so much Michelle. I love all the bits and pieces you sent very very much I'm gonna put it all back here in the box until I get a chance to put it all away where I want it to go.  We're gonna do a little vlog here, too. So my Facebook group is About to hit 500 members soon. We're at about 450 ish When as as I'm filming this video when we hit 500, which I think I'm thinking will be pretty soon I Am gonna have a special giveaway now The it all we're also coming up on the anniversary of the original forming of the group and granted I didn't do a lot with it until the last couple months or so, but It has been formed for quite a while So I thought to celebrate both of those things that I'd have a little giveaway and instead of just giving away to one person I'm gonna give away to everybody. So as part of The celebration of the anniversary of my Facebook group if you're a member of the group But only if you're a member you're gonna get that the PDF copy digital copy of this coloring book That I put together over the weekend that how this is actually the off one because it has page numbers at the top I ended up taking them off, but this is my sample They're only printed on one side so that you can color them and then take them out And it's a PDF document that you can print on your computer at home. This is printed on Nina card stock and But you have to be a member of the group to get it There's some old designs and there's some newer designs There are some designs in here that are intended for future rubber stamp lines that I haven't made yet So this is a special just for you guys. There are some of these that are, you know, only otherwise for sale in my Etsy shop. So If you're a member of my Facebook group when we hit 500 we're gonna Post this just to the group and it's only for group members. So if you're not a member of the group Go over to Facebook and think about joining I may after that put some of these up for sale in my Etsy shop Haven't decided yet, but it won't be until after we hit that 500 mark so look for that and I Think that might be it for right now. I can't think of anything else. I've got a few projects coming up. I'm working on Finishing the journaling by fives. I filmed step four over the weekend. I'm gonna try to do step five today or tomorrow I'm going to make some little items out of these that we're gonna. I'm in a film These are some of my stamps. I stamped on some Watercolor paper and I have a project for these coming up and then I colored them with watercolor paints And I have a project with these pill pack boxes, I'm gonna try to work on today to and film So lots of exciting things coming up. I'm gonna be revamping my website for next year I'm gonna be having more online courses for next year Ah Lot of a lot of stuff coming up So stay tuned join my Facebook group if you want to contact me for any reason my email address and P.o. Box is in the description below send me happy mail or whatever. I love tissue paper by the way FYI And if you know leave a comment on the video I'll reply if you have any questions comments or concerns for sure Don't forget to have a great week everybody and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later Bye