I have sought out to create a perfect night shot, I have found a need to improve my Photoshop proficiency for post editing. There are many tools in Photoshop that can make a big difference when it comes to creating a good image and a perfect image. Two that get used commonly in nature and especially night or astrophotography is Image-stitching and image-stacking. A quick explanation of what Image Stitching and Image Stacking are:

Image stitching (merging) is the process that you can create a panorama from several images.

Image stacking is the process of blending photos together to create a single photo with multiple focus areas.

This picture is my patio garden, and is created from 4 images, and in the process 2 of them were rendered useless. All of them are from the same position on the tripod and I used the manual focus to get each portion of the garden in focus, to simulate the whole garden being in focus, even though there are different focus distances in the end image. This is the result of my first stacked image, and I am happy with it for the most part. There is some lighting that can be tweaked but overall, the clarity of the image is better than I had before. There are official Image stitching and Image Stacking.

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Another fantastic post shoot editing software in the Adobe library is Lightroom. It is very common and there is a very good reason for it. Lightroom has a utility called Presets; a preset is just a series of changes that runs just like a macro, making is easy to makes a handful of changes to an image with a single click. However, if just blindly ran and saved, you can ruin an image with over-editing. There is a perfect amount of editing that will leave the viewer wondering if there have been any edits at all, and that is the skill level I've been working on. There are thousands of presets already created and it is not hard to create your own the specific style you have.

I have included an example image of my dogs playing. It was Fall and I wanted to see if I could make it look something like spring, turning the grass from tan to a green without changing any other colors. I think it came out decent.