You have chosen the right location, kept an eye on the weather, planned the perfect composition, and have experience shooting and stacking hundreds of night sky images for the result to be effective. However, at home, you may discover after it’s all done that something didn’t go according to plan. Luckily, you still have post-processing to work magic on these images. For me, these unexpected issues cost me almost two hours of post-processing.

Landscape photography is a genre where long exposures can be a good thing. They let you get motion into a photo, in the form of blurred water, clouds, grass, and leaves on trees.

Surely you’ve seen a photo like this before—a night view of a big road in the city, full of light trails from passing cars. It looks like a very long exposure was used. But was it? There’s an alternative approach you can take that gives better control over the results.