For today’s process post, I chosen this shot, just taken one sleepless night from the balcony of my flat :)

So lets take a look at it :) I started by taking 84 exposures for the star trails. That all looked like this:

That I first loaded into Lightroom, where I corrected the lens distortion, vignetting and white balance.

Then I exported them and loaded all into layers in Photoshop, that I set to Lighten mode to get this:

Then I followed with these edits (layers numbered from bottom up)
1. The combined image from all 84 exposures
2. Recovered the buildings from one of the exposures (I didn’t liked the lights the merging created)
3. Color Efex pro contrast on the sky to add more contrast and detail to it.
4. Added more contrast to the sky
5. Removed noise from the buildings
6. Added detail using High pass filter
7. Color balance to cool down the buildings
8. Added more contrast overall
9. Merged layer with few passing planes removed from the sky
10+11. Added glow to the photo

And that’s all :)