Editing Aurora Photos in Lightroom: 8 Essential Tools

One of the most amazing phenomena of the night sky is the aurora borealis (also known as the northern lights). For as long as humans have existed, the dancing, brilliant curtains of light have dazzled the viewers below.

The opportunity to see the aurora is often a bucket list item, and the opportunity to view and photograph the northern lights draws thousands of people to polar regions every year.

Advancements in digital cameras and photo editing software have created an incredible opportunity for you to edit your shots after a night out under the stars and lights. However, post-processing technology has, in my opinion, resulted in many aurora photographs that are over-processed to bring out a level of saturation and contrast that did not exist in the original scene. Because many of the colors of the aurora are so pure and contrast so intensely with the sky, it is easy to inject the equivalent of pixel-steroids into your images, resulting in an eye-catching but ultimately false effect.

It is my goal when editing aurora shots to enhance but not over-enhance. Understanding how each of the basic Lightroom editing tools impacts an aurora image can help you tell the story of a night out by making your file look like the sky did when you originally witnessed that beautiful light show. Below, I walk you through the different tools that are useful for aurora editing in Lightroom, and I do my best to explain how you can use each to your advantage.

Lightroom basic sliders

To illustrate how my favorite Lightroom sliders – Contrast, Clarity, Dehaze, Tint, Saturation, Vibrance, Shadows, and Highlights – affect an Aurora image, it is easiest to look at how extreme values for each setting impact the image.

For each tool, I will walk you through how the slider impacts any type of image (i.e., I will explain what the slider does in general terms). I will then apply it at an extreme level to the same aurora image to show a before (no edits) and after (extreme applied) comparison.

1. Contrast

Contrast is a very useful slider and a fundamental one for editing. By definition, the Contrast tool darkens the darkest midtones in the image and lightens the lightest midtones.

In an aurora image, many darker midtones appear in the aurora itself. As you slide the contrast to 100%, you’ll see that the colors in the aurora darken, giving the image a more saturated look:

2. Clarity

The Clarity slider adds contrast to the midtones without adding much noise. The tool is often used to bring out texture and details.

As I said above, aurora colors generally fall into the midtones of your image, so a Clarity boost impacts them strongly. Boosting the Clarity to +100 adds definition to the banding of the sample aurora shot below because there are vertical dark lines in the sky. You may like the Clarity slider for aurora shots because it doesn’t add as much contrast as the contrast slider and can make stars in the image pop and seem crisper.

3. Dehaze

Similar to Clarity, the Dehaze slider increases midtone contrast and shadows to give the images a slightly darker and more saturated look.

The Dehaze slider was built to remove haze from a scene. However, when you apply its technology to an aurora shot, it adds a lot of contrast and saturation to the image. It’s a slider to use gently (if at all) for aurora image editing.

4. Saturation

The Saturation slider deepens, intensifies, and brightens the colors throughout the image.

In an aurora photo, you’re often dealing with very intense colors, so you will find it is very, very easy to overdo the Saturation slider. Use Saturation sparingly.

When pushed to +100, the Saturation slider gives the northern lights an almost neon appearance:

At -100, on the other hand, it strips all color from the shot:

It might seem counterintuitive, but there are times when bringing the saturation out of your aurora image by -5 or -10 can help improve the file’s appearance and make it easier for the eye to comprehend the intensity of the northern lights.

5. Vibrance

Vibrance is essentially a less aggressive version of saturation. It’s a tool that increases saturation selectively, with an emphasis on cooler rather than warmer tones.

In aurora shots, the Vibrance slider provides a more realistic enhancement of the aurora’s colors. You can see in the examples below that there is still a real danger of going too far. A Vibrance value of +100 creates neon colors similar to overusing Saturation:

However, at -100, you can see a distinct difference from -100 Saturation. The -100 Vibrance adjustment does not remove all color from the sky:

When editing my aurora shots, I like to decrease the saturation slightly before increasing the vibrance; it’s a powerful technique to subtly improve the colors!

6. Shadows

The Shadows slider increases luminosity in the darkest parts of the image.

With a picture of the aurora, you have a distinct advantage in that the Lightroom program interprets almost any part of the image that is not the aurora to be a shadow. The Shadows slider, therefore, lets you brighten or darken your foreground very easily.

You can see in the +100 shadow example below how details were brought out of the shadows in the silhouettes of the trees:

7. Highlights

The Highlights slider is the opposite of the Shadows slider and increases the luminosity of the brightest parts of the image.

Lightroom interprets any part of the image with the aurora to be a highlight. That means an increase in the Highlights to +100 effectively increases the exposure of the aurora. On the other hand, if you over-expose an aurora image in the field, decreasing the highlights can help you reclaim lost detail.

8. Tint

The Tint slider is meant to be used for color correction in correspondence with the Temp slider.

When editing your northern lights photos, you can use the Tint slider to neutralize the snow, which tends to turn green during intense aurora displays. I like to use a Graduated Filter (i.e., a Linear Gradient mask), coupled with increased pink tints and decreased saturation to make the snow closer to white.

Often this helps your eye focus on the aurora and can restore balance to the shot.

Put it all together for a final edit!

Now that you know how each slider impacts your overall image, it’s time to combine each in moderation to achieve a final edit.

For the shot below, I wanted to make sure the banding in the aurora was enhanced along with the purples. My final edit brings out features of the image without over-enhancing it:

Now I want you to experiment with editing aurora images! Please pick your favorite aurora photo, then do some post-processing based on the advice I’ve shared. Then share the results in the comments below! As I always say, pixels are cheap – so I hope you make lots of pixels while photographing the aurora and have fun editing them!