Most Milky Way photos don’t look great ‘out of the box’ so you need to edit them carefully. Adobe Lightroom Classic is one of the best tools out there for the job. As with shooting, everyone has their own unique approach to editing. However, most of the time, the best process is to start with Lightroom’s global adjustments that affect everything in the photo, followed by local adjustments such as gradient and brush tools. That’s the process I follow during this walkthrough, where I edit one of my own Milky Way photos from start to finish. I’m using the newest 2021 edition of the software, which includes interesting features like Color Grading that you may not have seen before (step 6).
You can save your favourite steps as presets to save time when processing in the future.