URTH Night Filter Plus 

INTRODUCTION

If your passion is astrophotography or night photography in general, then you would have at some stage heard about the Night Filter – sometimes referred to as a Light Pollution Filter. We’ve owned the NiSi Natural Night Filter for a couple of years and must admit that it’s not a filter we have used that often. We primarily purchased the filter to demonstrate it to our large Meetup group on Photo Walks.

When Urth (formerly Gobe) rebranded in late 2020, they introduced the URTH Night Filter Plus to their line-up. It is available as a circular filter (screw-in), and as a 75mm or 100mm Square Filter (75mm has now been discontinued) used with a  Square Filter Holder. Although Urth produces its own Square Filter Holder, the square filters will fit into any brand of filter holder. Read our review of the Urth Square Filter Holder.

We’ve been using Gobe/Urth Filters for quite a while now and love their quality, price, and contribution to the environment through tree planting in some of the most deforested regions of the world.

Urth kindly sent us a 77mm Circular Night Filter Plus  for this review. Please read our disclaimer at the bottom of this post.

WHAT IS A NIGHT FILTER?

A Night Filter is primarily designed to block the wavelengths of light sources such as mercury vapour, sodium and other lights that are often used as streetlights. Generally, these lights are usually yellow/orange and are the primary cause of light pollution around cities. Needless to say, this type of filter is really only suitable to use at night. 

DO YOU NEED A NIGHT FILTER?

Well, technically – No. You can achieve the same results in post-processing to a degree, however, the Night Filter will do all your heavy lifting in-camera and save you heaps of time. Everyone that we have met that uses a Night Filter raves about them and would not shoot any night photography without one in cases where there is light pollution in the sky or a variety of different lighting in a night scene.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

As with all the Urth circular filters, the product arrives in a mid-grey square recyclable box. Every purchase funds tree planting in areas affected by severe deforestation — revitalising ecosystems and empowering local communities.

The filter is housed securely in a black circular tin container. These tins are great, but will not be ideal for everyone to carry around as they are cumbersome and if you carry several filters then they will take up significant space in your camera bag. We prefer to use the URTH Lens Filter Caps in the field. These are compact and several filters of the same thread size can be stacked. Also included in the box is a microfibre cleaning cloth.

THE FILTER

The URTH Circular Night Filter Plus filter has the same ultra-slim magnalium* rim design used in all the new Urth circular filters. As usual, the inner rim markings denote the URTH brand, the thread size, and the number of layers of nano-coating on the filter (in this instance, it is 20L or 20 layers). On the outer edge of the rim is simply ‘Night‘, denoting that it is a Night Filter.

*Magnalium is an aluminium alloy with 5% magnesium and 95% aluminium. Alloys with small amounts of magnesium (about 5%) exhibit greater strength, greater corrosion resistance, and lower density than pure aluminium – Wikipedia

The filter has the Plus quality rating, which is Urth’s premium quality range. The optical glass is manufactured with Neodymium Glass, which gives it its violet colour. In addition, as mentioned above, it has 20 layers of nano-coating which gives it better protection against water, oil and scratches. The nano-coating also provides a higher maximum light transmission and a more consistent transmission curve, resulting in sharper images, finer colours and greater depth.

The filter is double-threaded, meaning there are threads on both sides. One thread screws onto the lens while the other thread, facing outwards, allows another filter to be attached to it. Please Note: We never recommend stacking filters for fear of vignetting; however, as these filters are ultra-slim rims, you may want to test them at different focal lengths to see if they vignette on your lens. When using our Full Frame sensor camera, stacking two slim-rim filters may cause slight vignetting at 24mm, but this effect disappears by approximately 28-30mm. In APS-C mode at these focal lengths there’s no vignetting due to the 1.5x or 1.6x crop factor. If you are shooting with an ultra-wide-angle lens on an APS-C or Micro Four Thirds sensor camera, we recommend you test for vignetting.

HOW TO USE THE FILTER

Like any circular screw-in filter, it is best used without any other filters attached to your lens. This is not a filter that you would normally need to combine with another filter anyway. Therefore, before adding this filter to your lens, you should remove any existing filters such as a UV, C-PL (Polarizer) etc. Once attached, this filter will not affect the camera’s autofocus, however, it will increase your exposure by 1-stop.

WHO WOULD USE THIS FILTER?

• • Those that love shooting at night when there is a lot of mixed lighting
  • Astro photographers that want to reduce the amount of light pollution in their images

SAMPLE IMAGES

Below are some sample images using the 77mm Urth Circular Night Filter Plus. The images are straight out of the camera and have only been straightened and the lens profile has been applied in Lightroom. All images were taken on the Full-Frame sensor Sony A7RIII with a 24-105 f/4 lens using AWB (Auto White Balance).

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PRICE

The circular Urth Night Filter Plus is available for lenses with thread diameters from 37mm to 95mm. The price ranges from USD$69.00  to USD$165.00. The filter is available for the  Urth Square 100mm Filter Holder (USD$85.00). If you don’t already own a filter holder then check out our review of the Urth Square Filter Holder.

RATED: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 

If you are interested in reading any of our other reviews of the Gobe/URTH Filters click on any of the posts below. Alternatively, we have a dedicated URTH Filters page on our website which you can check out here. For any of our other product reviews click here

Disclaimer:  This review is totally unbiased. As Professional Photographers we would never recommend the use of any product unless we have used the product ourselves. We always strive to give you our honest opinion in order to help you make the best choice. We did receive the product with compliments of URTH but were not paid for this review. We may also receive commissions on other links in this post.