How to identify stars in photographs? I can look at a star chart and identify things like constellations in the sky.  But if I take a picture with my DSLR camera (35mm with a decent zoom lens, no astronomy specific optics), I run into difficulty. I find that the camera can see a lot more stars than my eye, and I find that I start to have great difficulty even identifying simply constellations.  For instance, when I look for the constellation Cassiopeia in the night sky it is very easy to spot: it looks like a sideways "W".  But when I take a picture I don't see a W at all in the picture, I see about 16 stars around where the "W" should be a weird angles to each other, and it's hard to figure out which stars to connect to form the actual constellation.

And it just goes downhill from there, as other constellations don't even have a shape as easily recognizable as Cassiopeia, and as a result I have a great deal of difficult even recognizing what I am looking at.

A photograph with a regular camera is not quite the same as looking through a telescope, because the camera has a much wider field of view.  And at the same time, there does not seem to be a linear relationship between the actual magnitude of the star and how bright it looks.  As I mentioned above, I see 16 stars which look somewhat comparable in brightness, but I know that they differ by several magnitudes.

Is there some kind of trick or technique that I can use to quickly identify stars in pictures I take?  In looking for clues, I have not seen anybody mentioning this problem.
Take another photograph of the same field that is less exposed. (Doesn't matter if you do this by shortening the exposure time, decreasing the ISO, etc.) This will give you an image with far fewer stars so you can easily pattern match your images.