Lack of colour in images

[Philmarriott]

I'm imaging with a starwave ed80, no reducer and a canon 1100d and I'm really struggling to get much colour from my images. I did the dumbell neb last night but as I said there is hardly any colour. Detail looks ok. I have a skywatcher light pollution filter in and was doing 2.5 min subs. X40 of them. Has anyone come across this kind of problem or am I expecting too much?

Thanks!

[Daniel-K]

40x2.5 min sub should give you a fair amount of detail on m27 as its quite bright. can you post an image?

[blinky]

If you are stacking them in deep sky stacker I would then open it in Photoshop (or similar) and increase the saturation, this is pretty common with DSS

[Philmarriott]

Thanks guys. Been having a play and starting to bring some out but it starts looking a little too processed too trying to find a balance.

[wxsatuser]

Is your 1100d modded, if not the red will be hard to get.

Nice image btw.

[Daniel-K]

that just needs longer subs, nothing wrong with that given the short time

[Philmarriott]

No it's a standard camera. Will try some longer ones next time. What's a good sub length do you think?

[wxsatuser]

For a dslr you want to aim to get the histogram around 20>40%.

If you look at the histogram, the peak, it looks like a mountain, should be in the range I quoted above.

Do this for whatever your setup, iso etc and this will give you your maximum sub length for your sky brightness.

Take test exposures and see where the peak lies, adjust length so you don't go over 40%.

[jtlandreneau]

Here's my M27 - taken through a 130mm reflector, ISO800, 38 minutes total exposure with 2 minute subs, no darks. You have to boost the saturation in DSS and stretch the curves, but other than that I had to do very little post processing

[Daniel-K]

Get the longest subs that the sky conditions will allow. Taking into account LP will reduce your subs.the sw lp filter is ok but id upgrade if you want to start doing 300sec subs.