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Does anyone know where I might find a processing tutorial to help with GIMP?


RSM

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Hi. After months of umming and aaarhing, imaging the moon and constellations through the zoom lens on my Canon DSLR, I finally took the plunge and bought an HEQ5 mount second hand and my good lady wife bought me a Skywatcher 200PDS as a birthday present (lucky boy). This last week has been my first week of observing and I also got to take my first images of the double cluster and M31. I have used DSS in the past and stacked 37x30 second subs of M31 I took last night before I was swimming in dew. I took darks,flats and bias and I have to say, using only the basic processing tools in DSS, I have a first Astro image I'm really quite happy with for a first go. I feel that there is much more I could do with this image, but am finding all the processing a bit bamboozling! From what I've read I need to learn about layers and curves, but that's where my knowledge ends. Are there any video tutorials anyone knows about which could help me out? I've downloaded GIMP for Windows. Holding out from purchasing Photoshop or Lightroom as I heard GIMP can do the basics I'd need.

Any advice gratefully received. After a week of viewing and observing in the great autumn evenings we've been having and I'm hooked. Looks like I'll have some processing time (or learning how to process) over the next few nights as the weather closes in though!

(Not sure what the dark blob is below the centre of M31 - may need to look at the subs and re-stack)

Thanks for any help you can offer.

post-47153-0-96468200-1443970342_thumb.j

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Can't help you with the photography side of things.... I'm a complete novice at that myself.

I would suggest a dew shield with a heater built in will certainly stop dew build up on your optics longer than just a standard dew shield. I also found that being on the lawn the dew was considerably quicker to build up and in a greater quantity than on a hard standing.

Nice picture with the dust lanes and bright core.

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I'm just going to cut to the chase...

Gimp just doesn't cut it for astrophotography processing. Pixinsight with Harry's video tutorials is the easiest road IMO but most (including me) end up using both Pixinsight and Photoshop.

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Gimp 2.8 is of little use for image processing as it is only 8 bits per channel, Gimp 2.9 is 16 bits per channel and will do just fine for basic processing.

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Gimp is perfectly OK for image processing. I use it all the time both for amateur shots and professionally.  The trick is to make sure you have scaled the image to a sensible range before importing it (or use the 2.9 beta version). One thing to avoid though is division (due to the 8-bits) - so flat fielding is usually a no-no.

NigelM

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You can download Photoshsop CS2 for free as it's now not supported by Adobe (Google Photoshop CS2 download - there's a youtube video on how to do it)).  I'd suggest going this route rather than GIMP especially as there's plenty of tutorials and help for PS.  (i'm learning all of this stuff myself and what all the sliders do apart from mangling the image...)

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Thanks again, this is great info for a newbie. Learning curve is really steep right now. The great thing is even though gimp is not the best route for processing, after using it for this image I'm hooked. Can't wait for the clouds to blow away!

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You can download Photoshsop CS2 for free as it's now not supported by Adobe (Google Photoshop CS2 download - there's a youtube video on how to do it)). I'd suggest going this route rather than GIMP especially as there's plenty of tutorials and help for PS. (i'm learning all of this stuff myself and what all the sliders do apart from mangling the image...)

Not entirely true, you can download it for free if you already have a CS2 licence. Downloading it without having a licence would be software piracy despite the fact that you download it from the Adobe website.

They aren't supporting that software anymore and have decided to shut down the authentication servers which is why they allow people to download a version that does not rely on those servers.

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