Jump to content

IC1318 in Ha/Ha-R/G/B

steppenwolf

By steppenwolf
in Imaging - Deep Sky

Recommended Posts

steppenwolf

steppenwolf

Posted
Posted

Terrible skies still so decided to have a play with two images taken a month or two ago, one in Ha using my SXVF-H9 and the other in one shot colour using my SXVF-M25C. I blended the Ha into the red channel and then used the Ha again as a luminance channel - all good fun!

butterfly_030611_Ha_and_RGB_l.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites
steppenwolf

steppenwolf

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thanks for your comments folks.

You should post up a higher res one too :rolleyes:

Ironically, this was just a time filler because I was so fed up with the weather so I worked on the reduced resolution JPEGS copied and pasted from my website rather than from my original FITS files - if I can find the time, I'll have to redo it from the originals!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Catanonia

Catanonia

Posted
Posted

Great use of resources and the colours / smoothness are outstanding.

Could you post a simple workflow for combining the Ha as luminance in PS please as I would like to try it myself and compare to my own methods.

Many thanks

Link to comment
Share on other sites
steppenwolf

steppenwolf

Posted
  • Author
Posted
Could you post a simple workflow for combining the Ha as luminance in PS please as I would like to try it myself and compare to my own methods.

With pleasure although I'll add a little extra detail in case anyone else is interested in what I had to do to get the images completed.

I started off with the two JPEG images below, (yeah, I know but I was just playing about on the laptop and only had access to my JPEGS on my website over the Internet!) exactly as you see them now. Both of them had been processed previously and were, as far I was concerned 'finished' images. I was happy with the Ha one but frankly disappointed with the colour one as amongst its many faults (blown star Sadr) I discovered that I had a tilted sensor fault..

butterfly_030611_l.jpg

sadr_region_190811_l.jpg

I loaded them both into MaximDL and set the screen stretch to Max Val to maintain the original finished stretches.

I aligned the two using a manual two star alignment in MaximDL using the Ha image as the 'Reference Image' and saved them both as 16bit TIFs.

This is what the colour one looked like - horrendous, blurred where it had been expanded to match the size of the Ha etc. etc! But, I wasn't bothered as the detail is held in the 'Luminance Channel' (in this case it would be a luminance channel of Ha data).

colour_2.jpg

I loaded both images into PhotoShop, selected the colour image, selected 'channels' and clicked on the red channel. 'CTRL A' followed by 'CTRL C' to copy the red channel to the clipboard followed by opening a new file and pasting the red data into that. I then copied the Ha data and pasted that on top of the red data and adjusted the opacity until I got what looked like a nice mix of the two (this turned out to be 73%). I flattened this image, copied it and pasted it into the red channel of the original colour image.

This gave me a detailed but insipid pinky image with garish stars. I used the 'Noise' Filter (Reduce Noise - Reduce Colour Noise set to 100%) to tame the stars down.

I then set about increasing the colour saturation, adjusting 'Levels' and 'Curves', adjusting the colour balance away from blue and towards red, worked on the star halos a little and worked a little further on the star colours until I was happy with them.

Hope that helps.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.