steppenwolf Posted August 26, 2011 Share Posted August 26, 2011 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! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fay Posted August 26, 2011 Share Posted August 26, 2011 That is a great process Steve, nice & smooth, good detailWhat program did you use for merging the two images?Fay Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steppenwolf Posted August 26, 2011 Author Share Posted August 26, 2011 Thanks, Fay, I aligned the two images in MaximDL using a two star align and then loaded them into PhotoShop for the rest of the work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peter shah Posted August 26, 2011 Share Posted August 26, 2011 super colour....real nice Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foundaplanet Posted August 26, 2011 Share Posted August 26, 2011 Very nice, beautiful star colours. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melsky Posted August 26, 2011 Share Posted August 26, 2011 Lovely job Steve, excellent balance between the nebula and stars. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prokyon Posted August 26, 2011 Share Posted August 26, 2011 Wow, very nice!I am doing the same area currently. You apply pressure to me with your great pic. CheersWerner Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lukebl Posted August 26, 2011 Share Posted August 26, 2011 Breathtaking image. Fantastic result. Just hope I can eventually get such great images with my SXVF-H9. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R Fisher Posted August 26, 2011 Share Posted August 26, 2011 Great colour and contrast the Ha luminance has really made the detail jump out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ollypenrice Posted August 27, 2011 Share Posted August 27, 2011 Splendid, a beauty. Smooth but with contrasty ionization fronts and plenty of star colour which isn't easy with a strong Ha component. That's great. Olly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coco Posted August 27, 2011 Share Posted August 27, 2011 Very nice indeed.. You should post up a higher res one too Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steppenwolf Posted August 27, 2011 Author Share Posted August 27, 2011 Thanks for your comments folks.You should post up a higher res one too 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 More sharing options...
Deneb Posted August 27, 2011 Share Posted August 27, 2011 The Colours of those Stars are very well balanced indeed.Nadeem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacebloke Posted August 28, 2011 Share Posted August 28, 2011 Wow, fantastic colours. I really like this image! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Catanonia Posted August 28, 2011 Share Posted August 28, 2011 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 More sharing options...
steppenwolf Posted August 28, 2011 Author Share Posted August 28, 2011 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..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).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 More sharing options...
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