struggling with star colour m38

[Daniel-K]

17 x1 min iso 300 darks flats and bias. on the 500d screen i can lots of colour but when stacked its lost?? theres no red stars? any advice please

[Spikey]

If you're using DSS to stack go to the saturation tab after stacking and move the slider up to 15 or so then click apply. That should bring out some colour and you can adjust/apply the saturation until it looks right.

[DugDog]

Check out this about G2V star calibration. I tried this for the first time. Not too sure about the results, since I tried it on an image covered in nebula dust.

Starizona's Guide to CCD Imaging

You may need to do something a little different for your DSLR to separate the RGB channels. I've never tried this with a DSLR, but the same technique should apply after you split your image into three channels.

Here's another suggestion for processing OSC images:

Astro Imaging Tutorial OSC One Shot Color RGB Processing

I know this method helped me with the overall image color.

Good luck!

[Deneb]

yeah send me the stack please ....

[Simms]

Melibum - make sure the saturation slider is around the 15% - 20% mark in DSS (I use 17% usually) - that should bring some colour back into the stars - however I also use "Noels Astro Actions" which has an enhance star colour action which works really well - thats normally enough for me to get plenty of colour in my stars - if its not enough then run it twice! Obviously these need either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to run.

I`ve had a quick stab at your image (hope you dont mind) there doesnt seem to of been enough colour in there initially to pull much colour out, I threw a few star spikes in there to give it a bit of `pop`... I also adjusted the levels (curves for lazy people) to make the background a bit blacker.

[RikM]

Sorry for the short notes, no time right now: Make a star layer using colour select, duplicate it, increase the saturation to bonkers levels, apply a gausian blur at radius 1pix, set blend mode to colour then adjust layer opacity to suit. Works for me. Don't make the star selection too big or you will get too much blue.

[Daniel-K]

thanks simms it was only 17x1 min exposures. i always use 17% sat on dss i was going to get noels actions but didnt know weather it would work ok cs3?

[RikM]

Save the tiff output from DSS with settings embedded but not applied. It gives you much more control in PS. The image manipulation bit in DSS is really only to get an idea of what you have captured. DO the processing in a processing package. Noel's actions work great in CS3.

[RikM]

Here's another suggestion for processing OSC images:

Astro Imaging Tutorial OSC One Shot Color RGB Processing

I know this method helped me with the overall image color.

Good luck!

Sorry for the quick thread sidetrack...

Doug your tutorials are a great help thanks. Does this OSC processing differ significantly from simply opening the full colour Tiff in Photoshop and then working on the colour channels individually? That's what I currently do and I find it works quite well.