Losing star colours after stacking in DSS

[Kbramley]

When I stack together my lights, darks and flats (all raw) in DSS and then export as a Tiff for further processing,I notice I am losing most of the colour in the image, especially the star colours. I can get some colour back in the main object of interest by boosting the saturarion significantly but the stars in the image always end up white.

any tips?

btw im using a astronomik CLS clip in filter on an unmodded 450D on my MN190

Cheers

Keith

[Bizibilder]

The colour is there - it just needs teasing out! There are several tutorials for doing this either in the imaging section or on the web.

If you look closely at your star images they will be saturated (white) in the centre but will have a ring of unsaturated coloured pixels around their outer edge - you can use the to recreate the star colours.

[Shibby]

My images always look grey in the preview that DSS gives you. Not when exported, though. Experiment with different background calibrations, RGB works well for me.

[RikM]

Quite a crude way of doing it is to create a star layer, duplicate it, increase the saturation of red and yellow to bonkers levels, apply a Gaussian blur at a radius of 1pix, set the blend mode to colour and adjust opacity to taste. I can't get the blue stars to respond to this because all the dim stars tend to turn blue, so I fix blue stars on an individual basis using the same basic method.