how can i make the stars look more natural?

[Astroblagger]

Here is my reprocess of orion which i took afew months ago, im just wandering how to make the stars look more natural or softer, without altering image as a whole??

[Quatermass]

My question would be do you need to? The image looks really nice and the stars look fine not over sharp but not out of focus.

There are several ways of selecting your stars and applying changes to them after you have selected them though. You could for instance select your stars and boost saturation then apply a gentle blur to bring out more colour or you could use curves to reduce there intensity and brightness.

The only thing I would change in this image might be the core with a shorter exposure sub to bring out the detail in the trapezium but apart from that it looks great.

[carastro]

What a fabulous image done with a Canon 450D according to your signature. I have the same camera but not achieved anything like that as yet. What is your imaging data?

Regarding the stars, when I stretch the image I always anchor the white point down in Curves, and I think it makes for a slightly softer edge to the stars (if that is what you are getting at).

Carole

[LukeSkywatcher]

The stars look fine to me. Great image.

[Steve 1962]

I agree with the others - there's nought wrong with those stars.

Lovely image.

[Macavity]

Just for fun, since I was casually wondering...

http://www.prodigitalsoftware.com/StarSpikesPro2.html

[ollypenrice]

Noels Actions for Photoshop, now called Pro Digital, I think, have a one click star selection tool. On here you can look up MartinB's tutorials. The star layer one tells you how to select only the stars.

I think your green channel is too low giving a generally magenta caste to the picture. The star shapes look pretty good to me though. Getting star colour from DSLRs seems to be difficult.

Olly