Why am I losing colour with Deep Sky Stacker?

[DaveGarland]

Can someone help me out please?

I'm just dabbling with imaging and I'm having some teething problems (there's a surprise!). So far I've tried M13 and was over the moon with my first pic. Then however I had a go at M27 and M57 last night and I'm having a spot of bother with both. In the RAW pictures there's some quite nice colour but when I run them through DSS the colour seems to disappear. Also all the background haziness just seems to add up. I am just using darks and lights at the moment, could this be the reason or is there something I could be doing with settings? To be honest at the moment I prefer the individual RAW files to the stacked ones

Thanks for any help.

Dave.

[RikM]

The final image screen in DSS always looks grey. It is just a preview rather than the actual image. The best thing to do is to save as a 16bit Tiff and check the box that says 'with settings embedded but not applied'. Then when you open the tiff in Photoshop (or similar) all the data and colour will be there. It will look dark initially but using levels and curves adjustments, you can lighten it and increase the colour saturation.

If you just want a quick look at what you have using DSS then click on the Saturation tab and increase it to 15 - 20%. Then on the luminance tab drop the midtone angle to about 5-7° and then use the bottom midtone slider to position the curve more or less over the peak on the histogram. Click apply, to view the result. This will show you broadly what you have, but I find it better to save without the settings applied and do it all in Photoshop.

[serpiente]

If you captured in nebulosity, try in edit, preferences, color file format and select rgb fit maxim. In DSS in the final image put in saturacion 15% for example and apply.