Why no colour?

[harrythemartian]

Hi all, just wondering if anyone can give me some advice on how to get more colour in my deep sky objects. Attached is an image i took last night of M27 (stacked in DSS); 20 15 second subs at ISO 800, with darks, with a canon 1100D on a 200p (unguided).

The individual JPEG test shots i took didn't show as much detail, but there were vivid reds are greeny-blues visible in the nebula, but none in the stacked image. Do i just need to do longer exposures of, say, 20 minutes?

any help would be much appreciated

Harry KIlmartin

PS: I've had to crop the image down quite a bit to reduce the file size.

[Sp@ce_d]

Hmm I'm only looking at this on my phone but it seems to have no colour information at all. Can you give us a bit more details of the stacking/process. Are you shooting raw? Maybe post up a single sub.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Steve Ward]

Welcome to the forum Harry ,

The colour info should be in there , it just needs bringing out in post processing.

A quick way to check will be to open the stacked image in DSS in the 'processing' box then click on the 'saturation' option and push the slider to around 20% , this will reveal the colour.

You should be shooting in RAW mode to get the best from the camera.

[harrythemartian]

thanks for the quick replies guys

I am shooting in raw, but its only a 5 minute exposure of 20 subs stacked in deep sky stacker, with no post processing. All i did was tweak the curve in DSS a little.

Here's a single jpeg frame i took whilst lining up the shot, i think its about 15 seconds exposure. (again, I've had to crop it a lot to reduce the file size enough).

[Steve Ward]

I dug out an old DSS stack of M27 for you ,

When you first see the image it will be in Mono , as per this pic with the Saturation at 0%.

Crop.

Adjusting the Saturation slider up to 20% should reveal the colour as here.

Crop.

There's a good DSS tutorial here . . .

Hope this helps.

[harrythemartian]

thanks Steve! saturation worked a treat. Now to do the same for my other photos :L.

cheers for the help

[Steve Ward]

You're very welcome sir ...