Lost color after stacking in DSS

[tobblerone]

Hello mates!
I'm very new at this whole thing with astrophotography and processing (in general) and right now I have no idea of what I'm doing wrong, or not doing at all.

So a couple of weeks ago i tried to image m45 as I just love some of the pictures I've seen of it. Even though I had massive problems with fogging I got some pictures (no dark since I thought I was screwed..) I thought I'd try to process into something worthwhile. 

So a quick single image in photoshop to test turned out like this:
 

So after seeing that I felt a bit more inspired. But after stacking 5 images that seemed to have made it I got a much more washed out image. This is after a quick adjustment in levels and curves:

So where did the colors go? Did I do something wrong when stacking, is it the fog that might have sneaked in and ruined some of the stacked images or am I missing something in photoshop? As I said, I'm a total newb when it comes to all of this and have loooots to learn but havent found a answer to this on my own.

All help is very much appreciated! 

[iksose7]

Hi Tobblerone, thats a great image for just a single sub

There are a couple things you could try:

First of all, try increasing saturation in DSS, this is not likely the problem but worth a try if all else fails. 

You say you made a quick adjustment in L+C. Have you tried more processing? If you have only applied say one curve and level stretch then you wont see what is hidden in the image. It looks like the nebulosity is there, you just need to pull out the colour. Try working on the image for a while and see if you get any more out of it. Use the histogram to your advantage, i have a feeling the reds and greens need dropped down or the blue pulled up.

You could also try a re-stack but make sure the frames you put into DSS show no fogging as they will affect the final image.

[ArmyAirForce]

Did you adjust the saturation control?

[RikM]

Image adjustments in DSS are really there only to give you a preview rather than actual processing. The best way I found to preserve the colour is to save from DSS as a 16bit TIFF checking the box to 'embed adjustments in the saved image but do not apply them'. That means that nothing is clipped or compressed and you are saving all the data. You will need to start from scratch processing in Photoshop but you still have all the data to play with. DSS is a great package, but it is not intended to be an image editor. Increasing the saturation slider 15% or so, you will see the colour, but I found that if I saved with adjustments applied, I either had colour with a lot more noise or no colour. Use DSS to align and stack and Photoshop to process and you should be fine.

As said above, for a single sub, that's a cracker. Look forward to seeing the final image. Be aware though that 5 might not give you much more than 1 sub. You want to aim for 20 or so for best effect.

[tobblerone]

Thanks for your advice! I ran the images in DSS and got a much better result this time! Not sure what did it but I made sure the "embed adjustments in the saved image but do not apply them" box was checked, maybe I missed it the first time. Anyway I'm much more pleased! Going to tinker with it in photoshop now and see what I can get out of it. As you said 5 subs is not much, I think I had to throw away around 2/3 of the images. So given that I'm glad to get anything at all from it It's a fun new hobby and just learning new stuff is satisfying on its own!

[tobblerone]

This is what I came up with. An expert would surely done a much better job but given it's my 4th image ever I'm satisfied Huge thanks to you guys for the help you gave me!

[jaspalchadha]

Great image I use DDS for stacking my images, I then use Photoshop to do all the stretching and curving.

[RikM]

Very nice. Perhaps the background could be a little darker.

For a great quick way to boost saturation in the brighter areas, without introducing noise into the darker areas, make three duplicate layers plus your background. Set the top layer to luminosity, the middle layer to softlight and then merge all three duplicates into a single 'saturated' layer above your background. You can adjust the opacity to if it's a bit OTT.

[tobblerone]

Thanks for the tip! Will try it and see if I can get that to work