Deep Sky Stacker giving me black & white result

[Purplehayze104]

hi everyone me again

am curious, ive been taking images with my Nikon d3100 in colour but when ive run them throught DSS i end up with black & white image as result. has anyone else had this problem??? or could it be a nikon raw problem or maybe a setting ive not done in before processing.

any help in this matter would be mucho appreciated

clear skies

john

[Ant]

I bet if you were to open in PS or similar and process the file it would be colour.

I tend to find the image in DSS very dark, but when I open the TIF file in PS it's fine.

Cheers

Ant

[Purplehayze104]

well did open in ps but was black & white, will try adding some colour to it see if thats my prob thanks for your reply

regards

john

[JB80]

It does tend to have that effect but the colour is still in there and it's just a case of teasing it out.

Generally while still in DSS I level off the R, G, B on the histogram and then play with the saturation setting and a bit more colour comes out.

It may not be the best way to do things though.

[Stargazer33]

I bet if you were to open in PS or similar and process the file it would be colour.

I tend to find the image in DSS very dark, but when I open the TIF file in PS it's fine.

Cheers

Ant

All my images tend to come out very washed out! They are also just grey scale - no colour. I really have to play with the curves and levels in PS to get any sort of colour out of them. Quite often I only end up with a colour cast over the whole image - no colours in the individual stars etc.   so you are not alone in having difficulties.

[Purplehayze104]

That's wots happening to mine even in ps can't get

Any colour from the stars don't know wots going on

Do you use a dslr or ccd

Regards

John

[WaveSoarer]

We also have fairly monochrome images in DSS. We set the RGB peaks so that the left edges of the tails are aligned, allowing the peaks to be in slightly different places, but there is still little colour. When we first tried out deep sky imaging, we just stacked the images in PS and they had lots of colour. I expect that the treatment of the RGB histograms has a lot to do with it.

[Purplehayze104]

Never tried stacking in ps mite look into that as have ps5 would like to see colour in the photos

[Stargazer33]

That's wots happening to mine even in ps can't get

Any colour from the stars don't know wots going on

Do you use a dslr or ccd

Regards

John

I use a Canon 1100D at the moment - I'm hoping to get the ASI120MC when funds allow, which isn't going to be any time soon!

I have been reading around and looking at my individual frames and it looks like the colour is there for the stars but the centres have 'burnt' out. The colour is just in a ring around the edges. Now, I have read a thread or guide somewhere about how to get the colour back into the stars using PS. I think it has something to do with creating a star mask and then blurring one layer so that the colour bleeds back into the star and then blending the layers back together some how; but I can't remember where I read it!

[steve_w]

I like that remark Bryan..mine would be..very little gear, with no idea :-)

Steve_w

[Slynxx]

Having the same problem here. Is it because I'm not using flat/bias files, just Light & Dark frames?

[Davey-T]

I use a Canon 1100D at the moment - I'm hoping to get the ASI120MC when funds allow, which isn't going to be any time soon!

I have been reading around and looking at my individual frames and it looks like the colour is there for the stars but the centres have 'burnt' out. The colour is just in a ring around the edges. Now, I have read a thread or guide somewhere about how to get the colour back into the stars using PS. I think it has something to do with creating a star mask and then blurring one layer so that the colour bleeds back into the star and then blending the layers back together some how; but I can't remember where I read it!

Rough idea from memory so may be bits missing but the general idea is, duplicate image / select colour range / fuzziness 50% / select / modify / expand 5-6 pixels to select stars and a bit of sky / select / feather by 2/3 to 3/4 of expand / ctrl M curves lock bottom half pull down top click preview on / off to see effect / hue saturation 50% / filter / minimum adjust radius / edit /fade if needed / deselect all.

For individual big stars blur 50% select suitable brush to fit star / sponge / saturate 40% ish / desaturate if too much.

Dave