First Afocal Saturn

[jgs001]

Here's my first Afocal Saturn. A single frame, handheld afocal on a 10mm LET Plossl 1/25Sec @ISO400. It's a bit carp really, but figured I'd post it as it's a first.

(click to enlarge)

[Cloudwatcher]

Cleaned up the edges a bit but you might want to do something with the colour.

Cheers

CW

(click as usual)

[jgs001]

CW, Thanks, May I ask, what did you do ? That look so much better. I played with it in Elements, and that was the best I could get.

[rawhead]

Cleaned up the edges a bit

A bit! :shock:

That's a remarkable transformation :thumbleft:

I too would like to know how you did it...

[trevboyd]

Me too! The original looked a lot like my attempts at Saturn, so I wonder if I could get the same result from mine.....

Trev

[MartinB]

A great first bash John and good enhancement CW

[jgs001]

Martin thanks very much. Gonna look into someone of clamping the camera to the ep.

[saturn5]

I turned an adapter out of nylon,one end bored out to fit the minolta lens and drill and tap a couple of threads for plastic screws to grip onto the lens,other end is the same but to suit the diameter of the eyepiece you are using,if there is one thing the Minolta is good for is being easy to clamp thanks to the sticky out lens(good technical terminology there)

[jgs001]

Excellent. Something to look into. I do have an old Logitech quikcam somthing or other, partially doctored (or should that read broken ) waiting on a nose piece that I'm gonna have a bash with. I suspect it will probably only get me images like this, but it's worth a go.

[Cloudwatcher]

I will try to give a brief description of the enhancement with pictures.

The original was cropped and enlarged to 266dpi so that the 'frilly' bits around the edge could be seen clearly. these were then burned of with the burn tool. The image was then despeckled and Gaussian blurred which resulted in an image (third in the chain) that could be further worked on in Photoshop. Levels,curves,burn and dodge tools were used and saturation/de-saturation applied till a reasonable image resulted. It is sometimes better to work on a image that has been Auto coloured or Auto levels have been applied and this is represented in the lower chain of images. in the later case this has to be reduced for the final image.

If you want to improve the final image further make a couple of layers,one an Auto levels layer, and overlay them. Playing with the opacity levels of the two can produce quite an acceptable result.(see bottom row images) If you are not happy with the colour then try using the photo filters in Photoshop to warm up or cool down the image.

HTH

Cheers

CW

P.S. Sorry about the quality of the image but I had to reduce everything to make it fit.

[jgs001]

CW, Thanks very much for your words of wisdom on how to carry out the black art that is image manipulation. I've got as far as the burn tool.... :? I can tell this is going to take quite some time to understand and make produce a decent image.