M42

[steviemac500 1,021]

I took some lovely shots of the Orion Nebula last night. The individual shots are lovely but when I go stack them, all the colour disappears. I took around 40 at 30s ISO 800, same darks. Why would this be. I did flats as well and I have tried stretching them in GIMP. I would have expected the picture to have more detail after processing. This is the processed image.

[jambouk 1,659]

Nice. What software are you stacking them with? Is there a setting you are missing to tell the software it is a colour image?

Why are you stretching flats?

James

[Knight of Clear Skies 5,720]

There is probably more detail and colour hiding in there. DSS often produces very dark, almost monochrome images after stacking. I use the sliders to perform an initial stretch and colour balance and boost the saturation before saving the image.

Edited October 14, 2015 by Knight of Clear Skies

[udaiveer 45]

Use the Highlight slider in DSS to taper the histogram curve in DSS.

Did you your CR2 (RAW) files? If so try converting all to tiff n then stack. Somehow the results r predictable with tiff ;-)

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[steviemac500 1,021]

Hi, I'm using DSS to stack Sorry, that was badly written, I meant I'm stretching the image not the flats. I haven't tried using the sliders to boost the image before GIMP so ill try that. Is there an option that says its a colour picture?

[xtreemchaos 14,587]

great image mate, nice dust lanes. well done. thanks for posting  charl.