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My First Nebula attempt


wornish

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I realise it not up to the usual submission standards I see on here but its the first one I feel confident enough to share.

Taken with my OMD E-M5 mk2 with a Nikon 80-400mm zoomed to 300mm mounted on Sky Adventurer un guided.

41 x 60sec light shots stacked in deep sky stacker and processed further in Photoshop.

 

Welcome any suggestions for improvement.

 

 

 

 

Orion-Oly-sized.jpg

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Very nice first shot! Quite a bit of faint detail captured, at the expense of a centre that is overexposed. This is practically unavoidable if you use just  one exposure time. Combining results from different exposures allows you to extend the dynamic range, and catch even more detail.

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Yeah, the core is blown, but so what? There is some nice detail and colour in there. As others will say, the next step is to have a go with shorter exposures for the core and then merge the two images - not quite got around doing that myself yet as this year has been fighting against me getting out for any photography!

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3 hours ago, Marky1973 said:

Yeah, the core is blown, but so what? There is some nice detail and colour in there. As others will say, the next step is to have a go with shorter exposures for the core and then merge the two images - not quite got around doing that myself yet as this year has been fighting against me getting out for any photography!

I know what you mean about the weather.  Last night was the first totally clear night this year so I thought I would give it a go.  I will try taking short exposures as well as long ones next time as I know the core is blown. :sad:

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16 minutes ago, Herzy said:

Couldn't you just mask out the blown out core and replace it with a single 30s exposure?

As far as I know this method can't be beaten. http://www.astropix.com/HTML/J_DIGIT/LAYMASK.HTM

The author uses separate sets at different exposures but you can substitue different stretches of the same data as well.

Olly

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Hi Wornish,

I'm also very new to this Astro stuff but have a bit more general photography experience. One thing I've quickly picked up on is that what one sees with their stacked image contains a whole heap of hidden data.

In my quest to improve my astro PP'ing technique I often download others images to try and hone my limited skills.

PP is very subjective and there is no one method suits all tastes or desired outcomes. Anyway I copied your image to see if I could bring out some more detail, and I hope you don't mind.

Bear in mind that I was working with a 150kb image and not the monster TIF file you got from DSS. I'm a long, long way from being a Photoshop guru, more of your trial and error sort of a person, but I've found with my own images that the Dehaze slider in Camera Raw is a great tool for cleaning up images.

Basically what I did was to back-off the Highlights a couple of times and the same with the Dehaze slider. I also looked at the colours individually in 'Levels' and finally tweaked the Gamma slider in Exposure.

OK, the core is still blown out, but I've seen NASA images that don't look too different. I'm not in anyway posting this as a perfect example of PP'ing, more to make you aware of just what the Dehaze slider can do to assist you with your own PP work.

 

 

zzOrion-Oly-sized.thumb.jpg.d0b4b37f5b3b93d3be1db6907f0a885eEDIT.jpg

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5 hours ago, DarkKnight said:

Hi Wornish,

I'm also very new to this Astro stuff but have a bit more general photography experience. One thing I've quickly picked up on is that what one sees with their stacked image contains a whole heap of hidden data.

In my quest to improve my astro PP'ing technique I often download others images to try and hone my limited skills.

PP is very subjective and there is no one method suits all tastes or desired outcomes. Anyway I copied your image to see if I could bring out some more detail, and I hope you don't mind.

Bear in mind that I was working with a 150kb image and not the monster TIF file you got from DSS. I'm a long, long way from being a Photoshop guru, more of your trial and error sort of a person, but I've found with my own images that the Dehaze slider in Camera Raw is a great tool for cleaning up images.

Basically what I did was to back-off the Highlights a couple of times and the same with the Dehaze slider. I also looked at the colours individually in 'Levels' and finally tweaked the Gamma slider in Exposure.

OK, the core is still blown out, but I've seen NASA images that don't look too different. I'm not in anyway posting this as a perfect example of PP'ing, more to make you aware of just what the Dehaze slider can do to assist you with your own PP work.

 

 

 

I dont mind at all, thanks for the feedback and help.  I never thought of using the dehaze slider.  I did manage to get more out the core as well.   Photoshop is amazing it is harder than taking the pictures.

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