pyrasanth Posted April 19, 2016 Share Posted April 19, 2016 Well- with the sky being a bit bright tonight I went back to my M51 data sets & reworked the image. I like this a lot more. The image is once again taken with the Celestron C11 Edge at F7 using Baader LRGB filters on an Atik 460. This consists of about 130 subs. 10 each of RGB & the rest UV-IRCUT. As always let me know what you think. I have now decided that less processing in Photoshop & more in PixInsight is better. I need to reshoot the stars when the moon is gone as they are a bit red- but they don't distract too much from the image. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laudropb Posted April 19, 2016 Share Posted April 19, 2016 Very nice image Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Herzy Posted April 19, 2016 Share Posted April 19, 2016 I can see all the small faint fuzzies in the background besides M51. Wonderful image! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pyrasanth Posted April 20, 2016 Author Share Posted April 20, 2016 (edited) 2 hours ago, Herzy said: I can see all the small faint fuzzies in the background besides M51. Wonderful image! Thanks- I just redid the image & changed the colour scheme as the cores were burnt out. I like this image better- just need to make it less purple but a lot of M51 images I see are purple/blue. I'm still working on this. I will repost when sorted. Edited April 20, 2016 by pyrasanth 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pyrasanth Posted April 20, 2016 Author Share Posted April 20, 2016 Here is the first image reworked so the core is not so burnt out 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ollypenrice Posted April 20, 2016 Share Posted April 20, 2016 The third one for me. Olly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pyrasanth Posted April 20, 2016 Author Share Posted April 20, 2016 2 hours ago, ollypenrice said: The third one for me. Olly Thanks Olly- the third one for me as well as it uses a masked stretch which I stumbled across its virtues last night when I was stretching the HA data for M101. It's a very powerful PixInsight module which I intend to explore more fully. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Astroboy239 Posted April 20, 2016 Share Posted April 20, 2016 The 3rd one seems perfect. Great image. Varad Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ollypenrice Posted April 20, 2016 Share Posted April 20, 2016 25 minutes ago, pyrasanth said: Thanks Olly- the third one for me as well as it uses a masked stretch which I stumbled across its virtues last night when I was stretching the HA data for M101. It's a very powerful PixInsight module which I intend to explore more fully. I've tried it too but I'm not a fan of packaged stretches (including DDP.) The stretch is the most important and most 'intimate' or creative part of post processing and every image is different. Even if I didn't get it as good as the packaged stretch I'd feel somehow remote from the final picture. I never claimed to be rational!! Olly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pyrasanth Posted April 21, 2016 Author Share Posted April 21, 2016 16 hours ago, ollypenrice said: I've tried it too but I'm not a fan of packaged stretches (including DDP.) The stretch is the most important and most 'intimate' or creative part of post processing and every image is different. Even if I didn't get it as good as the packaged stretch I'd feel somehow remote from the final picture. I never claimed to be rational!! Olly I'm not very good at the concepts behind stretching I always seem to burn the highlights if I go after the faint details. Do you know of internet tutorials? I'd be interested about learning how to stretch to enhance the faint details but not ending up with bright areas that look like there is a light house behind them! The 3rd image which you liked more was a masked stretch in PI. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ollypenrice Posted April 21, 2016 Share Posted April 21, 2016 My introduction to Curves came from an Adam Block tutorial but I can't remember the title. When introducing post-processing here one of the things I do for starters is explore the effects of different Curves and the way they can be exploited. There's the 'standard issue' log stretch to use as a baseline. You just move the grey point to the left. This isn't a bad stretch but there are others which may give a different result to serve alternative purposes. When I posted this on here it seemed to strike quite a few people as crazy but it comes straight from that first tutorial and is very much the norm for me and for Tom. It gives excellent contrasts and is great for Ha and luminance, though I wouldn't use it for colour. You need good S/N for it to work well. This also pulls out the faint stuff brilliantly. Then there are alternative curves for tasks like building a good background sky with small stars. (This can then provide just background and stars for galaxy images, for instance.) Variations of that second stretch can be used to 'repair' saturated parts of a hard stretch. The thing is to use Layers to allow you to blend different speicialist stretches. At least that's what works for me. Olly 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Astroboy239 Posted April 21, 2016 Share Posted April 21, 2016 Guys u have any idea how much pixinsight and nebulosity cost. Right now I have to depend on dss and ps ? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyo Posted April 21, 2016 Share Posted April 21, 2016 That's a great M51 definitely the third for me also the stars are a lot better. You have got a great background sky nice and smooth did you use a noise reduction tool in PI.I have recently discovered the masked stretch and found Harry Pages tutorial on it very useful as he uses it to add the stars from the masked stretch onto a normally stretched image. 2 hours ago, Astroboy239 said: Guys u have any idea how much pixinsight and nebulosity cost. Right now I have to depend on dss and ps ? I think PI is about £180 well worth the money it can do all the calibrating and stacking as well as post processing and has some superb processing tools like DBE. It does not do capturing though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pyrasanth Posted April 21, 2016 Author Share Posted April 21, 2016 56 minutes ago, andyo said: That's a great M51 definitely the third for me also the stars are a lot better. You have got a great background sky nice and smooth did you use a noise reduction tool in PI.I have recently discovered the masked stretch and found Harry Pages tutorial on it very useful as he uses it to add the stars from the masked stretch onto a normally stretched image. I think PI is about £180 well worth the money it can do all the calibrating and stacking as well as post processing and has some superb processing tools like DBE. It does not do capturing though. I produced composite images for M51 so layers are prepared that have no stars & then M51 removed so we have stars only. This allows aggressive techniques to be used on the background without affecting the final appearance of the stars since the stars can be put back into the final result on a separate layer. This is very practicable for high resolution images where stars number in the tens as they can be manually removed if need be in Photoshop. The difficulty with Star removal tools like Straton is that they can affect the object you wish to keep & the backgrounds are never very good so I prefer to work from the actual images manually. I use a masked stretch on the images then ACDNR, Deconvolution & sometimes an unsharp mask but it depends really on each individual image.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyo Posted April 21, 2016 Share Posted April 21, 2016 (edited) Thanks for the detailed explanation on your processing very useful. I havn't been using photoshop just PI but I am now working on a new workflow that involves both PI and CS6 as I believe a combination of the two mabe the way to go to get the best out of my data I have just got a lot to learn with regards to cs6 Edited April 21, 2016 by andyo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gorann Posted April 21, 2016 Share Posted April 21, 2016 Yes, third one is great. Congratulations! I found it very helpful to save many versions while I process, so if I suddenly find that I blew out something like a core, I just copy the good core from an old version and put it in using layer masks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnrt Posted April 21, 2016 Share Posted April 21, 2016 5 hours ago, Astroboy239 said: Guys u have any idea how much pixinsight and nebulosity cost. Right now I have to depend on dss and ps ? The cost of Pixinsight is worth it for DBE and colour calibration alone! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
opticalpath Posted April 21, 2016 Share Posted April 21, 2016 On 20/04/2016 at 17:32, ollypenrice said: I've tried it too but I'm not a fan of packaged stretches (including DDP.) The stretch is the most important and most 'intimate' or creative part of post processing and every image is different. Even if I didn't get it as good as the packaged stretch I'd feel somehow remote from the final picture. I never claimed to be rational!! Olly Very interesting to see the differently shaped (custom) curves you use, Olly. I like to tailor curves in PS too and find the control-mouse-click to fix points on the curve indispensable. But I do also like to use DDP in Maxim as the first step whilst the image is still in 32 bits (or floating point) before moving on to 16/ 15 bit TIFFs in PS. I go for fairly conservative DDP settings so there is still some work to do and room to manoeuver in PS. I'll often do two or three different DDP stretches and carry them over to PS to see which one, or what combination, is the most effective starting point. Adrian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ollypenrice Posted April 22, 2016 Share Posted April 22, 2016 7 hours ago, opticalpath said: Very interesting to see the differently shaped (custom) curves you use, Olly. I like to tailor curves in PS too and find the control-mouse-click to fix points on the curve indispensable. But I do also like to use DDP in Maxim as the first step whilst the image is still in 32 bits (or floating point) before moving on to 16/ 15 bit TIFFs in PS. I go for fairly conservative DDP settings so there is still some work to do and room to manoeuver in PS. I'll often do two or three different DDP stretches and carry them over to PS to see which one, or what combination, is the most effective starting point. Adrian Yes, that's the way, I think. I import an assortment of PI mods into Ps for partial selection via layers, too. Olly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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