AR 2546 improved version

[Iainp]

Hi all. With the Bank Holiday Photon Shields (clouds) in place, and rain predicted for the next few days, there's plenty of time to revisit old data and try to improve on image processing skills.  Here's one of AR 2546 on the 22nd.  Astra Image Plus is wonderful but so far I'm finding ImPPG much better for  deconvolution. It gives a really "creamy yet sharp" result with a single click. Perhaps I just haven't got to grips with Astra properly yet.  The multi-scale contrast feature is superb in Astra though, and worth the purchase price alone, in my opinion.  Another improvement for me is to do all the contrast adjustment before wavelet sharpening or other sharpening.  Doing it the other way round led to overcooked contrast, I found, and this way leads to a more natural balanced look.  

 

 

[laudropb]

Very nice image Iain.

[Davey-T]

Excellent work Iain, could you post the before and after together ?

Dave

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

That is lovely. Very nice capture

[David Smith]

That's a great shot Iain.

[Iainp]

Thanks guys. Dave here's a gif comparing it with the previous version. Actually there's not a big difference frankly! The tonal range is better in the "improved" one I think, also a little more detail showing.  Also the umbra was  not so well defined in the other one but it's a bit more realistic in the second. ((Edit: oh, and quite a bit better in the lower right, near the limb, now that I look) 

[David Smith]

It is quite a subtle change but the contrast on disk inside the spot is improved, as is the sharpness of the spot and surrounding area.

[paulastro]

That's a wonderful image Iain, thanks for posting.

[Drop Of Sun]

Very nice, Iain!

I really like that Astra Image has lots of different ways to sharpen, but it does mean experimenting a lot!

[Pete Presland]

Nice close up. 

[Ewan]

Iain the less sharpened image is best, really really easy to overcook any image with the processing.

In IMPPG I have found you can save your tonal adjustments to use on future images but your more likely to re do the sliders as this does not work all the time.

Have a good mess with it though.

[Iainp]

Thanks! Yes Ewan, that's a great feature of ImPPG. I can't believe how easy it is to do batch processing and alignment with it too.  Shame Astra doesn't do batch processing, though I just read that it's "coming soon" and existing users can update for free.