Star colour when stacking

[Galactic Wanderer]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering about star colour when stacking. When I took a single frame of m13 with my DSLR the star colours were evident as seen below but when I come to stack these individual images the stars are all a uniform white as seen below. Is there a certain setting on deep sky stacker that I need to do? Or do I need a professional CCD to have star colour?

Any ideas?

Thanks

Seb

[Galactic Wanderer]

sorry here are the images

[StargeezerTim]

There is no reason why you shouldn't get star colour with a DSLR. Stacking shouldn't affect it, as far as I know. You need to process the autosave, levels, curves etc for the colour to develop, and you can always enhance colour in processing. Hope this helps. Tim. 

[symesie04]

Imassuming you have done some stretching as well and that does affect star colour. Various tools in PS can allow you mask the stars and re add colour for those alone. Alternatively you could lay an orignal frame as a layer underneath and then mask into the top layer.

[PeterCPC]

If you are using DSS to stack you should adjust the saturation tab to about 25%.

Peter

[toxic]

as peter says adjust the saturation levels but start at 15% then go up. the higher you go the more noise you will get all so i never use the autosave file, i do a small stretch of the levels in dss then save rather than use the auto save as it seems to turn out much better.then i do the rest in photoshop.

 

[ollypenrice]

When you stack you improve your useful signal and, with the shallow depth of the DSLR, you may indeed burn out colour in the cores. It is still there around the edges, though. A routine Like Noel's Actions, Increse Star Colour, is designed to measure colour around the outside of the stars and drag it into the middle. You can learn to do this for yourself but Noel is kind of tempting...

Olly

[Galactic Wanderer]

Thanks guys I put the saturation up and this is what I got:

 

[ollypenrice]

Never boost the saturation on a whole image, especially with a DSLR. The background sky usually has far too much colour to start with. Learn to use layers in Ps and to select just the parts you want to see with more colour.

Olly

[toxic]

here is your image after selecting the background and then subtracting it in photoshop then boosting stars colour with noels actions.nothing ells was done

[Galactic Wanderer]

On 6/9/2016 at 23:31, toxic said:

here is your image after selecting the background and then subtracting it in photoshop then boosting stars colour with noels actions.nothing ells was done

That's fanatstic! Thank you. Is there a way of doing the same thing on GIMP?

seb

[toxic]

hi Seb i don't use Gimp so i couldn't tell you but i would think so, if it has layers and selections and then the ability to subtract 1 from the other then yes.