cloud induced desperation

[Stinky_Pete]

That's it, i hold my hands up and apologize to you all. The current run on rubbish weather is entirely my fault. Not only have i had the mount tuned so now it purrs (more on that later when i can get some guide logs from DS stuff) but i have also have a new camera to play with as well as other toys on order. So yep, its me.

Sorry

So, this cloud induced desperation has driven me back to old data to try and mend my ham-fisted ways using wavelets in Registax and i stumbled across a few extended shots of the moon taken with my 200pds and eos400d back in 2011. I was testing iso's and exposure time with my then new scope and i took about 30 frames of each as RAW files. Registax had a fit when i asked it to stack these frames, i think i only tried it once and then forgot about it. A good bit of advice i received the other day (see my Jupiter thread) was to try stacking in AS!2 and then process wavelets in Registax on the exported file. I have to say this works very well for  me, AS!2 seems to work better on my little windows 10 imaging tablet than registax so what i have taken to do is capture my video file, stack it in situ then its a much smaller file to transfer to my big PC for post processing. 

So long story short, AS!2 is able to process the 30 DSLR frames of the moon and then tease out a bit more data in Registax. This gave me the opportunity to compare how big the effect is from stacking few frames compared to a single one i have been using for the moon until now. 
I processed one frame in PS alone (Levels, small amount of sharpen and a bit of saturation), one frame i tweaked wavelets in Registax first then processed in PS using similar values as before. Then the 30 frame stack directly from AS!2 and finally the stack after wavelets again. I tried to keep the PS processing as comparable across the images as possible but it was evident that the histograms after stacking were quite different so i had to do it by eye rather than use the same numerical values. It was also interesting to see that saturation looks very artificial at a lower value (eg saturation of "70" in the single frame was equivalent to "60" in the stacked frame). I like a bit of colour in my whole moon shots but i have increased it a bit far in these to illustrate the differences.  Happy for any tips people have.

[xtreemchaos]

great demo mate and some cracking shots too. thanks , charl.

[laudropb]

Very nice set. I think I prefer both shots without the Registax. They just look a little more natural to me.

[Stinky_Pete]

1 hour ago, laudropb said:

Very nice set. I think I prefer both shots without the Registax. They just look a little more natural to me.

its entirely possible that i have made them look "unnatural" through my attempts with wavelets....its an art i have yet to grasp!

[Tyson M]

1 hour ago, Stinky_Pete said:

its entirely possible that i have made them look "unnatural" through my attempts with wavelets....its an art i have yet to grasp!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, some prefer either or. But yes, you will spend countless hours over-analyzing what is too sharpened or not.  Or at least I do....

I have been experimenting with several sharpening programs lately. 

 

 

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Bottom right image does it for me detail wise but personally I would have less colour. What do I know though, I'm pretty new to imaging!