Grading my image

[astrochris]

The picture of the Pinwheel Galaxy is my most recent one but I am also curious about my M81 and M82 shot. The M81 and M82 shot is my first color photo I've completed (processed in PixInsight). Please tell me what is wrong with my images so I can try to correct them. I'm not very happy with the color image as it's not very clear??

Pinwheel: http://www.astrobin.com/297628/?nc=user

M81 + M82: http://www.astrobin.com/289692/?nc=user

Thanks for the help!

[alan4908]

9 hours ago, astrochris said:

what is wrong with my images so I can try to correct them.

Hello

I don't believe there is much wrong with your images. 

On the M81 and M82 image, the main issue is the background. Firstly, assuming an 8 bit scale White = 255 and Black = 0, your average background level should end up around 18 - 25 dependent on personal preference - currently you seem in be in the fifties which is much too high.   Also in the background you appear to have a mixture of colour blotches eg large scale colour noise and possible light pollution gradients. Since this looks like quite a reasonably long exposure, I think you are capturing some of the IFN (which normally appears as white ish) but in your case it appears to be mixed with the colour noise resulting in the colour blotch effect. 

So, within PI I'd suggest you run something like TGVDenoise with quite a strong colour noise reduction and much less on the Lum - this should help protect the IFN. You should only apply this to background which can be achieved by applying a mask. After you've done this, try lowering the backgound level to see the result.  If you think you have problems with light pollution or flat issues, you could also first trying DBE.  Whilst I think this will improve the image you might end up obliterating any IFN that you have captured, so choose your DBE sample points very carefully.

Alan

 

 

[AKB]

I'm with @alan4908 on this one... just tried the equivalent of DBE, brought the black point in, bit of colour noise reduction, SCNR, a tad of saturation increase and contrast enhancement, to get this on the JPG...

...so may have gone a bit too far, but I didn't hold out much hope for IFN on the JPG file.  I think that losing much of the green (with SCNR) is quite important.  Looks like a great piece of data acquisition!

 

[Waldemar]

So... Alan and AKB both made it obvious you need to learn processing... not an easy task, but you are halfway the whole process:  imaging is ok!!
You can be proud of that processed image!