Elephant Trunk Nebula - 9 Hs of Ha and OIII with a Nikon D5300a

[StargeezerTim]

Prefer the earlier ones with the lighter blue. Seems more 'airy'. They are all stunning. I must get a friend for my Ha filter and have a go at bi-colour. A new year resolution perhaps .

[toxic]

very nice indeed 

[Xiga]

Ok, final final version. 

I changed the colour tone slightly (for the umpteenth time, this time less orange and more yellow/gold). I also added a bit more contrast to the sections of dark nebula, and ran Noel Carboni's 'Less Crunchy More Fuzzy' to help remove some more grain. 

I'm now fairly convinced it's an improvement over the original as I think it was definitely too bright and grainy. And as much as I like the deep blue, I don't think it should really be there based on all the other images I've seen of this object.

Ok I can't look at this any more. Done. Finito. No going back now!

[tooth_dr]

Hi Ciaran. It’s hard to tell from my phone but there is definitely more pleasing detail, but for me personally it looks a little unsaturated, but that’s just my personal taste! Great image. 

[beka]

I like the HDR version. In this last I feel that you may have lost the dimmest stars or at least made them much harder to see. I am no processing expert but I kind of aim to do the minimal amount of processing that would get as much information out of the image that is possible. Great work!

[Xiga]

On 01/01/2018 at 15:17, tooth_dr said:

Hi Ciaran. It’s hard to tell from my phone but there is definitely more pleasing detail, but for me personally it looks a little unsaturated, but that’s just my personal taste! Great image. 

 

20 hours ago, beka said:

I like the HDR version. In this last I feel that you may have lost the dimmest stars or at least made them much harder to see. I am no processing expert but I kind of aim to do the minimal amount of processing that would get as much information out of the image that is possible. Great work!

Correct on both counts guys!

I really need to stop saying I’m done, as I’m just making myself look foolish now

That last version was all wrong. Although I was trying to tone things down a bit, I went way too far. I killed far too much detail in my attempts to smooth things out, plus the stars were a disaster. So I went back to the drawing board and started again from scratch.

This version now sits somewhere between the last 2 versions, but has more detail, better stars, and a more pleasing (to me at least) colour scheme. I’ve also now come full circle on my opinion of the colour for the centre of the Nebula. I actually do like the deep blue, so it’s made a return, for good this time.

Ps – My monitor is one of those cheap Korean 27” 1440p over-clockeable ones you can get off the ‘bay. It has virtually no on-board controls for adjusting things, and is certainly not calibrated. I really need to find a way of getting something close to a decent calibration on it (even just using the nvidia control panel) as i’m finding it quite annoying trying to find a satisfying colour scheme on this object when I view it on different devices. It still looks a bit too orange here on my work monitor, whereas I thought it looked better last night at home. Arghh!