First go at Milky Way

[Paul67]

I'm not sure what to make of this if I'm honest. After a failed attempt up at Ladybower reservoir on Thursday night I decided to have another go at Dovestones reservoir last Friday. This is a partial section of the Milky way, cropped due to quite heavy vignetting.

Image taken with Nikon D90, Tamron 18-200mm lens at iso 3200, 9 lights (20 seconds each) and 5 darks stacked in DSS. raw file converted in rawtherapee and then played about with in the demo version of Startools, the image is a screenshot from startools. The colours are wrong and no matter what Ive tried I cannot seem to get it right so not sure if its my imaging skills or processing skills (maybe both). Any pointers welcome.

 

dovestones.tif

 

[RichM63]

I've got no chance of downloading a tif.

Upload a low res jpeg into your post. PLS

[Paul67]

Done Rich.

[Alien 13]

As above but I prefer PNG format it seems to preserve more detail.

Alan

[Paul67]

This is the original stacked as png  56.5mb

 

[des anderson]

Now, that`s a great image and I`m sure that someone will help with the colours. The second just needs a bit of" depth," BUT still a good result, still a good effort. Des

[Alien 13]

Thanks for posting that, DSS does seem to suck the colour out of images but it should still be there, if you use the saturation slider a little at a time in DSS then save and repeat you should get the colour back.

Alan

[Paul67]

6 minutes ago, des anderson said:

Now, that`s a great image and I`m sure that someone will help with the colours. The second just needs a bit of" depth," BUT still a good result, still a good effort. Des

Thanks Des, took me about 9 hours over 2 nights to finally get some data to  play with.

[Paul67]

7 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

Thanks for posting that, DSS does seem to suck the colour out of images but it should still be there, if you use the saturation slider a little at a time in DSS then save you should get the colour back.

Alan

I'll give it a go, when DSS was finished stacking all it showed was a white image with barely visible stars, thanks Alan.

[Davey-T]

Had a play with the PNG, you may need to remove the stars to pull out the Milky Way then put them back.

Dave

[Paul67]

4 minutes ago, Davey-T said:

Had a play with the PNG, you may need to remove the stars to pull out the Milky Way then put them back.

Dave

Thanks Davey, I'll get busy with youtube learning these techniques.

[Paul67]

Had another go at processing the same image tonight, startools followed by gimp and much better colours imo. Again this was from a screenshot of startools followed by gimp so final image is only around 850kb. Quite pleased considering I don't really know what I'm doing.