My 'Happy Christmas' dataset's here.

[MartinFransson]

Since a few others "cheated" and since I´m away for Christmas I hade a go myself ?

Lovely data, so easy to work with and to stretch equally. Here is my quick fix in PI and Photoshop. Used LRGB-combination in PI. Then added the Ha to the red channel in PS.

 

[ollypenrice]

57 minutes ago, MartinFransson said:

Since a few others "cheated" and since I´m away for Christmas I hade a go myself ?

Lovely data, so easy to work with and to stretch equally. Here is my quick fix in PI and Photoshop. Used LRGB-combination in PI. Then added the Ha to the red channel in PS.

 

Ooh yes, that's feisty!

Olly

[Laurin Dave]

Here's my attempt. Olly, you'll have to let us all know how you managed to get so much detail and colour into your version some time.  Had fun with this, such great data, the best bit was when my wife Jenny walked in and said... Oh that's good, not one of yours then!  ...  She knows I spent/wasted ages on this one last spring 

Dave

 

 

[MilwaukeeLion]

First attempt adding ha to lrgb. Not sure did it right, came out little aqua-e. Fun anyway and nice data, no gradients like normally deal with.

Combined lrgb in nebulocity, stretched, then copied red channel into ps, combined with 30% of HA image, then copied that back into red channel of lrgb image.  Binned image and some touching ups.  Thanks for sharing.

[ollypenrice]

11 hours ago, Laurin Dave said:

 Olly, you'll have to let us all know how you managed to get so much detail and colour into your version some time.  

Dave

 

 

 

Four simple Ps techniques for enhancing colour.

1) Convert to Lab colour mode and greatly increase the contrast in a and b channels using the contrast slider. I take them up by 40 points. Re-convert to RGB.

2) Make 2 copy layers, set top layer blend mode to Soft Light and flatten onto mid layer. Set this blend mode to colour, add a slight blur (0.6 Gaussian) and flatten onto bottom layer.

3) In Selective Colour in the reds menu move the top slider left to lower the cyans in red.

4) Add luminance to RGB in small iterations of about 20%. Before flattening the L onto the RGB increase the saturation slightly in the RGB layer and put a slight blur (as previously) in the L layer. Flatten and repeat. On the last iteration don't blur the L.

I try to use the saturation tool as a last resort. 

Olly

[gorann]

Olly, Thanks alot for your X-mas present that gave me a few hours of pure entertainment!

Here is my take on it (so far). All done in PS CS5 except a little bit of deconvolution in PI. Great data of course. Used lum and all your colour channels except that I only added Ha to where it was needed in the galaxy (to avoid adding background noise). Do you mind if I post it on my Astrobin, full credits of course?

Any comments and suggestions most welcome

And, oh yes,  Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

[Laurin Dave]

25 minutes ago, gorann said:

Olly, Thanks alot for your X-mas present that gave me a few hours of pure entertainment!

Here is my take on it (so far). All done in PS CS5 except a little bit of deconvolution in PI. Great data of course. Used lum and all your colour channels except that I only added Ha to where it was needed in the galaxy (to avoid adding background noise). Do you mind if I post it on my Astrobin, full credits of course?

Any comments and suggestions most welcome

And, oh yes,  Merry Christmas!

 

 

Hmmmmm..  Going to have to learn how to do all this in Photoshop....  so much  better than my mainly PI version...  

Dave

[gorann]

1 hour ago, Laurin Dave said:

Hmmmmm..  Going to have to learn how to do all this in Photoshop....  so much  better than my mainly PI version...  

Dave

Thanks Dave! I think the ideal would be to master both PS and PI, but so far I have only used a few particular goodies in PI. What I like about PS is that I feel more in control by seeing the results immedeately rather than having to randomly (in my case at least) changing settings and then wait for the computer to run the algoritms.

I just edited my post by changing to a version with some star shrinking, a bit more blue saturation and a tiny bit more sharpening.

[tomato]

Thanks Olly, have a very Merry Christmas and and all the best to you and Monique for 2019.

My favourite type of DSO, I’m getting a Datacolor Spyder5  for Chrimbo, so I’ll give this a go as my first post monitor calibration project.?

[Uplooker]

Very generous Ollie. I will have a play with this later.

Merry Christmas or should it be Bon Noël 

[don4l]

5 hours ago, Laurin Dave said:

Hmmmmm..  Going to have to learn how to do all this in Photoshop....  so much  better than my mainly PI version...  

Dave

If you haven't got Photoshop, then you could try out the Gimp. 

 

I was easily able to follow Olly's advice about "Lab" processing (given earlier in this thread) and it gave very impressive results.  As far as I can tell, the user interface is similar, so most of the PS tutorials are easy to follow.

[johnfosteruk]

What a lovely Xmas pressie Olly, thank you!

Loads of colour & structure to play with, in my case at the expense of other variables. There's loads wrong with this but it was only a quick attempt (with PS CS5).

1. Ha combined with red (30%)
2. RGB combined and linear stretched
3. Star mask applied
4. curves adjustments
5. Saturation adjustments (lab mode)
6. Same routine for the Lum (The Lum is feisty though isn't it!)
7. Sharpened the Lum
8. Lum and RGB combined
9. NR
10. Job done
11. Have another go when I've got more time

[bottletopburly]

 Cheers @ollypenrice ,Startools processed lrgb, no Ha,mk2 same processing startools 

[Captain Caveman]

Which Galaxy is this? and what is the smaller more "smudgey" area nearby?

[wimvb]

1 hour ago, Captain Caveman said:

Which Galaxy is this? and what is the smaller more "smudgey" area nearby?

M51. Which "smudge"? There are many nearby galaxies. One of them is IC4278, the other (needle) IC4277, I believe (but can be terribly wrong).

M51 consists of two interacting galaxies, the grand-design spiral ngc 5194 (M51A) and the dwarf galaxy ngc 5195 (M51B).

[wimvb]

Here's my version of this data.

In the end, I didn't use the Ha data. And, as Olly, I used the rgb data to repair the blown out L core.

[gorann]

9 hours ago, wimvb said:

Here's my version of this data.

In the end, I didn't use the Ha data. And, as Olly, I used the rgb data to repair the blown out L core.

 

Nice one Wim! Seems like you and me ended up with rather similar colours. Adding the noisy Ha data selectively is maybe easier in PS (with layers and the magnificent brush tool?).

[Anne S]

Here's my version, processed using Pixinsight, which I'm only learning. Ha combined with R channel using NBRGB script after initial background modelling and noise reduction on Ha and RBG. Luminance also had HDR applied to enhance the dust lanes etc. Then combined with the HaRGB.

It's nice to have some better data to play with - I've not seen any clear stuff all month!

[AstroAndy]

Hi Olly

Thanks for this quality dataset. Between weather, moon, and job, this was a welcome opportunity to do some processing, here are my efforts at a semi-quick throw together. The LRGB was combined with the ha data.

Merry Christmas.

Andy

[tomato]

Here is my effort, entirely processed in APP. Like so many posters before me, I am hugely impressed with the quality of the data. You can just keep processing and the data responds. With my data, most images would end up in the bin without the use of some radical noise reduction tools.

New year's resolutions for me have to be:

1. Image from a decent dark site.

2. Get some integration times measured in hours rather than minutes.

Not easy for sure in the UK, but are there any alternatives?

[Adreneline]

Thanks very much @ollypenrice for the data set - a very kind and thoughtful gesture.

Here is my take on your data set. I too chose not to use the Ha. LRGB stretched in PI, RGB combined in PS, L added to RGB in PS.

I've tried to keep the processing to an absolute minimum so it may be a little muted colourwise.

Wishing you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2019 - and lots of clear skies - for everyone!

Adrian

 

[Jonk]

Having a look through some of these it's interesting to see everyone's different take on it.

Has anyone else deconvoluted theirs, as I think I over did it!

It would be good to get some insight here.

[wimvb]

3 hours ago, Jonk said:

Having a look through some of these it's interesting to see everyone's different take on it.

Has anyone else deconvoluted theirs, as I think I over did it!

It would be good to get some insight here.

Yes, I did. If you used the settings in your first post (from your screen shot), you may have overdone it. I always keep the dark deringing setting as low as possible, starting at 0, then increase from there. I hardly ever use the bright deringing settings, and usually keep iterations below 50 - 75. Then I use deregularization to control the background. With finetuning, I sometimes succeed without using a mask.

[wornish]

Thanks for sharing the data.

Hope everyone on here has a great 2019

Here is my attempt at processing using APP and PS

 

 

[gorann]

Realized that there was a bit more to do on my version of the image, so here it is with a somewhat darker sky, more dust and subdued red stars.