My First Nebula - M57

[Yourdog]

Hello, I was able to take pictures of my first nebula a few nights ago, I am stoked. 😀 Anyway I am trying to process the stacked image that included darks, flats, and bias shots through DSS. My problem is I live in a very light polluted area, so I have to turn my settings up high on my ZWO ASI120MC-S camera (I know its not designed for this but working on a budget) which introduces some noise and I see a slight brightness to my images. I am planning on using GIMP to post-process since I can't afford Photoshop, does anyone have any suggestions on how to take care of the excess light in the photo, make the sky darker, and possibly bring out more of the color in the nebula? I am new to GIMP and have played around with exposure, brightness, and contrast but it makes everything darker which I don't care about the stars so much but it also darkens the nebula. Thank you for your time!

The image Autosave.tif is from DSS which is the one I'm trying to process through GIMP and the M57.bmp is one that I tried processing through Registax (the only issue with that is I don't know what I'm doing in there either) and its really hard to see the nebula on a phone screen..

 

Autosave.tif M57.bmp

[Anthonyexmouth]

what scope are you using? 

[Yourdog]

I am using the AWB Onesky mounted on a Orion StarSeeker IV

[Xplode]

Nice result for a first image!
I'm unfortunately not able to help you with GIMP, but i looked at your image and there's potential in it


Here's what i made from it in Pixinsight

[Yourdog]

Well that certainly brought out more color of the nebula and darkened the sky.. are some of the stars supposed to be yellowish? I've been reading up and people say that "the data is there" even if taken in black and white. Does that mean that the true color of the stars with a long exposure is going to bring out more colors of a particular item or is that a strictly a result of post-processing? I'm assuming there is a way to focus only on the nebula for some changes and a way to focus on everything else separately, I hope someone chimes in on GIMP or another suitable free program because I can't see myself paying that much on some software 😅 I understand the paid software can be great, but surely there's a way to do things without having to spend much more money.. 

[Yourdog]

Anyone else have any suggestions? I just noticed the Adobe CreativeCloud is only $10 a month which includes photoshop and lightroom.. are they very helpful with what I am trying to do?