Editing help

[Kenboy]

Hi all,

I took this last night, finding difficult to bring much out of it, not sure if it's editing or the picture itself? 

I've messed around with the levels/curves function, but it appears too bright

Would anyone be able to edit this on GIMP (or something else) and explain briefly how you did it? 

I'm attaching the un-stretched stacked version 

Thanks! 

10-07-20 astropic 2.TIF

[michael8554]

Here it is after three passes of ArcSin 300 stretching, no colour though:

10-07-20 astropic 2.tif

Michael

 

[wimvb]

I've downloaded your data, and am playing with it in both PI and GIMP.

In GIMP I cheated a little, because I first removed the gradient in PI and also did colour calibration there. But after that I moved the image to GIMP and played with levels and curves.

In levels:

• midpoint slider to about 25% (so midway between its original position and the black point).
• adjusted the black point (left slider) to just below the foot of the histogram, so as not to clip any pixels.

Repeated this procedure twice.

Then went to Curves and applied a gentle S-curve, lowering the curve a little just at the peak of the histogram, and raised it a little at about 60-65% of the hoizontal axis.

In curves, targeting the red channel only:

I put a marker on the curve at 25% and at 75% to fix the dark areas bright areas. This to make sure I didn't end up with a colour cast in the background or pink stars. I then raised the middle section a little to enhance the nebulosity.

Finally I rescaled the image to 50% and saved as jpeg.

This is my first time using GIMP for image processing, so be gentle with me. 😋

And the image after pixinsight (arcsinh stretch, lifting the nebulosity with exponential transform, and star reduction. No resampling)

 

(click on the images to enlarge)

Edited July 12, 2020 by wimvb

[Kenboy]

56 minutes ago, wimvb said:

I've downloaded your data, and am playing with it in both PI and GIMP.

In GIMP I cheated a little, because I first removed the gradient in PI and also did colour calibration there. But after that I moved the image to GIMP and played with levels and curves.

In levels:

• midpoint slider to about 25% (so midway between its original position and the black point).
• adjusted the black point (left slider) to just below the foot of the histogram, so as not to clip any pixels.

Repeated this procedure twice.

Then went to Curves and applied a gentle S-curve, lowering the curve a little just at the peak of the histogram, and raised it a little at about 60-65% of the hoizontal axis.

In curves, targeting the red channel only:

I put a marker on the curve at 25% and at 75% to fix the dark areas bright areas. This to make sure I didn't end up with a colour cast in the background or pink stars. I then raised the middle section a little to enhance the nebulosity.

Finally I rescaled the image to 50% and saved as jpeg.

This is my first time using GIMP for image processing, so be gentle with me. 😋

And the image after pixinsight (arcsinh stretch, lifting the nebulosity with exponential transform, and star reduction. No resampling)

 

(click on the images to enlarge)

2nd one looks really nice! Thanks 

[alacant]

13 hours ago, Kenboy said:

GIMP (or something else)

 

Hi

Lovely shot. Those stars. Amazing...

Sorry, no time for GIMP ATM but here's a quick 5 minute thrash with StarTools in keep-all-the-stars mode!

HTH

 

**edit: fixed the stars in corners.

Edited July 12, 2020 by alacant