EP18 - Sunday, 6th September 2020 7:30pm BST - Dark Art or Magic Bullet? by Steve Richards

[Grant]

We are very, very pleased to welcome back our very own Steve Richards @steppenwolf of http://www.nightskyimages.co.uk/  to StarGaZine to continue from his first talk with his new talk 'Dark Art or Magic Bullet?'.

This is a follow-on to the ‘Finish’ section from his original ‘Making Every Photon Count’ talk and is aimed at beginners to the dark art of image processing. The aim will be to show a complete processing workflow to produce an LRGB image of the Whirlpool Galaxy, M51. The following topics will be discussed:-

• Data Preparation
• Bias/Dark/Flat Frame Calibration
• Image Alignment
• Image Stacking
• Initial Stretching
• Combining Red, Green and Blue Data
• Removing Light Pollution
• Levels Adjustment
• Curves Adjustment
• Saturation Adjustment
• Adding Luminance Data
• Increasing Colour Saturation (PhotoShop Action available to download)
• Final Colour Balance Adjustment
• Sharpening (PhotoShop Action available to download)
• Demonstrating the contribution of the Luminance Data

Links to Software Downloads:

FITS Liberator Version 2.3

Deep Sky Stacker (DSS)

Stargazine Actions.atn

Meeting details below:

Topic: EP18 - Sunday, 6th September 2020 7:30pm BST - Dark Art or Magic Bullet? by Steve Richards
Time: Sep 6, 2020 07:30 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/93254088501?pwd=K0lDa2w5NktnMTc3ZVkvUUpTSEg3QT09

 Meeting ID: 932 5408 8501
Passcode: 939401

[x6gas]

Brilliant!

[happy-kat]

Looks a good topic, looking forward to watching.

[Grant]

Reminder that this talk starts in a little over an hours time 🙂

[rnobleeddy]

Had to leave this early, but looking forward to seeing the rest on YouTube.

[Jkulin]

Sadly I missed the beginning but excellent thank-you Steve.

[martin_h]

spot on

[happy-kat]

Thanks Steve and FLO, another informative talk to listen too, always pick something new up with each one.

I should be able to trial the astro flat plugin as it should work with PaintShopPro or Affinity.

Edited September 6, 2020 by happy-kat
An A not an I

[Alien 13]

Very good talk and learned lots, would be interested how much of this is transferable into Affinity Photo which I have moved to from CS6...

Alan

[Grant]

21 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

Very good talk and learned lots, would be interested how much of this is transferable into Affinity Photo which I have moved to from CS6...

Alan

We have an Affinity talk organised for later in the year 🙂

[Alien 13]

10 minutes ago, Grant said:

We have an Affinity talk organised for later in the year 🙂

Thanks Grant, thats great news, the Affinity Photo user base seems to be growing recently and it is becoming a genuine contender to PS...

Alan

Edited September 6, 2020 by Alien 13

[Tenor Viol]

Affinity is similar in many ways to PS. If Affinity had a catalog I'd ditch PS, but because of a major project kicking off next week (which I will report elsewhere) I will have to keep using PS for the time being as I need the catalog (I have about 30k images).

[groberts]

A belated thanks for Steve's excellent talk which I just caught up with today and the downloads provided.  As was said in the presentation, you never stop learning with astrophotography and especially processing - much appreciated.

Graham