Editing images always makes me go to far down the rabbit hole.... M31... way way over processed. 72ED, 50D on the AZ GTI.

[gaz81]

Hi All,

Had a clear night on Sat night... so captured some more images of M31. 

Taken with a stock Canon 50D, Skywatcher 72ED with a StellaMira field flattener.  The mount was the AZ GTI in EQ mode. 

One of the things I keep doing though is not knowing when to stop with it comes to editing the images.  I need to learn a bit more self control! .... how does everyone else manage that?

....kind of played with the tilt shift style also...

I think for me, its the excitement of pushing the levels... then the curves.... then seeing there is more to get from the levels again etc... etc etc etc.... then the astro action set etc. 

The image contains 40 x 400 second lights (with darks, bias, flats etc). 

I seem to be having some good luck with my GTI.  I was tracking also with PHD2... I believe the graph looked pretty bad, but it was tracking... so, will not chase that just yet!

 

Autosave003.tif

[vlaiv]

4 minutes ago, gaz81 said:

I need to learn a bit more self control! .... how does everyone else manage that?

That is very though thing to learn - push the data only as far as it lets you.

 

[SyedT]

11 minutes ago, gaz81 said:

Hi All,

Had a clear night on Sat night... so captured some more images of M31. 

Taken with a stock Canon 50D, Skywatcher 72ED with a StellaMira field flattener.  The mount was the AZ GTI in EQ mode. 

One of the things I keep doing though is not knowing when to stop with it comes to editing the images.  I need to learn a bit more self control! .... how does everyone else manage that?

....kind of played with the tilt shift style also...

I think for me, its the excitement of pushing the levels... then the curves.... then seeing there is more to get from the levels again etc... etc etc etc.... then the astro action set etc. 

The image contains 40 x 400 second lights (with darks, bias, flats etc). 

I seem to be having some good luck with my GTI.  I was tracking also with PHD2... I believe the graph looked pretty bad, but it was tracking... so, will not chase that just yet!

You only tend to learn that over time. You'll find that every time you back to an image, you'll want to change something. That's OK, but as vlaiv has said, you should only push it as far as it lets you. I find the community on here very helpful if you ask for specific feedback, and that will certainly help you to process images better.

As for the guiding, my rule is that if the stars are tight and there's no significant drift across the frames, then it's probably fine! The graph at times doesn't tell the full story.

Edited September 27, 2020 by SyedT

[Ouroboros]

I think your picture is quite interesting. You could push it a bit further into the more surreal I reckon!  

[gaz81]

Yeah I agree.... I will start again with this at some point during the week.  

I went to far with the core, so want to dial that back.

Photoshop isn't as scary as I used to think it was... i used to never leave Light Room... now I don't really use LR at all,.

[vlaiv]

As a contrast, here is your M31 image processed to resemble visual appearance under dark skies as would look like to human eye if signal was amplified enough:

Quite a contrast, isn't it?

[gaz81]

The tilt shift thing is an idea I spotted, think it was sky at night award winner or something... so I can't take the credit at all there.

I feel it works well on M31 as its so huge!

[gaz81]

Oh yeah, huge contrast! 🙂

 

[Paul M]

I think you have some real nice detail there and would make a great image if played straight. But where's the fun in following the pack: 😎

It's just that it makes me a bit sea sick, it seems to move as you look at it!