Struggling to bring out detail

[feverdreamer1]

Hey there, recently went to a dark sky trip last friday and although the imaging session got cut short (due to battery issues...you should make sure they're charged btw😅), had an amazing time under the stars.

Now, I knew I wouldn't get an APOD image, but i was really hoping i got something good, cause the place was quite dark and the tracking was just on point...However, after reaching home and stacking and processing, I don't see as much detail as I was hoping to. I dont know if its because of the quality of the subs or my editing skills, but I cant seem to bring out much of it without completly wrecking it unfortunatey.

So, I am asking if you could try to edit it for yourself and tell me if its the image or my (albeit basic) processing skills.

Processing I do with gimp, so if the methods are aplicable to it too, that'd be really great. Stacking was done with sequator I've heard its better for wide-field, if this is not the case, please do let me know what you use  

Thanks in advance and clear skies!!!

 

 

output.tif.pp3

[vlaiv]

You did not attach the actual image but rather pp3 file (whatever that is).

Luckily google knows what pp3 is

Quote

A .PP3 file is a RawTherapee Postprocessing Pro file.

 

[feverdreamer1]

Right @vlaiv, will attach as soon as I reach home, sorry for the trouble.

[feverdreamer1]

Here it is:

output.tif

[vlaiv]

11 minutes ago, feverdreamer1 said:

Here it is:

output.tif 79.96 MB · 0 downloads

Did you already stretch this image or is the data still linear?

It looks as if it has been stretched.

[vlaiv]

In any case, maybe you should calibrate your data, there are a lot of hot pixels, so at least darks. This is what I was able to pull out (not very versed at processing wide field shots):

All those red dots are hot pixels. Blue halos around stars are chromatic aberration of lens used. There was very strong gradient in the image from light pollution that I needed to remove, so that was done in ImageJ along with x3 bin to improve SNR (but image is now smaller - only ~1500x1000 px because of that). After that I composed back channels in Gimp and did very mild curves adjustment and a bit of denoising.

Maybe I could get better image if you post linear 32bit data, but don't expect great improvement. I think this is good as is.

[feverdreamer1]

19 hours ago, vlaiv said:

In any case, maybe you should calibrate your data, there are a lot of hot pixels, so at least darks. This is what I was able to pull out (not very versed at processing wide field shots):

All those red dots are hot pixels. Blue halos around stars are chromatic aberration of lens used. There was very strong gradient in the image from light pollution that I needed to remove, so that was done in ImageJ along with x3 bin to improve SNR (but image is now smaller - only ~1500x1000 px because of that). After that I composed back channels in Gimp and did very mild curves adjustment and a bit of denoising.

Maybe I could get better image if you post linear 32bit data, but don't expect great improvement. I think this is good as is.

I would definitely have calibrated it but my camera died on me 😞. 

It's a very nice edit Vlaiv, you really managed to take out that strong LP gradient. I tried quite a lot but I'll have to dabble with it again hahah.

Thanks for all the info and the time you spent on this, I really appreciate this.

Will try to edit again to try and reach something similar to yours.

Thanks again and clear skies!