Caldwell 33 Eastern Veil

[dark knight]

Had a nice sky at home last week so managed to get out and have another go at the Eastern Veil but this time with the 2600mc pro, 29 x3min exposures plus darks and bias frames, stacked in APP and bit of basic processing in Gimp. My eyes are not what they were and having to wear specially tinted glasses does mean I struggle with processing so what I think looks ok'ish may look awful to the rest of you lol. Anyhow as always constructive criticism is always welcome. 

[Bugdozer]

That's a lovely image! My only suggestion would be to darken down the value of the darkest parts of the image, at the moment the blackest parts are just dark grey. That will give much more pop to it. 

[dark knight]

Thanks Bugdozer, is there an easy way of doing it without darkening the whole image, is it done in levels and curves for example in gimp??

[Bugdozer]

On 30/09/2023 at 14:46, dark knight said:

Thanks Bugdozer, is there an easy way of doing it without darkening the whole image, is it done in levels and curves for example in gimp??

Yes, that is the easiest way to do it, just little adjustments so you don't lose detail on the darker parts of the nebula. I'm not very familiar with Gimp, I tend to do most of my curve adjustments in a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop. I can try and play around with it to give you an example later, if you like.

[dark knight]

Ooer yes please

[Bugdozer]

OK here's an example of a quick adjustment to the brightness of the dark areas. You can see how darkening it down makes the colours look a little more intense although I haven't adjusted the saturation directly. Also with the small increase in dynamic range you start to be able to see a little more detail in the bright part of the nebula just right of centre.

It would be possible to darken the sky even more, depending on your artistic tastes - there's a great lot of detail here so it gives you a range of ways of how you'd like to present it.

[Moonshed]

That is an impressive improvement @Bugdozer with only a tweak basically. Personally I have spent entire afternoons fiddling around with multiple adjustments in PhotoShop only to decide in the end it looks like a painting and not a photograph! Back to the drawing board.

Edited October 4, 2023 by Moonshed

[Bugdozer]

3 minutes ago, Moonshed said:

That is an impressive improvement @Bugdozer with only a tweak basically. Personally I have spent entire afternoons fiddling around with multiple adjusting in PhotoShop only to decide in the end it looks like an painting and not a photograph! Back to the drawing board.

Thanks. Although I am new to astrophotography, I'm pretty experienced with regular digital photography and I am also a radiographer, so professionally I have a good understanding of gamma curves, dynamic range, contrast etc. 19 years of dealing with x-ray, CT and MRI imaging has given me a good ability to look at an image and see what might not be quite optimal about it.

There's always the question of "how far do you want to go?" with processing. I think most of us like to strike a balance where it looks better than our eyes can see it whilst still looking "natural", unless trying to bring out a specific area of detail. Nothing beats having a good original image to start with though, like Carl has here. I hope one day I might take pictures as good as that.

[dark knight]

Wow that really does look so much better thank you Bugdozer!!! I really need to learn whatever you did!! My main issue is my glasses have a grey tint (early manacular degeneration) to filter out certain light wavelengths and so my perception of colours is skewed and without glasses  my near vision is rubbish lol. Once again many thanks, oh and our nieces son is a radiographer in Sussex too!!!