Thanks Mike for the opportunity to use your data--I wish my data was half as good-----it's quite easily recognisable by the way your images hold up to intense processing that they contain lots of information.
ANyway I've processd your data in photshop7 --so had to work at times in 8bits (not ideal). I did not use registax.
I did a series of unsharp masks at different levels on the different color channels, combined them, adjusted levels, curves, and hue/saturation.
OK here's another go - different method (well sort of)... All done in PS CS3.
1. Each channel processed as follows:
Blue: unsharp mask 2px, 500% then 1 px, 198%; despeckle; Levels 202, curves - increase contrast.
Green: unsharp mask 2px, 500% then 1px, 205%; despeckle; levels 205; curves - increase contrast.
Red: unsharp mask 2px, 500% then 1px, 225%; despeckle; levels 211; curves - increase contrast.
2. Combine into RGB
3. Saturation +41
4. Brightness -35, Contrast +32
5. Flatten the image.
6. Unsharp mask 0.7 px, 131%
7. Despeckle.
8. Save for the web.
Seems to me to be a lot of double processing - sharpening/despeckling - so there's got to be data loss. It comes about from responding to the appearance of the image at each stage, and probably not getting the USM right in the first place (maybe wrong radii?).
Another rainy weekend so I decided to have a crack and learn a bit more about processing.
1) Load up each image in registax and set wavelet slider #2 to ~20
2) Load up in photoshop, despeckle, set the levels "input levels" to '1,1.00,190', set contrast +20, brightness -20, then a slight despecle again through dust and scratches with a radius of 1 pixel.
3) Load up in astraimage, convert to greyscale, run a LC deconvolution with 5 iterations at 1.1 setting, then combine RGB, set gamma to 0.7.
4) Screenshot it so I can save it in MS paint Open in photoshop, save for web.
I tried opening the original image in Registax 4 and got the same error message so I renamed each of the files with a .tif extension rather than with .tiff and they opened fine. (my computer course training coming in handy here) Registax just didn't recognise the four character filename extension.
I've a bit of familiarisation ahead of me with Registax though, before I can share some results. I took some digital photos of the Juper/Moon conjunction a few weeks ago using my Olympus on a tripod - no telescope needed - which I want to tidy up with Registax, so any practical experience I can get will be very helpful. The Moon was over-exposed on some photos while Jupiter came up sharp, and on others the Moon came up sharp and there was no Jupiter! How do I line them up in Registax or can I just stack them on top of each other in say Paint Shop Pro (I don't have Photoshop)?
Thanks Mike for providing some good quality photos to start with.
Robster
Woy Woy
Quote:
Originally Posted by iceman
Thanks for having a go, Joe and Ingo. I'm surprised others haven had a shot at it.
While the captures are in mono, at some stage during my pre-processing (ppmcentre etc) they end up as RGB bitmaps even though they're single channel. So it's normal (for me) to have to convert them to greyscale before combining them.
I didn't have any trouble opening them directly in Registax 4 though?
Joe - your first 2 look good in terms of data and sharpness, but they're too pink/red. Try adding more green and blue in the levels. The last 2 are good for colour, but the details are kind of blurry and not sharp. Great attempts though, well done.
Ingo - yours looks good, nice colour but could probably do with a bit more sharpening. Nice job for a non-planetary guy.
I hope to see some others, and I hope this project has helped anyway, and I'm happy to do the same again in future when I've got good data to share.
By way of comparison, here is my version of processing on the same data, done back at the time of capture.
Of course, processing is a very subjective thing and what looks good to one person might look oversharpened, or the wrong colour, or whatever, to someone else.
The colors in my ones are pale looking I got one with good colors but cant seem to do i again Also when I convert them to gray scale in astra image they go heaps lighter. oh well practice, practice and more practice
Thanks Joe. I went to the links and grabbed a heap of info. Now to put it to some use.
By the way, I tried using the techniques suggested by one of the earlier mails on this thread by Al (sheeny) and found that if you convert Mike's original 3 images to greyscale BEFORE you take them into Registax 4 it doesn't like it at all. I created copies of the original images and took them into Registax OK, carried out the wavelet conversions, then took them into Paint Shop Pro and converted them into greyscale then recombined them using the RGB tool, then carried out some tweeking with some of PSP's tools. Still fiddling at this stage.
Ron - very nice, great sharpness and detail. Probably too flat looking though, and not 3D. Maybe try increasing the levels a tad, and then an overall curves reduction to give it more 3D appearance. Also the hard limb can be removed by using a guassian blur on a feathered selection around limb.
Al - your last version is nice. Perhaps a tad too oversaturated for my liking, still a bit too red/orange. I know what you mean with successive sharpening/despeckling. I usually limit the despeckle to one iteration right at the end with a minor USM after.
Kal - nice attempt. Probably a tad too dark around the limbs and could probably stand a bit more sharpening but a good first attempt.
Robster - please feel free to post your versions, no matter how you think they look. It's a good learning process for everyone!
Opened in Registax. Forced it to stack the three images in B&W. This simulates a luminance channel. Wavelets (4, 5 and 6) until it looked nice. Save as Tiff.
Exported four images to PS. Combined the three original files to a new document as R, G and B channels. Copy this image and paste it over the lumiance image, change blending to colour. Flatten image. Final tweak with Unsharp mask (1.5p 32%) and despeckle. Final boost to saturation by about 14%
Nice job Stuart. You should try using curves to increase the contrast (drag curves down) - it would give a lot more depth to your version.
Also, be careful of using registax to create the synthetic luminance. If the colour channels are slightly misaligned, registax may not pick up the differences and the resulting L channel may have the features out of alignment, slightly blurring them.
The best way to create a synthetic luminance is to copy the G and B image on top of the R image in Photoshop as new layers, and change the opacity of layer 2 to 50% and layer 3 to 33%. You can then use the move tool, blinking each layer on and off, to align the layers with respect to the features.
Once the features are aligned, flatten the image and now you've got your L channel.
G'day all. I am a newbie to this forum but thought I would give the Jupiter image processing ago. In the spirit of the original post - ie. to share information - I am keen to see how some basic image processing techniques that I use in my own remote sensing profession perform. Apologies in advance if these are processes that you are all already familiar with.
With the objective of keeping the process as simple as possible, the original Jupiter image was processed using a method called subtractive smoothing to create the first image below. Despite its name it is an image sharpening technique. Here a smoothing operation is performed on all 3 bands of the original image (Mean or median kernel, etc - 3x3 or 5x5, etc). The new smoothed image is then subtracted from the original image (hence the name of the operation) - resulting in a 'difference' image that contains high values where there were higher spatial frequencies and values close to zero where there was low spatial frequency in the original image. This difference image is then added back to the original image making the higher spatial frequency areas higher while keeping the low spatial frequency values the same - thus sharpening the image (I have attached a figure that attempts to show the process). Notably, with a little experimentation I multiplied the difference image by a factor of 6 (as it is a subtle sharpener) before adding it back to the original image. I then used a gamma correction for contrast stretching. The result provides no improvement over the excellent results from other contributors, but I thought interesting nonetheless.
The second image attached below was produced using a process called principal components analysis (PCA). Put simply, the process transforms the original RGB image into 3 new bands called components ordered in terms of the amount of information each component carries. That is, component 1 (PC1) contains the majority of information from the original image. The second component carries the next greatest amount of information that the first PC did not explain, while PC3 contains even less information. The significance of this is that the later components (in this case PC3) typically contain more noise - ie. isolating the noise from the 'real' information. Once this is done, PC1 is sharpened using the subtractive smoothing method above, while PC3 (the noise band) is smoothed to reduce image noise. On completion the PCA image is then transformed back to an RGB image where the information has now been 'enhanced' and the noise reduced. Again, the results show no real improvement over others posted but I found it quite refreshing to apply these techniques to planetary remote sensing instead of terrestrial observations.
There are so many terrestrial digital image analysis techniques that one can use, particularly atmospheric correction processes that I am keen to apply. So I hope to make some further contributions. Thanks Iceman for the opportunity.
Thanks for having a go at processing the data - especially given your non-standard techniques! The explanations make some sense, and it's great to see terrestrial image processing techniques can be of use in astrophotography.
Your results are very good, too - some of the better processed versions I've seen done.
Thanks for letting us have a crack at some top data
Heres my attempt.....used Astra Image first and worked each channel through the ME filter and experimented with the settings, the green channel allowed more filtering. Then into PS CS2 for some tweaks in levels/curves and a little work in Images Plus. My preference is for a more subtle overall image with saturation and sharpening so I don't know if this translates for others
).
Open in photoshop, save for web.
Registax just didn't recognise the four character filename extension.
I took some digital photos of the Juper/Moon conjunction a few weeks ago using my Olympus on a tripod - no telescope needed - which I want to tidy up with Registax, so any practical experience I can get will be very helpful. The Moon was over-exposed on some photos while Jupiter came up sharp, and on others the Moon came up sharp and there was no Jupiter! How do I line them up in Registax or can I just stack them on top of each other in say Paint Shop Pro (I don't have Photoshop)?
Also when I convert them to gray scale in astra image they go heaps lighter. oh well practice, practice and more practice 
