Ngc 45

[rogerg]

Hi all,

A nice galaxy, NGC 45.

I wonder if anyone has suggestions on how to bring out more colour variance on the galaxy?

http://www.astrobin.com/270796/

Frames:
Astronomik Type II B: 26x300" bin 1x1
Astronomik Type II G: 20x300" bin 1x1
Astronomik Type II L: 37x300" bin 1x1
Astronomik Type II R: 20x300" bin 1x1

Stacked in CCDStack then DBE in PI before post-processing in PS.

Regards,
Roger.

[Atmos]

For bringing out colour in the galaxy, I would suggest masking other areas of the image and selectively increasing the vibrance. You mostly want to mask the stars so that they don't go overboard :)

You've got a fair amount of data to play with, it is a nice looking galaxy and there is even a distant one photobombing NGC45 :P

[alocky]

Hi Roger - one trick you can do in both PI or PS is to process the image in LAB space, and apply a tight linear clip to the histogram in the A and B spaces. This is pretty strong medicine but sure brings out any colour in the data. If you google it, there's a few tutorials on the web.
If you do your colour combine in PI, the final combination step when you drop the stretched luminance image on the stretched RGB also gives you a chance to really give the colours a kick, but counter intuitively you use a low value for the saturation slider and not a high one!
cheers,
Andrew.

[rogerg]

Thanks Andrew.

It's been a while since I played with LAB when I didn't have much success ... but in this case I see what you mean, it works quite well to bring out the colour! I'll have a play more.
:thumbsup:

[rogerg]

Thanks :) Selectively saturating wsn't really working for me .... it was making artifacts worse.

[strongmanmike]

Nice to see something other than NGC 1365 this time of year :rolleyes: :lol:(1365 IS pretty special though ;)) I had this on my list of potentials buuut looks like I will miss it this year :sadeyes: nice result Roger :thumbsup:

Mike

[rogerg]

Thanks Mike :) Yes I tend to shy away from the popular :)

I've been so busy I haven't had time to process, or even change scripts, so every night I just hit go on a set which captures more data of:
M77
NGC 45
NGC 55
NGC 289
NGC 945
NGC 1232
NGC 1566
... some popular ones but some less popular ones. A mix to try and end up with something that show SOME resemblance of a nice LRGB image ... you know me & greyscale ;)

[alpal]

Hi Roger,
Some good data but I think it needs to be reprocessed.
Star masks for those hardened stars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZlpDFsugYk

Louie's videos which also discuss LAB mode:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ5b6pFHBGe66vsuSaXb-0A

cheers
Allan

[rogerg]

Thanks Allan,

I've always had troubles with Star Masks on my images .... I've put it down to the combination of the soft 12" EMC and having NABG cameras :shrug: I find the glare around the stars is brighter or the same brightes as the object I'm trying to enhance, like the galaxy, nd the bloat so large on the stars that the gaussian blur affects large areas of object around the stars, and leaves smaller stars still being enhanced because they get blurred out :shrug:

I probably need to try building up a mask from multiple star masks for different star brightnesses and blurs. Considerably time consuming :(

[alpal]

Hi Roger,
Yes it will be difficult,
you've got one ultra bright star right next to your faint galaxy
& plenty of other bright stars.
If you had some shorter exposures to work with it might have helped
you form another layer in the processing.
It's like Alnitak when you image the flame & horse head nebulas.
Alnitak can completely take over the whole image, if the processing is not carefully done.

cheers
Allan