First Rosette Happy but completely lost re processing

[batema]

Help and Hi,

The following three photos show my attempt at processing my first Rosette Nebula. I am very happy with both focus and tracking using PHD guiding but when it comes to processing I am completely lost. The shots were taken through my W/O Flt 110 and guiding through my 70 Megrez. ISO was 800 and they were stacked using Deep Sky Stacker. My camera is a Canon 400d unmodified.

I took 15 x 6 min Lights with 8 x 6 min darks then stacked and I believe 12 of the 15 stacked. The first photo is the original after DSS finishes. The second is some adjustment of aligning the red, green and blue graphs, then adjusting the high, mids and low values and also adding in saturation. I save this and then open in Photoshop CS3. Here I adjusted my light and dark points to settings recommended in astronomy Photoshop (currently reading) then make the curve look like a nice s shape and for good measure chuck in some more saturation and why not go the unsharped mask as well and there is the final result. Should I be happy with this or could someone offer advice. I would love to see if someone has a spare few minutes to have a go at working on my image to show me whats possible.

Feel free to comment.

Thanks

Mark

[monoxide]

hi mate,
cant really do much with a tiny jpg and im no real expert but heres a quick 2 minute go at it.

theres definately some decent data there though!

[batema]

Thanks monoxide. As long as I've got some good data then its back to my processing mission. I've unfortunately also got a couple og good dust mites.
Mark

[Hagar]

Hi Mark, You have captured quite a bit of the detail in this nebula but as TJ states it is a bit hard to fiddle with such a small JPG image without increasing the likes of the JPG artifacts etc.

I have had a bit of a fiddle and with some small tweaks on levels and curves and some adjustment to the red curve This is what popped up. Lots more could be done but the original stacked image would be needed. Try to keep away from unsharp masks and detail sharpening at the moment and see what you end up with. Sharpening can seem to increase the noise level considerably so just keep at the standard items such as Levels, Curves, Highlights and Shadows, brightness and contrast and maybe a very light gausian Blur and see what you end up with. Also have a fiddle with the separate colours in Levels and curves you can always step back if you screw up.
Good luck.

[renormalised]

Just had a go myself with your image. Turned out OK, but not really flash.

[batema]

Thankyou all. I have just posted my latest attempt (copied from Atronomy photoshop)
Mark

[Bassnut]

Latest attempt?, where?. All the posted reworks cream you 1st post. Nice detail tho.