M42 first attempt (playing with layers)

[Jeff]

After cowering in a corner trembling and sucking my thumb for a good couple of months :scared2:, I finally plucked up the courage to play with layers in Photoshop, and thought that my first attempt at the Orion Nebula might be a good place to start. After a few hours of tweaking selections & feather settings, I ended up processing in 3 regions, then blurred/sharpened the background to reduce noise a bit.

It kinda worked, so I'm out of the corner for now. :jump2:

Captured on Jan 4th with 450D / ED80.
4 x 3min stack @ ISO800 with single dark
Stacked in DSS and tweaked in PS cs3.

I also captured a swag of frames at shorter exposures (1min & 30sec), but did not ending up using them when layering. I could not work out why people bother with shorter exposures when layering, rather than just processing copies of the long exposure data stack for dim, medium and bright image regions. Would appreciate if someone could help me out here.:shrug:

Having lots for fun ... tips welcome.
Jeff

[Tom Davis]

Layers worked!! Wonderful capture of the full dynamic range of this very difficult object. Stay out of the corner; you're good!

Tom

[renormalised]

Very well done there, Jeff. You've got a good dynamic range the outer areas as well as the core....damn nice core, actually:)

Maybe could do with a slight more stretching to bring out those fainter bits but keep the core tight and it'll be perfect:)

[Hagar]

Well done Jeff. Youve managed the Trap very well. Keep at it.

[luka]

Great image Jeff. Keep on layering :)


How did you do the processing? Did you stack the 4x3min exposures and then used the same exposures (darkened) for the core when doing layers? Or did you use some other way?
I can imagine that, depending on the exposure time, the long exposures can have the bright parts overexposed and darkening them won't bring out the details which could be obtained if a shorter exposure was used.

[Jeff]

Thanks for the encouragement folks ... there's plenty to learn along the way so it certainly helps.



Hi Luka. Since core was not overexposed in the 4x3min exposure stack, I just used 3 layers of that, with differing degrees of layers/curves applied. With subs longer than about 5min in warm weather, I find noise & field flatness tend to suffer a bit.