M16 first processed image

[stanlite]

hey this seems the place. Only limited data in the image (about 60mins) taken at home. Please comment and offer pointers.

http://i944.photobucket.com/albums/ad281/stanlite88/Autosave1.jpg

[luigi]

Hi Grady,

Not very good to me.
Stars are "ok" at the center but quite bad near the borders, shape is not right.
The blacks seem to be clipped, the sky is too dark/black and that probably removed a lot of information from the shot.
You also lost all the color from the stars at some point of the processing.

Sorry for the feedback I figured this was better than just staying silent!

In case you are interested in some help just let us know how you took/processed the shot to see what can be improved.

[stanlite]

hi luigi. I expected coma in the photo (i have yet to get a coma corrector) this might explain the outer stars. i will go over what i did in processing and tell you what i did to see if we can't figure out how it got so much darker. from memory though it was roughly that dark when i moved it from DeepSky stacker to Photoshop, i think my act of trying to bring up the exposure might have affected the colour. :P:(

[desler]

Hi Grady.


The darkness around the edges seems to be a alignment issues. Basically you haven't been in exactly the same position with each exposure. So deep sky stacker aligns the bright objects and move the edges of each sub to do so.


The obvious answer is to try and find a solution to pin point your image subs, a lot easier said than done, i've found, although greater minds may enlighten us. Normally I just crop it out.

Without knowing what you actually did in processing, I downloaded your jpeg and had a little play, I hope you don't mind.

Now, I'm no expert but all I did was adjust curves, because we only have a pretty small jpeg to work with, you can't be do aggressive. I then adjust levels to bring the sky colour down and then performed a slight S curve to try and brighten a bit more of the neb.

These are only really basic things, but I've found that these are the most important,, if you get levels and curves wrong, well you just don't get there!

Have a look at this link

http://www.hyperstarimaging.com/video.php


They had some good tutorials.


Other then that here's my little edit and keep em coming and having fun.


Darren

[stanlite]

i think i might know what the issue is the darkening on the edge ... appears a short (test) exposure made its way into the stacker pile (it was also an off center shot ... thus the test). Also thanks Darren those tutorials helped heaps ... just have to wait for my brother to give me his full version of photoshop (running a trial version atm).

... here is a renewed and croped version.

http://i944.photobucket.com/albums/ad281/stanlite88/CropedM16.jpg

[multiweb]

It's a very good picture. You have hardly any coma actually. Might be mis-registration at stacking time or micro-guiding errors. You're 99% there. Just got to read on processing techniques and stretching data then you're good to go. Keep'em coming. Looking good :thumbsup:

[Bassnut]

The watermark is just awefull, loose it, cant be bothered even looking.

[stanlite]

hey fred i have lost the watermark in my newest pic

[DavidTrap]

Young Grasshopper - there is much to learn about post-processing. I am barely scratching the surface vs many of the masters lurking on this site.

I applied a simple recipe of stretching, curve manipulation, saturation and sharpening to your image. There are many recipe's on the web to get you started - mine comes from some articles by Warren Keller posted in Astrophotography Insight.

The data is there, it just needs to be massaged! (I cropped out the watermark as it was upsetting my histograms)

Are you a member of one of the club's in Brisbane?

DT

[Screwdriverone]

:lol: :lol:

tell us what you really think Fred, dont hold back now....

:)

Cheers

Chris

[stanlite]

yeah David i am a member of SAS.

[TrevorW]

Keep out it improvement comes in time