Lagoon

[peter_4059]

Finally got everything working last night (first time since returning from Astrofest). After re-doing the polar alignment I managed to capture 37x5mins on the Lagoon before the clouds rolled in. After sifting through the individual frames I kept the best 20.

This is the first image I've processed from scratch with the calibrated monitor. Comments welcome!

[noswonky]

It looks pretty good!
What equipment did you use?

[peter_4059]

Forgot to mention - 10" Newt & QHY8

[ozstronomer]

Peter,

That's a great shot. The Spyder3pro seems to have done an excellent job of calibrating the monitor as the colour looks very natural.

Peter, once you ran the calibration routine through Spyder3pro, did it suggest much of a change to your monitor from the original settings? and did you need to change anything in your Photoshop processing to cater for the new colour range?



Cheers Geoff

[peter_4059]

Geoff,

There was definately a change in the appearance pre and post calibration. The calibration software lets you switch back and forth between the two. I haven't changed anything in PS.

Peter

[ozstronomer]

Thanks Peter, I'll have to give this a go as the results are excellent :thumbsup:

Geoff

[Octane]

Peter,

Outstanding detail and the colour looks quite nice.

I'd say that this is your best image to date.

Looking forward to more.

H

[multiweb]

Great stuff Peter. A little on the red/orange side but real nice details. Those two stars next to the yellow bright one are blue. :thumbsup:

[peter_4059]

Thanks for the feedback H and Mark. I've been doing some more tweaking hopefully to make it less red/orange. Looks like I've overdone the stars though so will need to go back a few steps and re-adjust to keep the star colours.

[multiweb]

Here's a quick one. That's the idea anyway. :thumbsup:
Then again colors... whatever you like. Very subjective.

[peter_4059]

Thanks for the tip Marc - what did you apply to balance it?

[multiweb]

The offset was spot on but the red and green scaling were a bit overwhelming. I did an aggressive curve first on both red and green to tone down and boosted the blues a bit, then dropped the saturation a bit and blended the result back on your original as 'color' and 50-50% opacity. Then I run the carboni action to increase star colors and blended that on top as 'normal' maybe 20-30%. That gets you close to the ball park. Obviously you'll get a much better result if you tweak the channels in the raw files with a bit of pixel match.

PS: Have you tried Ivo's program (http://www.siliconfields.net/)? Very cool to get nice colors balance.

[peter_4059]

Thanks Marc - I haven't tried Ivo's program as I'm unsure how to use command line apps.

[acropolite]

Very impressive Peter, the detail is superb.

I prefer your original colour balance to Marks reprocess, on my (calibated) monitor Marks repro looks to have a blue cast.

[peter_4059]

Thanks Phil - the colour balance question sure is a tricky one. I thought calibrating the monitor would improve things however there still seems to be quite some subjectivity and individual preference to it.

The other thing I've really noticed is how many images look like the black point is clipped now.

ps did you have any luck contacting Doug Dieter?

[troypiggo]

Excellent!

You know you now have to go back an reprocess every single image you've ever taken...

[jjjnettie]

LOLOL

Lovely work Peter.

[spearo]

Very nice
love the colors (both the original and the repro.

I wish the image size was a bit bigger they're so lovely!
frank

[peter_4059]

Cheers Troy, JJJ and Frank. With all those old images to repro there won't be much time left for imaging - might have to sell off all the gear!