flamed horse - the need for better processing

[h0ughy]

this is a slight crop of two nights worth of images - have 7h23min worth, 127ED with a Cooled Canon 40D at iso800 and I used a CLS CCD filter due to the heavy light pollution and there in lies my problem - i cant balance the colour of the image.:sadeyes:

[Peter Ward]

I suspect you have hit the dynamic range stop of CMOS/DSLR's.

Hallmarks of this are: stars all saturated to white with white halos around the brighter stars as well....

Under light polluted skies, very hard to fix

Nice equine image just the same.

[h0ughy]

Thanks for your thoughts Peter, i suspect you may be right:sadeyes: but nonetheless i am giving it a big go;).

i just wished i could get my ruddy automadome control working:mad2: had to go and manually slew it throughout the night.

[richardo]

A huge effort here David.
Stars look beautiful and round and our old friend Al's kept well under control.
Shame about the overal colourisation.

Try messing with background in levels in PS.
Double click the far left eye dropper, set your r=32 g=30 b=32 and then click on say the bottom R/H corner..
I'm not saying it will sort out your probs here, but it might help balance out the magenta cast to something more workable.

Have you tried a light pollution filter?

Rich

[h0ughy]

that is with a filter Rich

[peter_4059]

Dave,

It's a pretty good outcome considering what you are up against. You've got some great detail in the flame.

Peter

[h0ughy]

thanks Peter, did you end up having a closer look at what i sent you?

[irwjager]

Love the framing - that's beautiful!

As a starting point, a very simple fix to your image seems to be reducing the red channel's Gamma (a value of approx 0.5 looks good to my eye). You can do that by means of a curve (dragging down a single point in the middle of the curve) or in some other levels manipulation tool.

You may have to play with the other channels after that (particularly the blue channel).

EDIT: Added a repro of the JPEG

[rally]

David,

The data is in there, just gotta colour calibrate out the Red !

Mine is a quick and dirty just to see if it was possible - since I was only working with your 8 bit highly compressed jpg as you put up on the site, its ended noisy and steppy, but with the original files you will be able to get it looking nice and get the rest of the colour looking better and all that detail in the shadows which I lost !.

Cheers

Rally

Edit - Oops forgot to sharpen this one ! - nebulae detail looks much better but noisy areas are worse - its a double edged sword with the noise - needs some selective masking work, but not worth doing unless there is a full sized image to start with.

[richardo]

David,
I did a version for you doing exactly as I already described in my previous post to you.
It's too easy....;)
A one click fix in PS. No loss of blue or star colors. No more magenta.
Try it with your original.
And let's see a Sid.


Mmm sorry didn't know the CLS filter excludes mercury and sodium wave lengths... learn something every day.

Rich

[gregbradley]

Nice image. More in it than you may have realised.

Greg.

[h0ughy]

ok i have Sidonioed the image - repro2. I can see from the above images you guys have had some fun and made some helpful suggestions. it is a difficult beast to process thats for sure:D and i am still not happy with what i have done

[strongmanmike]

Man not only you but everyone else is Siding you work :lol:...and they call me the repro man :shrug: :lol:...maybe it should be called doing a Houghonio..?

It looks like you are on the right track with what needs to be done to fix this image but overall I think the original is the best, yes it has a red cast but otherwise it looks natural and naturally smooth with beautiful stars, who cares if they are mostly all white they positively glow!

Buuuut lets see the rest of the Hough-&everyone else-onios, see what comes up :thumbsup:

Mike

[h0ughy]

Thanks Mike - but dont feel left out i sent you a larger file to play with LOL:help::question:

[h0ughy]

:rofl::rofl: well i fixed my colour cast during lunch - must be the heat:question: colour is overrated;):lol:

[strongmanmike]

Yes I saw that come in on my phone but t'was too big to open, I'll have a look tonight on the home desk top :thumbsup:

Ooh..my first Houghonio :P