Quote:
Originally Posted by speach
The most important thing is first get your hair cut really short, this prevents you pulling it out.
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Agreed. Learn to love biting your fingernails too.
DSS is good but adjusting levels I found difficult, Photoshop I thought would suit me well (already use it as a photographer) but again found it too limiting to tease out faint structures. Dedicated astrophotography programs tend to assume you are capturing a certain way with certain gear and rarely help when you are capturing with the gear you have and use.
Look at taking your stacked image from DSS as your master image and process from there elsewhere. I use PixInsight It has a steepish learning curve but easy enough once you get the hang of the interface and you figure out a workflow you are happy with.
If I'm capturing video (usually planetary) I tend to use PIPP to give me uncompresssed stills cropped with object centered (eg aligned/integrated). I might stack with Registax where I'm more comfortable using its wavelets (using PixInsight I havent been able to pulll out and more details and registax for planets is easiest for me).
DSLR stills imaging is mostly what I do and PixInsight is mostly what I use, sometimes DSS to make my master image.
My simplified process is something like:
- register (align) images
- integrate (stack) images
- at this point I have a single 64bit FITS image, this is my starting point for processing
- crop
- gradient removal
- cosmetic processing... through to output image to taste
I don't always do darks, flats but when i do i still end up at the third point with a master file containing all data. From that I work on a copy in PixInsight. Sometimes that master is created in PI sometimes DSS or elsewhere. Just depends on what I've captured and what I am after from the data. PI is the closest to what I would call a single app to do it all but it just happens to be the one I learnt easiest ( and i've bought pretty much all AP programs but PI is what i prefer), just personal choice really. StarTools is also pretty good but too simplistic controls for me. AstroArt and Nebulosity were promising but not too happy with my source data. I still go through phases of updating and retrying these programs periodically to see if they can wow me into investing more time to learn them, but PI so far doesn't let me down, as I learn and want to try different things out PI always seems to have a way for me to try.
I don't know which commercial software has demo version to try but I recommend grabbing them and checking youtube for tutorials and see what you find comfortable.