Quote:
Originally Posted by raymo
Hi Martin, You are doing everything out of order, taking darks, flats, etc
when you don't understand how to do the basics in DSS. Forget darks etc for now, and enable in camera noise reduction. You're not wasting much imaging time because your subs are short.
Most DSS output images look like yours, washed out and nearly monochrome. You have to make adjustments to arrive at the colours that
you want. Tick the box under the three sliders so they all move together, and move them to the left to get a sky colour that is fairly dark, but not black. Click the luminance tab. Leave the three sliders set to zero alone.
Adjust the highlights slider to quieten down the washed out highlights in the image.
Adjust the one above it [33.3] to show more or less nebulosity.
Adjust the top one [black] to darken the sky if necessary.
Click the saturation tab and provisionally set it to about 16-18.
Back to histogram, untick box and adjust RGB sliders individually to
get the colour how you want it. You should end up with the three colours merged into a single tall cone, and the dotted coloured lines should also nearly merge into one. Miniscule adjustments make big
changes. Finally, readjust saturation to suit you. Export image to other software to make any other adjustments such as contrast, sharpening,
etc. Colour sliders in DSS are difficult to move in very small steps.
This is how I do it, others may have different routines. Hope it helped.
raymo
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Raymo why say he doesn't know what he's doing taking bias, dark and flat images? This is the best way to process images (though really you probably need more of each than 10 to avoid noise in these images creeping through in the final output).
DSS gets a bad rap because most people don't know how to use it. Part of the reason colours come out muted with DSS is that it's compressing the dynamic range massively to try and show everything. Colour in most astro images is compared to the luminance signal, so they end up looking washed out unless you boost the saturation a lot. As other's have noted, they controls for adjusting the colour balance and saturation are pretty clumsy in DSS so it's best to this in other programs.
Martin:
The only thing I'd change from what you've got there are:
1) adjust the top end of the luminance so that you don't have a slight downward curve at the right-hand end. I'm not sure if this is just an artefact of the way the curve is displayed but if it's real it'll lead to weird looking stars with darker cores.
2) bring up the mid-point of the luminance so that you've got a broader inflection point going from dark to bright. This is where to centre your RGB histograms.
3) move the RGB histograms to the centre of the new inflection point. This means that the most pixels are now your mid-tones. This should result in a pleasing image with a broad range of shadows and highlights.
4) Make sure each of the R, G and B channels has its centre spike overlapping. This works because of the fact the most images have their mid-range luminance in each channel - grey tones. It's the variance (above or below this) that gives things their colour tone. If you're not happy with the look this gives then you can alter the image later in another tool, but this will be at least neutral.
5) increase the saturation to 15% if you've removed all saturation boost from the camera. 10% is a safe boost if your camera already gives colourful images.
Now save and open in another program like Photoshop to make your final adjustments.
Hope this helps,
Cam