Quote:
Originally Posted by codemonkey
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End of the day, it's a trade off, and maybe you're not happy with making it, which is fine, some things matter more to some people than others.
The success of this method will largely be based off how good you are at creating masks to preserve the areas you care about. Remember that you have total control here, so you could literally protect every detail if you're fastidious enough.
Anyway, it was just an idea to consider, a potential to scrape some benefit out of those house of less than great data.
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Perhaps I didn't make myself clear Lee,
none of the data I used was "great" data - none of it. There were a number of subs I used that were
well outside my normal tolerance for acceptability. If you look closely you'll see that manifest in relatively poor depth and quality of faint stars. Don't worry though, I've teased every morsel of depth and detail out of the available data without rendering artefacts or
making it look like I've tried very hard - maybe that's the problem
. Finally, complex masks and layer blending are child's play in PS and the norm in my processing, but there is a limit to the overall magic you can conjure using bad data without making an image look forced in some way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
I'm with Marcus on this. I have done the same as he has and many times. Versions with all the data of which some are poor and some with only the better. I find invariably the ones with only the good data are better. The only cost usually is extra noise. ...
It would make a good thread-what does it take to get the ideal image?
Greg.
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Thanks Greg!
Time or the paucity of clear stable nights will tend to limit ones ability to gather megadata, so honing noise mitigation techniques is essential to good processing technique.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alpal
The faint glow of the outer extremities of a halo has no detail in it anyway.
Surely by stacking - more of that faint halo could be revealed?
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There is in fact large and small scale structure in the antennae. E.G.
some of the knots you see on the outer fringes are actually blurred stars that, with
good data, would look much clearer. I try not to erase these, even though they may look like noise.
Final thought is that people, especially beginners, need to understand that while good processing is paramount to producing a good image, no amount of sophisticated processing will overcome the limitations imposed by bad data.