[The_bluester (Paul)]

Originally Posted by Aurorae

Thanks for your response

I do see some ordinary landscape photography being over-processed and really hate it, but deep space photography has a very different dynamic, almost like we are aware that some images are over processed and are still okay with it.

Sometimes, the way that I have seen some pictures, it is almost an artistic expression, which returns back to your subjective comment. I guess, ultimately, that is photography and I will stick to what I like. I really do like this picture as I am confident I have not over processed it, keeping the integrity as close as I could to the original but enhanced the colour and black, yet even so, there should be some explanation in terms of what this integrity of deep space imagery actually means or at least, when I spot a really over-processed image, I can immediately understand that. I don't think I yet have that skill.

Thanks again

Talking in terms of artistic expression, that does hit the nail on the head as far as I am concerned. Unless you are doing spectroscopy or some similar, more scientific endeavour, there is always an aesthetic element to this sort of astrophotography and that is where subjective judgements come in to it.

Processing wise it is a little hard to tell with the compression of the image, but one of the things I quickly learned not to do is clip the blacks in photoshop, if the histogram is firmly attached to the left then it is likely a lot of background information is being lost by clamping it to 0. I aim for dark backgrounds to have a texture, something like a very black, new blackboard that has never had chalk on it. Basically almost black, but slightly mottled looking.

Bojan mentioned lens distortions, I was not going to comment without knowing what it was shot on. If it was a pure DSLR shot you might try stopping the lens down a little from it's fastest, often camera lenses show up that sort of thing on astro photos and it can sometimes be helped by stopping down.

I must say that getting a result like that using Photoshop impresses me, I have never had much success at all in building an image direct in photoshop and stretching it there to reveal faint stuff.