Quote:
Originally Posted by The_bluester
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.
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Thanks for your tips about blacks, I will definitely keep that in mind. I actually tried using Astro Pixel Processor and it was really frustrating for me, and then Deep Sky Stacker was playing up and I got all flustered. There is something somewhat independent about the process in photoshop that I liked, and because I actually do film and audio (so I use mostly adobe products), I felt comfortable with the process because I had so much more control over it. I actually didn't stretch this, but I can see how that would be complicated with PS.
As mentioned to Bojan, I used a Zenithstar 71APO telescope with a Nikon D7500 attached, but I must admit that the t-adapter to the t-ring was stuck on (I could not remove it) and so there was some issues related to adjusting the distance on the field flattener because of it. I am assuming this may be the cause, but I am not sure.