Quote:
Originally Posted by kosborn
Lovely image Mike. What I would do for dark, clear skies... So does your no steroids comment mean no sharpening at all,or just a tad of non-AI sharpening..?
Kevin
|
Thanks Kevin
... firstly, dark skies don't help that much, with narrowband imaging and there are plenty of examples of deep narrowband images taken from city skies, especially with 6nm or less band pass filters, however, it really comes into its own and once the Moon is not around, when you want to shoot for faint broadband signal, like faint tenuous dusty fields
and galaxies, tidal streams etc. Exposures can be significantly shorter for the same signal to noise ratio too and you can just get that bit deeper. Also, dark skies mean that you aren't dealing with significant gradients and rarely need to resort to gradient removal, that isn't dealt with already by your flats
My comment re no steroids is just a bit of fun, I'm seeing what AI sharpening like Topaz and BlurEx is doing to images (and I don't have access to either) and I'm feeling like it's almost a bit fake or kinda a check box/slider adjust, form of cheating..?..(it's not, I know... just exaggerating for clarity). I use more traditional Lucy-Richardson deconvolution in Astroart (or not, depending on the object/field) sometimes some unsharp mask in Astroart and smart sharpening in PS CS3+...ie, just good'ol fashioned health food store supplements, not black market equine steroids
It's really just a bit of humour, AI sharpening is here and here to stay but I can now clearly see when it has been used in images, it imparts a characteristic "look" you could say...or, in other words, my eye is being
AI trained, so to speak, to detect when it has been used
Mike