Quote:
Originally Posted by jase
Colour… is always a subjective topic in astrophotography and most of the time it comes down to personal taste or aesthetics. I guess the question is do we have a baseline to judge against? Do the images on APOD define this? What is the definition of true colour and is it technically possible to achieve? Would we have a different perspective with narrowband? I could go on and on…
Before I (we) vote, are we simply making an analysis on colour only or the images in their entirety? Also would it be possible to share your goals for each of the images. i.e. maximise colour saturation in the shadows while not clipping the highlights, pushing the colours in the midtones while dulling the highlights with curves etc. Or was this a case of "wing it" and see what happens?  |
Theres a lot of considerations there jase...
firstly having been only a short time at IIS ive found out some prefer images one way others differently, i guess that as long as the image is sharp then the rest of the constraints are personal. from personal experience we all tinker with our images and nobody doesnt add colour saturation to some degree,
for me its detail detail detail, i want to see the intricate knots in the nebulosity i want to see the tips of the galaxy arms BUT i dont like noisy images, so i settle for less pushing of the image at the sacrifice of detail....
i remember reading with regards to landscape photography which i used to be keen on, that we in general remember a place differently to whats recorded on film and hence we bump it up to meet our expectations/ memories.
So does the APOD image of the day define colour.... hmmm what colour is space really probably extremely bland after all looking through a 12 inch scope can i see any colour in nebulas etc ... Barely. Narrowband is another situation certainly becoming more common as the detail captured is considerable as no doubt you would attest. Are we imitating what is considered "fashionable" .... possibly. What is not in doubt is that those images are considered the best by those judging them..... Why..... i guess thats what im exploring here.
So before you vote.... well i guess i just want a raw quick opinion, your gut feeling, generally we see something and although we subconsciuosly analyze it, generally we can look and have an opinion. (if you dont publicly want to commit one way or the other you can vote as its anonymous)
As for my goals well i just wanted to extract the most detail possible, i did want to imitate the colorfull images as this image already had tones in it to work on. i started with decon to sharpen it up a bit then applied a smoothing filter to reduce noise, then stretched the image, then tinkered somewhat endlessly in lightroom with the color hue , saturation and luminance, i liked some of the detail such as theres a little spiral loop at the top of the main arm and below it a bowshock curve i managed to eek out a bit more detail in the lanes. during this i manipulated the curves and levels to keep the data from clipping as much as possible all the time trying not to introduce too much noise.. i have deliberately oversaturated.... or maybee its just right whos to say
Given my expertise in the processing dept , winging it probably is more truth than fiction.
the other difficult thing is as stated by Rob K if its an unfamiliar object we have no preconcieved ideas so we accept it. id have to say all of us have an expectation of eta carinae so it makes a more interesting debate.