[RobF (Rob)]

Originally Posted by telecasterguru

Rob,

I think both images have merit and its good to see you moving forward with your processing skills.

Frank

Thanks Frank - improving my processing was a 2009 New Year's resolution, so I'm pleased I'm getting somewhere. Not pretending there isn't always stacks more to learn though - just one more aspect of this hobby that just keeps continuing to offer more challenges!

Originally Posted by Prickly

Hi Rob,

Very nice image. Stars look very nice and the nebulosity looks more detailed I think / apparent over a wider field.

What are the key steps to Sidonio'ing an image? From the looks it this may involve masking I imagine. Seems like this is becoming quite popular. Cant argue with the outcome - looks great.

Cheers
David

Cheers David. I was trying to focus on bringing out my softness and detail, which involves different processing approaches. I used layers and selections a lot to tease out detail and stretch the nebula without changing the stars too much. The only point I used layers was to bring through stronger sharpening of the dust clouds in the heart of the triffid itself. Plenty of tweaking of curves, levels, saturation etc. One of the luxuries of having reasonable data to play with is that you can avoid using noise tools that always cost a bit of detail.

I guess the key points for any Sidonio are:
- you spend lots of time trying new things
- you have lots of fun doing so
- you hopefully end up with something you like even more than the original!

If I've missed something important, I expect the big man himself will fill it in.
Seriously though, I found Jerry Lodriguss' CD book "A Guide to Astrophotography with Digital SLR CAmeras" a huge help in the early days, and there are stacks of threads here about great reference books (none of which I've found time or money to get hold of yet mind you)

Originally Posted by bmitchell82

well generally you can enlarge the image and work with it at a larger size, ever noticed when you shrink a image down it always looks nice and sharp. so if you go to Image-->Image size and then increase it by say 5% at a time you will end up enlarging the image significantly working at this resolution will allow you to shrink it back to a A3 / A2 size. my images are generally shrunk 20-30% to fit onto a A3 print

If you want to try out deconvolution you can try it out with ccd stack, it has quite a good deconvolution program in it.

do a heavy deconvolution ~150 and a lighter one ~50 iterations, then selectively mask them in. youll have some really good results utilizing this method.

Thanks for that detail Brendan. I'd heard you can now download CCDStack, so I'll have to try it out and see how I go. I think I may have tried an earlier version a long time ago and couldn't get it to work on DSLR images, but will try as you suggest. The resizing advice is something I'll certainly have to explore too - most of my playing has been for screen output, so I've never explored the possibilities re resizing and effect on noise and artifacts.