Tuc 47

[lazjen (Chris)]

This is the second image from my dark site visit. As I was achieving 5 min subs on the night, I thought I'd give Tuc 47 a go at low ISO to see what I could get.

I took 4 images x 300 sec at ISO400 and combined with the darks, flats, dark flats. When I did that I noticed a strange artifact on the left (see the second image). I'm fairly certain it's a reflection from the lights in a nearby house.

The first image is a crop of most of the relevant area. I'm not exactly sure if I've processed this one well, so any suggestions are welcomed. While globular clusters look interesting, I get this feeling that I'm not doing it justice.

[tilbrook@rbe.ne (Justin Tilbrook)]

Hi Chris,

Good start, nice sharp stars.

Hope you don't mind but I had a play with your image in Photo Shop.
I backed of in magneta in saturation, then went to selective colours and baked the magneta more neutrals.
Then I used the magic wand to select one star, and the similar to get all stars of a similar size and brightness.
I increased saturation and deselected, applied the same image with multiply to itself then reduced opacity by half.
I did this several times.

You can see some colour in the stars now and has more contrast.
Don't know if this helps worth a try.

Cheers,

Justin.

[lazjen (Chris)]

I certainly do not mind at all - it's an improvement, for sure. But it will take me a while to sort out what you did - it's beyond my PS skill level. :p I'll ask my wife to look at what you did and read your instructions - hopefully she can show me what to do.

[tilbrook@rbe.ne (Justin Tilbrook)]

Originally Posted by lazjen

I certainly do not mind at all - it's an improvement, for sure. But it will take me a while to sort out what you did - it's beyond my PS skill level. :p I'll ask my wife to look at what you did and read your instructions - hopefully she can show me what to do.

Yep, sorry!

It can be Gobbledygook, I still have lot's to learn too.
I'm using quite an old version PS7, so some functions may be set up differently.

Cheers,

Justin.

[lazjen (Chris)]

I went back to my original file for this and did another process on it. I realised that the original had a better colour setup and that I had wrecked it with my processing. So with a bit more care this time, I've got this:



Mostly better than the original, especially the colour, I think.

[Rex]

Hi Chris, I definitely prefer your last processing of this to the first two. Might need a little saturation boost but other than that looks great.