Tried to take a picture of the helix nebula early last week. everything went well , aligned mount , synched on formalhaut to get better accuracy then goto to the helix, set 60D to iso6400 ,did a 30sec exp.Yes it was centred , took 13 x 10 min shots but forgot to reduce the iso speed back to 800. the pics were very washed out as you might expect however i stacked them without darks and flats in DSS and as you might expect the result was just so washed out it came out as a white screen on the computer. However i looked at the RGBK and moved all the channels to the left , adjusted the luminance controls to get a curve through the channels display that looked "normal" ( the curve you get with normally exposed pictures) . I then started to see a fairly normal image of the helix appear. I then increased the saturation and bingo i had a fairly "decent" picture , not good though , i expect much better when i di it properly . I then saved it as a Tiff and tweaked the levels and curves in photoshop.
The first picture is one of the RAWS and the second the DSS picture ( no darks or flats) processed in DSS and tweaked in photoshop. I havent put this picture up as an example of my photography but to show what the processing functions in DSS can do. I will just have to make a check list so i dont make the same mistake again , thats what happens when you get older i suppose.
regards (deflated) philip
Hi Kevin ,
The point I'm trying to make is that the completely over exposed picture was some what rescue able with the three processing stages available in DSS. However In my experience comparing processing only in PS and using DS stackers 3stages followed by PS , the second route gives better colour and contrast. Have you tried it ? I discovered how to do it on a utube video put up by a UK amateur
Regards philip
