Quote:
Originally Posted by multiweb
Very nice Greg  . Love the running man crop. How do you color calibrate your pictures before processing? Do you use CCD Stack to combine? |
I use CCDstack to do darks, flats and hot/cold pixel removal then register (align) and stack. I don't do much colour work in CCDstack as it is an unwieldy program memory wise and colour images are a bit too much for it.
I try to minimise use of DDP as it can black clip the image a bit especially if you use auto.
I save the resulting image as a RAW Tiff. I used to use scaled but again the histogram is often slightly black clipped and it is better to use levels/curves in Photoshop to bring up the image as you have way more control and wind up usually with a nice bell curved histogram which is the optimum image.
I then use Photoshop. Curves/levels to bring up the image and have the histograms of all colours running to make them more balanced and get rid of any bias. Then usually shadows/highlights which can brighten an image sometimes more effectively than curves without increasing noise or blowing out highlights (usually use shadows/highlights to get the bright areas under control and make the overall image a tad brighter.
Then very little else depending on the image. Noise Ninja is a very handy tool, I also use layered sharpening often not always, I don't often use unsharp mask or smart sharpen as sharpening the whole image often damages the stars. I use Noel Carboni Photoshop actions to increase star colour very often (quick, easy and very effective - his best tool).
I also often use Gradient Xterminator early on after levels/curves if there is too much background green or red etc. Not sure why I sometimes get this even at a dark site - perhaps lower altitude images suffer from atmospheric extinction and also this large chipped camera is more sensitive to the need for good flats than other cameras I have used.
Then save it as a 16bit tiff and then switch to 8bit and save as a jpeg in various sizes for posting on the internet.
That is my usual routine with very little change from image to image. Some images need hardly anything - they fall in your lap. Thats what I aim for and that comes from all your basic capture tech being as good as you can get it (polar alignment, autoguiding humming, focus, framing, exposure length, total exposure time, best filters, best camera, best scope, collimated, cleanliness of filters/scope, good flats, good darks etc etc.).
Greg.
