Southern Cross & Eta Carina Widefield

[batema (Mark)]

Hi,

I haven't done many widefield so thought I would give it a go after seeing some of the great images posted here recently.

Taken using my Canon 50mm F1.8 lens set at 4.5. 10 lights with 4 darks all for 4 minutes piggybacked through my Canon 400d. Stacked using DSS and processed using CS3.

Mark

[saturn c (Leo)]

Hi mark, great photo! welldone.

[iceman (Mike)]

Awesome, I love it!

[Bloodbean (Troy)]

Looks good! What ISO was this?

Troy

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

very nice!

[spacezebra (Petra)]

Awesome capture!

Cheers Petra d.

[batema (Mark)]

Thanks all. Troy the ISO was 800.
Mark

[bmitchell82 (Brendan)]

lovely capture, only one word, ide adjust my levels a bit more on my screen its a bit washed out a tweak of levels would bring that down nicely, then maby a tweak in the curves to bring back the vibrance

[Hagar (Doug)]

Very nice image. A bit of a tweak of contrast and you will lift the highlights and darken the background.

Well done.

[batema (Mark)]

Hi,

Thanks for the advice on adjusting levels, curves and contrast. I think this looks better than the first even though I was wrapped with the first. I think it looks a little more natural looking instead of a smooth grey over it as in the original.

Mark

[jase (Jason)]

A pleasing wide field Mark. Good feedback by others with the resulting repro showing depth. Could possibly do with additional colour saturation adjustments if you like richer colours. Overall, well done. Look forward to seeing more.

[batema (Mark)]

Thank you Jase. Your images are inspirational and I hope one day to be able to achieve a fraction of your capabilities.

Mark

[bluescope]

Hi Mark

Nice widefield .... you don't always need to use such tools as curves, levels etc etc ... it depends on the image.

A simple way to improve images sometimes is to make a duplicate layer and then apply it as a "soft light" in your layers menu ... flatten the image and then adjust colour balance. I did this with your image ....

colour balance settings as follows ...
midtones blue +5
highlights red+5
shadows green+5

Here's the result ............

[jase (Jason)]

Just a note on the softlight blend in PS. This is a darkening function, thus simply duplicating the layer and using the softlight blend mode is likely to result in black clipped data. Softlight is extremely powerful, but needs some work. The most basic application (and one I use often), is when you've got a well balanced RGB image, perform a heavy DDP stretch and colour saturation on it. Then introduce it above the luminance as a Softlight layer. This will provide a boost in the hues. Dial back the opacity of the image if its too dark, but it shouldn't be given you've stretched it hard with DDP.

An alternative method to addressing the darkening function of softlight is to introduce a screen blend layer, but I've yet to really work this one through with consistent results.