I Did Eta As Well

[leon]

Hi Guys.

I don't want to steal your thunder Doug, but I too had a go at Eta last night, however my subs were much shorter than yours, pretty happy with it though.

The image consisted of 12 exposures at 2 minutes each, ICNR, and flat fielded, through the Tak and Canon 5D, @ exposure of 500ISO at F/5.3, all on the G11 and guided with PHD, and Processed In Image Plus.

This is a full wide field, no cropping, some contrast and brightning in Canon's own software (Zoombrowser).

Hope you like it, but please comment, I need all the help I can get.

Leon

[Ric]

Very nice Leon, It's a completely different view of Eta, I am always amazed at the density of the starfield.

Top shot

[RB (Andrew)]

It's very nice Leon but you're clipping the data in the shadows (low end of the histogram).
This makes the background unnaturally black and causes you to loose detail.

You need to adjust the levels for the histogram so that it flows down to zero before it hits the left hand side of the histogram.

It's very sharp and nicely focused otherwise.

[jase (Jason)]

As Andrew mentions - You need to reprocess this one Leon. The FSQ handles this object really well with its wide flat sweeping FOV. Why the short subs? Look forward to seeing the reprocessed version when you're ready.

[leon]

Thanks Ric and Jase, I will have another go at processing this one, but I'm not quite sure what to do, or how not to do the clipping stuff you have mentioned.

I usually convert to tiff's as normal, then open in Image Plus, align and combine with average, an end up with a combined image, then i use digital development and move the background white to 65-70, and then move the break point to where the image appears the best.

Sometimes i then take it to PS2 and use levels on it to see if i can enhance it some more, usually that's about it.

Am i doing this wrong, as I not sure if this is the best way and what should the Histogram look like.

Thank You.

Leon

[dugnsuz (Doug)]

Beautiful shot leon - I love those wide Tak fields you do.
Histo is clipped as others said, but that's nice clippin'!!!!
Cheers
Doug

[leon]

Ok guys, thank you, but lets get serious about this clipping bit.

Now I have looked at the histogram of the combined image before i do anything to it, and they the red, blue, green, etc look pretty right, but of coarse it is very hard to see any detail in the image.

so when i play with a bit in digital development it totally wrecks the Histogram.

Could some one please explain what i'm suppose to do after the combined stage when it is looking at me on the screen.

Leon

[Alchemy (Clive)]

i will no doubt get canned for this but as a simple solution use levels to set background at say 10 you can do in rgb or individual if required. check values with eyedropper.(photoshop shows values of 0 to 255)leave the high end alone for now

go to curves the 0 and 255 are fixed and by lifting say the middle only you will lift middle tones Without changing the high or low point.... have a play with an s curve ( 2 points) in photoshop you can always go back a turn or two so have a bash.

processing can be far more complicated and involved but have a tinker with that first