Horse Head in Colour

[wysiwyg (Mark)]

Well I finally got around to processing my Horse Head in colour.

HA blending was a bit tricky as expected but managed to get a good compromise. There is always a trade off unfortunately.

Horse Head in Colour

Thanks for Looking!

Cheers
Mark

[renormalised (Carl)]

Very nicely done

[Ric]

That's a beauty Mark.

Thanks for posting.

[Paul Haese]

Nice work Mark, maybe could do with some star saturation. The blue stars are showing but the orange and red stars are not seen in the image. Most stars look white and that could indicate that you have over saturated your stars in either the processing or maybe during capture. If its the later then not much can be done, but I think it is most likely the processing.

Good smooth detail though with nice shaped stars.

[CoolhandJo (Paul)]

Nice one! I agree with Paul regarding some of the stars but its a good tradeoff to have if you have great contrast across the image (like you have!)

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Stunning detail throughout all the nebulae, Wizzy.
The Flame Neb shows it the best in those wispy black areas

Focus must have been perfect! Well done

[marc4darkskies (Marcus)]

A very nice rendition Mark! Nice crisp detail, deep, good colour and composition. I agree with others though, your stars are too contrasty and lack colour.

Cheers, Marcus

[wysiwyg (Mark)]

Originally Posted by renormalised

Very nicely done

Cheers Mate!

Originally Posted by Ric

That's a beauty Mark.

Thanks for posting.

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed looking.

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Nice work Mark, maybe could do with some star saturation. The blue stars are showing but the orange and red stars are not seen in the image. Most stars look white and that could indicate that you have over saturated your stars in either the processing or maybe during capture. If its the later then not much can be done, but I think it is most likely the processing.

Good smooth detail though with nice shaped stars.

Originally Posted by CoolhandJo

Nice one! I agree with Paul regarding some of the stars but its a good tradeoff to have if you have great contrast across the image (like you have!)

Originally Posted by marc4darkskies

A very nice rendition Mark! Nice crisp detail, deep, good colour and composition. I agree with others though, your stars are too contrasty and lack colour.

Cheers, Marcus

Paul, Paul and Marcus,

Thanks for your comments.

The saturation of the stars could not have been avoided as all subs were 30 minutes. With the FSQ in dark skies at that exposure, nearly all stars are saturated.
My plan was to go deep and get the detail rather than concentrate on the stars.
Like I said, there is always a trade off!

Originally Posted by ballaratdragons

Stunning detail throughout all the nebulae, Wizzy.
The Flame Neb shows it the best in those wispy black areas

Focus must have been perfect! Well done

Thanks Ken, much appreciated!

[mill (Martin)]

That is a good looking image Mark

[multiweb (Marc)]

Very nice indeed. Beautiful field.

[dugnsuz (Doug)]

Great work Mark
Huge FOV - very nice
Doug

[prokyon (Werner Probst)]

Wow, great work. The weak details are a stunner!

Cheers

Werner

[wysiwyg (Mark)]

Martin, Marc, Doug and Werner,

Thanks heaps for the kind comments.

Cheers
Mark

[Octane (Humayun)]

Mark,

Stunning work. 30 minute sub-exposures. phw0ar! Where on earth did you get clear skies long enough? : )

Perhaps if you get the chance, you could capture some 5 minute exposures to layer in the stars?

Something to aspire to.

H

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Overall it looks great Mark, love the field and composition, at a medium enlargement it has a great high res feel to it

Mike

[wysiwyg (Mark)]

Originally Posted by Octane

Mark,

Stunning work. 30 minute sub-exposures. phw0ar! Where on earth did you get clear skies long enough? : )

Perhaps if you get the chance, you could capture some 5 minute exposures to layer in the stars?

Something to aspire to.

H

Thanks for the tip, I might try that.

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Overall it looks great Mark, love the field and composition, at a medium enlargement it has a great high res feel to it

Mike

Thanks Mike

[gregbradley]

A wonderful image. So deep and super sharp. Your focus and tracking are superb.

There is a slight green bias to the background that is throwing colour off slightly. Many astro images suffer from this even from dark skies. Also the flame neb looks flat colourwise and can be made to be a vibrant yellowish colour like its name. The stars are probably beyond getting much of the colour back but there are a few yellow ones there that can be punched up to balance it a tad. Like Humi says, some 5 min subs for the stars would finish off this project beautifully. There is also a bit too much magenta in your Ha blend. Depends on how you blended the Ha as Ha can easily do that. There are several ways to blend Ha with distinctly different results. Is there some Ha as luminosity there?

Selective colour can reduce that effect to some degree. The fine points of colour seem to be the area to concentrate on as the basics have been done superbly well (framing, focus, tracking, callibrating, stacking).

So a fabulous image with lots right but a bit more finessing the colour would take it to another level. You've invested a lot of effort into this one and its worth taking the time.

Greg.

[wysiwyg (Mark)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

A wonderful image. So deep and super sharp. Your focus and tracking are superb.

There is a slight green bias to the background that is throwing colour off slightly. Many astro images suffer from this even from dark skies. Also the flame neb looks flat colourwise and can be made to be a vibrant yellowish colour like its name. The stars are probably beyond getting much of the colour back but there are a few yellow ones there that can be punched up to balance it a tad. Like Humi says, some 5 min subs for the stars would finish off this project beautifully. There is also a bit too much magenta in your Ha blend. Depends on how you blended the Ha as Ha can easily do that. There are several ways to blend Ha with distinctly different results. Is there some Ha as luminosity there?

Selective colour can reduce that effect to some degree. The fine points of colour seem to be the area to concentrate on as the basics have been done superbly well (framing, focus, tracking, callibrating, stacking).

So a fabulous image with lots right but a bit more finessing the colour would take it to another level. You've invested a lot of effort into this one and its worth taking the time.

Greg.

Greg,

Thanks heaps!

Particularly your comments. I found them very useful and you managed to analyse the image well. Working so long on an image you tend to miss the obvious until someone points it out to you, and I you certainly did that.

I did a preliminary adjustment to the image based on your advise but its late and I should really come back to it tomorrow for another look before showing the results, so far it looks promising and have managed to address a few of your observations.

Thanks again for your input, greatly appreciated.

Cheers
Mark

[wysiwyg (Mark)]

Here is an updated version.

I have managed to reduce the green cast, reduce the magenta slightly and enhance the richness of the red as well as stretch the data a little further.
Star colours have improved slightly, but that will have to wait until I grab some shorter subs in RGB as Humi suggested.

Horse Head in Colour Version 2 - High Res

Hose Head in Colour Version 2 - Medium Res

Thanks for Looking!

Cheers
Mark

[gregbradley]

This really is a nice image Mark. That has improved quite a bit. I personally like the background dust showing up the deep red Ha areas there. Some probably won't like that but its a matter of taste. I think though there are some nice subtle colour processing that can be done that takes it a bit further.

I hope you don't mind my "coaching" here.

Firstly, the star colours. OK its an FSQ106N and they tend to show too many stars as blue. Perhaps colour correction of the FSQ106N was a bit weak in the blue band, not all APOs get the colours just right. The newer 106ED has better colour correction but the FSQ has the fluorite hehehe and this to me gives the better overall colour - nice and rich and great star colours except for the exagerrated blue.

So knowing that, you are going to have to watch star processing with your FSQ106N in that it will tend to highlight too many stars as blue that aren't blue at all or exagerrate the blue.

So.

1. Create a duplicate layer. A fast way of doing this is to drag the background layer down to the 2nd from the right little icon at the bottom of the layers,channels, path box. To erase a layer you simply drag it down to the trash can icon. Nice and fast.

2. I ran a Noel Carboni increase star colour on it. This is the same as selecting the stars (colour range tool/highlights or colour range tool with image zoomed in, select a star, click on the + icon for the eyedropper and keep adding selections and adjust the fuzziness slider so it looks like you got most of the stars). Then adding saturation (control U).

What will happen is artifacts appear in the Flame Neb and the blue stars look too blue but the yellow ones are improved nicely and stand out.

So you need to mask out the unwanted changes and only allow the wanted ones to show through.

Layer/hide all

Select the brush and set opacity (in the top bar where it has the features of the tool) to say about 50% and rub on the areas where the yellow stars looked nicer and not the areas where the blue stars, flame neb looked worse.

Once you are happy, layer/flatten image.

Next. The Flame Nebula can be made to stand out more as a feature and differentiate it more from the background dust.

Use the magic wand tool Click on the yellow are of the Flame Neb. It will select a lot of it. Right click/grow to expand the selection. There will be a small area it did not select. Hold down the shift key, now you see a + sign appear next to the magic wand. Now while holding down the shift key you can add to the selection without the original selection disappearing. Once you've got the whole Flame Neb selected feather it 10 pixels (select/feather/10). Control H to get rid of the selection lines so you can see the result of your processing more clearly.

Now control B (colour balance tool). Shadows/yellow slider increased to increase yellow only. Then maybe pull it back with curves as it may be too prominent but with nicer colour. Play around with colour balance tool and curves/levels so it looks right.

Control D deselects the selection.

Select the magenta area of the neb behind the horsehead. Use the same magic wand tool and grow and feather it to suit.

Selective colour/magenta/ add some yellow to balance out the magenta back to more of a red. Yellow slider all the way to the right makes it look less magentaish and more red.

Control D to deselect.

Flatten the image or reduce the opacity of the layer if you want to be more subtle about the changes.

It looks awesome. A top image. Now the only improvement left would be to add some shorter exposure stars.

With the FSQ106N it will vignetter bright stars near the edges of the image. These stars appear to have a dark band like a worm hole going through them. You can zoom in and use the healing brush tool or the clone tool carefully to get rid of the dark band. Perhaps the smudge tool set to a small circle and smudge from inside the very zoomed in star out if it gets affected. Not really worth it but you can go that extra mile if you want to.

I hope this is helpful.

Greg.