pig in lipstick with home modded canon

[graham.hobart (Graham stevens)]

Greetings, just some test shots taken with my home mod canon 450D, and Adman's old 8" reflector. I had a cloudy night so out of three hours of shots had nine to use, plus for some reason my guiding stopped whilst I was in bed. I also re-collimated today after looking at that soft look. Found I couldn't get focus with the field flattener as well.
Promising I think but I was suprised how small the field was compared with my 80mm.
Work in progress as no effort made to tame the giblets of the thing!
Cheers
Graham

[graham.hobart (Graham stevens)]

This a single frame from earlier in the night -180secs at iso 800.
Graham

[adman (Adam)]

good one Graham.

Processing wise, it looks like you have clipped the left hand side of the histogram (the black point), and have lost some depth and fainter detail. There is plenty of detail there, it just needs to be stretched further. Have you had a look at Louie's online tutorials on processing (in Photoshop) - they are very good - nice and straightforward. There's quite a bit of blue in there as well , that you could get out by just adjusting that channel.

Keep plugging away
Cheers
Adam

[graham.hobart (Graham stevens)]

Cheers Adam- I don't have Photoshop so can you do that on Paint.net or on StarTools?

PS. just bench tested my semi finished peltier cooler monster for the 450d- looks like crashed space junk but I got a delta T of 7.1 degrees from ambient . This is before installing second internal fan (my first not working) and insulating and sealing properly. The temperature in my kitchen at the start of the test was 27.3 degrees. Have a sensor on the back wall of the cooler box but didn't actually have camera on and taking pics yet. Need to finish the job but looks promising ( well looks crap actually but acts promising!)
Graham

[adman (Adam)]

I would imagine that you could the levels and curves tools are about the most basic ones

Adam

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Good one Graham. Looks like all the hard work has paid off.

[CarlJoseph (Carl)]

Nice work Graham. Did you have any pre-mod photographs to compare with? I'm thinking of getting my 450D modded too.

[irwjager (Ivo)]

On a roll again Graham!

Man, that mod makes a big difference!

I can see a faint reddish halo around one of the dust donuts, probably caused by wipe. Try upping the Dead pixel filter (let's see if we can convince it the dust dount is a massive dead pixel , or mask out the donut so Wipe ignores it).

Originally Posted by adman

good one Graham.

Processing wise, it looks like you have clipped the left hand side of the histogram (the black point), and have lost some depth and fainter detail.

Hi Adam,

No black point clipping in the histogram that I can see (see attached). Any particular reason why you think the black point is clipped?

You're right though that there is more detail to be stretched out, even in the posted JPEG (which also proves the data hasn't been clipped).

Cheers,

Ivo