eta carinae yet again :) 5 hours worth

[chuckywiz (Ben)]

Morning folks,

Ive moved house and now have a perfect place to set up my gear at night. Attached is

ETA Carinae Nebula
61 x 5 minute exposures = 5 Hours
Iso 800
Nikon D3200
Guided
Neq6Pro
ED80
Processed in Photoshop CS2

No darks - do i need any this one came out pretty clean.. and still learning the whole processing learning curve

Any ideas on how to make the picture... brighter.. as such everything i try just induces so much noise so ive left it where im at.

Ben

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Nice image Ben. Dunno about going brighter. Looks pretty bright as it is! How is your monitor calibration?

[raymo]

Did you use DSS for stacking? if so, you can get a decent image without going into the complexities of PS. The highlights of your image are
burned out, and with 5 hrs the image should be very colourful; also there is not much contrast between the nebula and the background. All these
things can be corrected in DSS. When happy with that, you can do a bit
of sharpening and/or aesthetic changes in PS. I'm sure that
someone can show you what can be done with your image, but at 130kb
it's a bit small to work with.
raymo

[chuckywiz (Ben)]

With regards to calibrated monitor im just using my laptop monitor. And occasionly hdmi to my tv.

Presently after stacking in dss i just put the autosave straight into ps. Convert to 16bit and play from there. Dss doesnt really allow fine tuning as such so i havent been adjusting too much.

I had a play with dss on the autosave and cant see too much improvement. More practise ahead. The photos ive put on here ive just used snipping tool and saved. Then put on here

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Fair enough. Laptop monitors can sometimes be different. Have a look at it on a few different screens if you can. To me it looks... a bit too bright.

[raymo]

Ben, you've got it all wrong; all of my images come from DSS. You don't
work with the autosave image. At the end of stacking, a washed out image appears on the screen, and you make your image from that. DSS does allow RGB and luminance and saturation tuning; in the case of RGB and saturation, fine tuning. The following images of mine were produced in DSS, except for a little bit of sharpening and downsizing for posting on IIS. DSS contains a fairly comprehensive user's guide in the help tab.
I suggest that you learn to use DSS before moving on to the complexities of PS.
raymo

[chuckywiz (Ben)]

Ok so i tried Raymos way pretty much all in dss. I had no idea dss was this useful

Think i owe u a beer next time im in margs. Im most happy that the stars are the right colour and the nebula blings more what i was expecting

[raymo]

Great job Ben; you will notice that near the bottom, left of centre, there are very bright patches of nebulosity. These can be quietened down by
moving the bottom luminance slider to the left by trial and error, which
will bring out a bit more detail in the highlights. Usual saturation is around 17 or so, but if you think that a little more colour would be aesthetically pleasing to you, then a slightly higher setting would be o.k.
Don't touch the three upper luminance sliders that are set to zero. Most experienced imagers only use DSS for stacking, as it's processing functions are limited, and the RGB sliders are a bit hard to set accurately, but it's a good place for newbies to step onto the learning ladder. whilst you are learning the basics you can bone up on PS for later .
Pop in for a beer any time.
raymo