Why is it so.........

[Harb]

Now I am in no way knocking any images here, but I was wondering why it is that a lot of the deep space images I see around the web have the contast on the very light side, which gives the "foggy" look....
Isn't space a dark place....It seems to bring forward noise and all sorts of other artifacts that are not there in real life.
I know everyone is striving for an image that shows the deepest magnitude stars up......but it seems at a cost of image depth.
Most of the Film plates I have seen at major observatories are very dark between the stars, even on long exposures.
Again I am in no way knocking anyone, but I am really curious about this as I am probly missing something

cheers
John

[h0ughy (David)]

Originally Posted by Harb

Now I am in no way knocking any images here, but I was wondering why it is that a lot of the deep space images I see around the web have the contast on the very light side, which gives the "foggy" look....
Isn't space a dark place....It seems to bring forward noise and all sorts of other artifacts that are not there in real life.
I know everyone is striving for an image that shows the deepest magnitude stars up......but it seems at a cost of image depth.
Most of the Film plates I have seen at major observatories are very dark between the stars, even on long exposures.
Again I am in no way knocking anyone, but I am really curious about this as I am probly missing something

cheers
John

light is everywhere, and really deep shots will be foggy because you have captured background light (normally IR) but i am sure someone with credos will reply to this thread

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

I think you might find that monitor callibration has a lot to do with it as well John. If I processes something on my desktop LCD it looks absolute rubbish on any other monitor, yet if I process on my laptop LCD the result is nowhere near as bad.

And then you have the effects of jpeg lossy compression. Just about anything can happen there.