Help please photoshop curves and levels

[traverswilkins]

Hey Astronomers,

I'm new to this group. My name is Trav, i'm from sydney Australia and love astronomy. I just started dealving into astrophotography and have had a recent night out taking multiple pictures.

Since then I have stacked the RAW files in DSS, now just having a few problems in photoshop adjusting curves and levels. I have uploaded the TIFF file. You can find the address below.

I would so much appreciate any feedback regarding techniques i could use. Feel free to play with the TIFF file and see what you can get, I have spent hours trying to get a usable image :( Attached is also the best i can get the image...

Thanks everyone, can't wait to become a active user of this site :D

TIFF download link

http://seeupload.com/8074.TIF

Travers Wilkins
Astronomer from down under

[Doug]

Hi Trav!

Welcome aboard!

Great first post. And you have an image that's not too bad. I'll take a look at your tiff soon and see what I can do with your photo. Mike I am sure would love to give it a try as would others. It's been cloudy and rainy here in North America and we are hungry to process something!

Just in case you haven't see this tutorial...
Learning to Use Photoshop Curves.

Doug

[Doug]

Hey Trav,

I started to download your TIF image. We have a FTP server located here:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=75

No annoying ads. Its free to members.

Doug

[traverswilkins]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the welcoming reply Sorry to hear about your bad weather in the northern hemisphere across the pacific.. lol so far away. Thanks for taking a look at my Tiff and look forward to seeing what comes up

I wish ya good skys

Chat to ya soon mate

Trav

[traverswilkins]

Thanks a lot for the FTP details, awesome idea for members. Will be happy to utilize it.

Cheers

[mamill]

Welcome to the site Trav! Nice image from down under. I have a couple of questions for you though. 1) why is this image so large? 140mb! 2) what equipment were you using? 3) were you shooting near Sidney (i.e., light pollution) or did you travel to a dark site? 4) is the image you posted a good representation of what you see visually with the Milky Way as a cloudy ( I'm trying to ascertain if there is some vignetting going on in the center of this image. Also if you can supply image info, such as length of subs, how many etc.
Nice image to work with though!

[Doug]

Mike,

Trav's file is 32 bit...that's why it's so large. I first had to reduce it to 16Bit in order to apply curves to the image. That would explain why the file is so large.

I hope to take a look at it tonight.

Trav,

Is this a shot of the Milky way?

What equipment did you use?

Very nice wide field shot for sure.

Doug

[traverswilkins]

Hi Mike,

Doug is right, the image file is 32 Bit hence the large file size.

Equipment - Unmodded Canon 450D DSLR on a camera tripod

Location - 80Km west of sydney (still lots of light pollution) i couldn't travel to a dark sight as we have been having terrible skys during the weekend, it was a spur of the moment thing. During a working week the sky was clear at 10pm so i headed out for 5 hours, tell ya what though, i was tired the next day, but hey I live for this stuff :)

The image is a typical light pollution night near sydney, this weekend pending on weather Im travelling into the country to get some perfect skys (fingers xed) I purchased a Celestron 8" SCT with a goto mount and cant wait to get a good night and start capturing the M42 nebula with the Canon. Piggy backing will be great too for wide angle, but again need time to pack up the scope and stuff... I will be moving to Canberra (which is inland australia) in June so will set up a permanent setup in my backyard with nil light pollution

image details - 10 x 15 secs 1600 ISO.


Cheers for the input guys :) Hope you have fun playing with the image.

Oh and Doug it is a shot of the milky way as we see it, i just wish Orin was in a good position, but its a bad time of the year and also, im hanging to get a look at Jupiter but will have to wait until mid year...

Trav

[Doug]

Hi Trav,

I pretty much came up with the same results you did. I worked on the gradient a little more...but you are right there is a lot of light pollution in the photo.

As I applied the curves the red really came out more.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Doug

[mamill]

I came up with a similar result. While a very nice image it is extremely noisy, probably due to the high iso combined with the very short/not enough exposures.
Here is my stab at this..maybe over stretched?

[traverswilkins]

Hey

Wow, I am impressed :) Awesome work guys. I can't wait to get out this weekend and take more images.

Thanks for the input :) I shall decrease my ISO. I'm thinking maybe ISO 800 and increase exposure time to 20/25 seconds, and take a minimum of 50 shots.
Hopefully weather permits to get the scope out, looking at getting a piggy back bracket to attach to the scope.

Hope the weather is clear this weekend for you guys up in the northern hemisphere.

Cheers

Travers