Andromeda with a 75-300mm lens processing

do your deep sky astrophotography photographs taken with a 75 to 300 millimeter zoom lens turn out looking like garbage mine sure do but we're going to try to take care of that by stacking and using photoshop if you saw my last video i took about 60 65 photographs using this lens and then i put the lens cap on and took a few more we're going to stack those together in a software called sequitur you could also use deep sky stacker or if you're on a mac i think it's called starry sky stacker we're going to go into photoshop i'm gonna try to use photoshop as is but there's one plugin that i always use i had to pay for it it's called gradient exterminator 60 bucks i highly recommend this plugin that's going to fix a lot of problems i'm not going to take you through the entire hour to two hour long process that i usually go through i'm just gonna show you a few uh tips and tricks i've learned along the way to fix the problems that specifically come with this lens so we're gonna take the photograph from looking like this to looking like this so enough talking let's hit it i meant go to the computer [Music] okay before we jump into sequitur let's just look at the photos that we took the other night they look something like this not very impressive we're going to fix that there's a lot of noise in here and that's why we're going to stack them all together to remove that noise uh all the uh all the photos that i took with the lens cap on are in a separate folder called darks just to keep everything organized also i'm just letting you know that i went through here and any photograph that looked a bit off maybe the wind blew the camera or something and caused star blur i got rid of those so everything's uh ready to go into secretary so let's open that up all right sequitur is open we're gonna click star images up here at the top and we're gonna click on the first image of andromeda hold shift and click the last one and open these are raw files so it takes a few seconds 63 raw files actually all right now we're going to add the dark frames they call them noise images here let's click that go to our darks folder click the first one hold shift and click the last one and click open all right now we are uh yeah we're going to open output and just tell it where to save the the final file i'm going to put it in this folder called for youtube i'm going to call it andromeda as you can see i've already saved this so um i just don't have to do it twice to save some time but yeah just give it a name tell it where to save and click save last thing we're going to do is click accumulation right here and you probably can't see this because my face is in the way so we're going to minimize this maybe we're going to see if we can drag this over so you can see the bottom of the screen here [Music] there we go so we've clicked accumulation now we're going to go down to select best pixels and move that up to strict and this is in case you have any uh airplanes or satellites or anything moving through your photographs and and that's that's it we hit start after that so go ahead and hit start and we're gonna go into photoshop and open up the saved file okay now we're in photoshop and we've got the photo open that we just stacked in sequitur um the first thing i'm gonna do make sure my zoom tool is clicked and just click fit screen all right not a whole lot to look at right now but that's about to change we're going to go over here to our background layer right click click duplicate layer [Music] and now i'm going to crop this because there's a lot of vignetting a lot of dark in the edges trying to get rid of as much of that as i can so let's do that click the crop tool just bring this in re-center the galaxy it's dark over here i don't like that end recenter the galaxy that looks good to me click the check mark for okay and last thing we're going to do is rotate it because to me the galaxy kind of looks upside down right now image image rotation 180 degrees i like andromeda and that orientation much better all right let's uh let's start adjusting some levels shall we image adjustments levels now we're going to drag this is the dark area of our photograph drag that into the edge of the histogram it's getting rid of any light pollution kind of darkening the area let's drag lights in a little bit start brightening our photograph there we go bring that in a touch just really starting to bring out some detail in the in the galaxy a little contrast all right let's click okay [Music] let's go back over here to the zoom tool and click fit screen all right all right let's create a new stamp layer control alt shift and e basically what that does is it mixes everything we've done so far and puts it as a new layer on top and this is kind of a non-destructive workflow if we don't like what we did we can delete that layer or just turn it off like this all right so now let's check our levels again image adjustments levels and we can bring that in a little bit more to the edge of the histogram let's do the individual color channels as well red can come in a touch green blue blue's fine uh basically we're just getting a nice clean color in the background now not a lot of light pollution and click ok and we're going to do our first curve stretch we will do that by going to adjustments and clicking on curves or going to layer new adjustments layer curves select ok now i'm going to click this little hand tool right here and it gives me a dropper i'm going to take that dropper to a bright area in the galaxy and i'm going to click and drag up oh that's nice i'm starting to see a lot of detail in that galaxy now and now we're going to click on a darker area and drag down just giving giving it some good contrast don't want to go too crazy one thing you don't want to see is any straight lines up here in your curve and you don't want this um if you have your histogram open you don't want to see um this go all the way to the edge here either if you if you don't have your histogram open just go to window and click histogram it's really helpful makes you uh helps you to not clip anything out all right it's looking good so far but this vignetting is really bad so now is when we're going to use the gradient exterminator that i was telling you about earlier so let's create a new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e put a new layer on top all right so we'll go to filter rc astro and gradient exterminator just leave everything as is medium medium balance background color and click ok ah that's so much better just look at this before after i love it all right let's take a look at the levels real quick image adjustments levels looking good let's just bring that in a touch not too much yeah that's fine click ok let's do another curve stretch so adjustments curves let's click the hand tool once again let's bring up a bright area in the galaxy good stretch and let's click a dark area and bring that down look at all that detail we just brought out careful not to clip the curve over here we don't want it to get up to the top and be a straight line that's not good right i'm liking that so far now we just got to do something about these ugly red blobby stars let's create a new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e check the levels image adjustments levels that can be brought in just touch there we go right first thing we're going to do is try to deal with these purples and reds so we're going to go to filter camera raw filter all right we're going to go down to the optics tab we're going to make sure defringe is open let's zoom in so we can see what we're doing all right let's move this purple amount up just a little bit and just move these up a bit as well let's see that's getting rid of the red there we go i don't like there's a little bit of green in there i don't like so let's move that up too yeah all right let's click okay do the before and after red blob red and purple blobs everywhere ah much better all right let's start um making the stars a little smaller new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e now we're going to go to select color range and we're going to choose highlights from the drop down box let's turn fuzziness up and range down until we get a lot of star selected but we don't want our galaxy selected either so let's not go too crazy with it just a little bit of the core in the middle that's okay all right click ok you can see marching ants all over the stars now let's zoom way in you can see there's little selections around the stars but it's not selecting the entire star so we have to expand our selection by going to select modify expand and we're going to expand by two pixels there we go actually with those red blobs let's expand it a little more undo that ctrl z let's go to select modify expand let's try three pixels yeah i like that better now we're going to feather our selection because we don't want any harsh transitions here so select modify feather and we're going to feather it half of our expansion so we expanded it by 3 pixels so that's 1.5 there we go all right let's hit fit screen or zoom out and let's hide all these marching ants so we can see what's going on ctrl h to hide the marching ants now we're going to bring down these stars filter other minimum all right let's just do it by one pixel don't want to go too crazy with it it can make some very ugly looking halos around the stars all right make sure roundness is selected and hit okay as you can see i got rid of a lot of stars or made them smaller let's look at before looks like somebody sneezed all over the photo after i like that that looks really good except for the horrendous star coloration i got going on here so let's see if we can chill some of that out new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e first let's do something about these orange yellow stars zoom right on in select color range and this time we're going to do sampled colors it'll give us a little dropper here i'm just going to click on an orangey area right there and move the fuzziness up until a lot of orange stars are selected that's way too much here we go and let's click ok and just like we did when we were making the stars smaller we're going to click select modify expand i'm just gonna do that by two pixels [Music] select modify feather and since we expanded that by two feather it by one let's zoom out and hide the margin adds again ctrl h right now we're going to go to layer new adjustment layer vibrance and our vibrance controls over the top and so now it's we're going to just turn those down and it's just going to bring that color down on the selected stars i don't want to kill too much star color but these purples and reds and oranges are just just really out of control so i think that helped a lot let's do the same thing with these purple uh stars now new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e zoom in on a purplish area yeah this is just terrible select color range i'll try to do this a little faster now if i can select purple here turn fuzziness up all this purple star selected okay [Music] select modify expand two select modify feather at one okay zoom out hide the marching ants control h layer new adjustment layer and vibrance [Music] all right let's just bring the vibrates down a little bit chill those purples out oh that is so much better yes all right i like it new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e [Music] and you know what when you keep making these new stamp layers on top first of all you should be uh labeling them so you'll know where you're at i'm just kind of in a hurry so i'm not doing that right now but also each time you add a new layer it makes this this file much bigger and a lot of times by the end of the project this thing is huge and it's slowing my computer down i don't always like doing this but sometimes i just merge these layers if it the computer starts to have problems just going to select them all except the background layer right click and click merge layers now we can't go back and undo anything we've done before so that's why i don't really recommend it but just did that for now so the computer won't be slowing down all right so let's start bringing out some uh some detail in um in this galaxy i'm going to hit uh control d to make sure my last star selection isn't still there okay alright so let's do a new selection select color range sampled colors click the dropper on an area in the galaxy i want to bring out i kind of like this color it's kind of a bluish green and bring the fuzziness way down until we really just see kind of that outer edge of the galaxy there yeah like that i like that i'm gonna click okay see our galaxy is selected along with a few stars but adding a little star color back is not gonna hurt my feelings all right layer new adjustments layer vibrance select okay let's just bring that color out a little bit we don't want to go too crazy you don't want it to look fake or anything but i do like a pretty colorful galaxy that looks nice let's uh let's bring out a few more colors in the galaxy let's do make a new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e right let's do this again select color range now i'm going to put the dropper right on this dust lane right here let's bring that out [Music] cool select okay layer new adjustments layer and vibrance click ok now let's just bring the vibrance of that area out it's going to kind of add some orangey red back into the core of the galaxy and that looks really cool i like that a lot [Music] all right let's do a new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e let me check my levels [Music] bring this in maybe a touch all right now we've we've got a little bit of noise here after all that curb stretching so we're going to try to get rid of that one way you can do it is go to filter camera raw filter and click the detail tab and just start sliding up the noise reduction a little bit if obviously if you go a little too crazy with it you're going to remove detail from your galaxy that's just a small price to pay i guess and that looks fine all right i like it now after we've done the noise reduction let's add a little sharpening to bring back some of that detail go to filter at the top sharpen unsharp mask and use some settings kind of like this you definitely don't want to go too high on that radius i've seen it blow out my galaxy's core pretty bad let's click okay yeah that definitely helped a lot and this is going to be probably our final step let's create a new stamp layer ctrl shift alt and e going to go back to camera raw filter this is basically the program lightroom as a plug-in it's just wonderful let's go to the basic tab and just add a little bit of clarity that looks awesome a touch of de-haze not much and do not mess with the texture that just adds noise let's bring up the vibrance and saturation just to touch just some subtle changes there i kind of like this yellowy orange area so let's go to the color mixer and just see if this does anything yeah that looks good let's click ok and we're done save it as a jpeg and show it off to your friends on instagram all right i hope you learned something from that if you enjoyed this video please like and subscribe there will be more content like this coming soon as always stay spacey folks good night [Music] you

Channel: Delta Astrophotography

Views: 41,691

Keywords:

Id: dNQClDkTNzA

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020