Astrophotography for Beginners: 7 Essential Processes in Pixinsight

did you know you only need seven different processes in pixel sight to process an image hello i'm daniel zalero and i want to help you take your astrophotography to the next level so today i'm going to be showing you seven processes in pixel sight that i think are the most basic the most essential ones that you need to get going with pixensight so i've got my image my raw image of the helix nebula open that's what we're going to be using to show you the seven essential processes and the first thing we're going to look at is the screen transfer function function function when you open this up all you got to do is click this little nuclear button the auto stretch button and there you go i've got a stretched image now if you happen to find that when you click that your image looks all green like this with a one shot color camera that just means that you've got this link rgb channels button selected and you just need to unselect that then hit auto stretch and it should look just like that all right the second thing that we need to do is to to crop our image so let's go to processes over here and dynamic crop and so the reason why we want to crop it is because after stacking you're going to get edge artifacts on the edge of our photo that we don't need and that we don't want to process so we're going to click the reset button which selects our image and all we do is just drag in on the edges here to get rid of those stacking artifacts then hit the green execute button now we've got a cropped image i click down here to zoom to fit which we will maximize it again next up we're going to do dynamic background extraction dbe as it's often called is probably the most difficult of these processes to learn and can take some experimentation so this image here is is going to be pretty simple to use with it but after opening it you want to click on your image and it will give you based on the size of your image a default sample radius that usually works pretty good alright so now we want to select samples to sample this image now it's important when selecting the samples on your image that you you don't pick stars you don't put your samples over stars and that you don't put your samples on any of the nebulosity in the photo because we want to sample the background not the stars and not the nebula so i usually like to keep it really simple you don't want to go too crazy with placing sample points i usually put one in each corner of the image and then usually about somewhere around halfway up in each of these squares i'll add another sample point now you see this nebula here i want to be careful not to select that so i'm going to put it just before it now we need to change the tolerance it's not sampling very many pixels we want to allow it to sample more since i know that i haven't selected stars or nebula we can be a little bit more tolerant so i usually like to go with at least three that's probably a good place to start on smoothing factor i usually like to put this around 0.5.6 because it's smooth the transition of how it fixes the background of your image under correction i like to use division division works well for optical vignetting while subtraction's supposed to work better for light pollution i really haven't found a whole lot of difference between the two for now we're going to select normalize go ahead and click discard background model for now okay so let's go ahead and hit apply hit execute we're gonna get two images one of them is a new window of the corrected image that we can look at and the other one is showing us the the background so let's go ahead and open up our screen transfer and select that again so you can see this gives an overall look of how it's correcting our image which looks pretty accurate it looks like the vignetting in our image we can close that out and let's take a look at sample image here and see if it looks good click our stretch button okay yep overall it looks pretty balanced so this looks noisy um but we're not going to use this um we're going to go ahead and close that out since since i like the way that looks what we're going to do is go back to the options here we don't need another background model and what we're going to do is instead of opening a new window we're going to apply it by replacing the target image applying it directly to our image hit the execute button okay and i'm going to close dynamic background extraction and i can show you the before and after so here's before you can see all the vignetting and here's after you can tell things look a lot more even now all right after dbe now we need to do the next process which is background neutralization so in order to use this what we need to do is create a preview we want to find somewhere in the image that has no nebula that has no stars this looks a good spot here make a little preview square now we want to select that as our reference image so click there under view selected click preview one and then all we do is we just drag this to our image and as you can tell it's changed some things which can easily be fixed if we go back over to screen transfer and click that auto stretch again and now we're going to do the color calibration color calibration is going to help balance the colors in our image now on this one for the background reference we're going to want to go ahead and select the same preview area and just like before we just click or drag that onto there see there you go so you can tell that it's done quite a bit to balance those things out this is not been permanently stretched this is tilt still technically what we call um a linear image so what we're gonna do is use the histogram transformation let's go ahead and reset our screen transfer function here so we get this black and white image go back over to our histogram transformation now down here you're going to want to click track view so it tracks our photo and then right here there's a little preview button open that up so what we're going to do is drag this midpoint slider and we're going to apply it a few times just drag it in just a little bit here you can see our stars got brighter so let's go ahead and drag this to our window and apply it and every time it'll stay like that unless you reset it so we can go ahead and try that again and it's slowly stretching that image when i apply another one [Music] it will look that way all right now on our preview that looks a little over stretched so what we can do is click the reset button so now it matches our real image and on the preview let's go ahead and bring this in just a little more and now we can pull this black point now you want to be careful over here under shadows you want to be careful not to clip too many pixels so bring that in and we could probably brighten it up just a tad see now that's something to pay attention to um we're getting a lot of noise the more you stretch it the more noise you're gonna bring out so let's actually back off just a little bit here and i'd say that looks pretty good to me all right so let's apply this final stretch to the image [Music] and close that out all right and one last thing with astrophotography a lot of times especially with one shot color cameras because of that extra green in the in the pixel array you're going to get a lot more green than you really need so scnr is a process that removes the green from photos so you just open it up and you drag this on there all right so it's subtle but if you look this has in the helix nebula has more of a blue hue now if i go backwards and undo it it looks more of a turquoisey color but after applying scnr it looks to me it looks better it has less of that green and there looks more natural now if you're a beginner and you're a little worried that pixen sight might be too difficult for you watch this video right here and until next time clear skies [Music]

Channel: Zoliro Astro

Views: 4,263

Keywords: amateur astronomy, astronomy, astrophotography, astrophotography for beginners, astrophotography image processing, astrophotography processing, astrophotography processing tutorial, astrophotography tutorial, colour calibration pixinsight, digital image processing, helix nebula, image processing, nebula, pixinsight, pixinsight le, pixinsight processing, pixinsight tutorial, pixinsight tutorial beginner, pixinsight workflow, zoliro astro

Id: wLrOBUyuNSI

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021