Astrophotography with a 50mm post processing

hi i'm walt this is delta astrophotography in my last video i photographed the entire constellation of orion with a nifty 50. now i'm going to show you how i processed it i'm going to leave a link to my stacked unprocessed tiff file in the description below so if you want to download that and follow along with me that'd be awesome the software i'm going to be using is lightroom and photoshop you can get them both together for ten dollars or it's ten dollars a month but if you just wanna try it out ten bucks i'm also going to be using a photoshop plugin called gradient exterminator sadly it's the most expensive thing on the list it's 50 bucks but if you're taking astrophotography seriously you should definitely get it it's going to fix so many of your images i use it twice in this tutorial it's amazing next i'll be using a piece of software called starnet plus plus and this one's a game changer because it removes all of the stars from your image and you get to process your nebulosity and your stars only image completely separately and then recombine them at the end now it's available for free for windows and mac but the mac version operates a little different and i don't quite know how to use it so you'll probably have to look up a tutorial for that if you use a mac and finally i stack my photos with a piece of software called sequitur or sequator um if you're just using the tiff i supply down in the description then you don't have to worry about that everything's already stacked for you all right let's go ahead and get everything downloaded and installed and let's get to processing all right i've got everything loaded up in lightroom let's take a look we shot it iso 800 50 millimeters i have 3.5 120 seconds and i do want to add that i did shoot from a dark location i live in a pretty dark area out in the country okay so let's take a look at the corners i just want to show you this they look pretty terrible probably should have stopped down to f4 or lower oh well can't fix that now and another problem i had was well two i can see a little bit of red glow in the corner and it really gets exaggerated when i start doing curve stretches even with uh added dark frames in the stack so i don't know what's going on there and towards the end of the the image session that night i don't know what happened the moon was not out that night so i have no idea what caused it to suddenly start getting brighter especially from the right and the white balance is all thrown off it just looks terrible and i think maybe these last 10 images or so are not even usable but i'm going to try to correct it as much as possible by balancing the white balance so let's do that now let's get started i'm going to click my first image here and i'm going to come down to vibrance and saturation over here on the right and turn them all the way up let's try to get this uh even all the way throughout the image right now it's it's very red it's too warm for me i'm gonna just kind of drag this over into the blue a little bit there we go it's getting better i don't want it too blue but all right it's still very red down here in the in the bottom right corner so i'm going to fix that using a graduated filter so i'm going to click this right here graduated filter i'm just going to drag this over like that make sure everything is zeroed out over here you don't want anything to be affected except temperature i'm going to turn that towards the blue and there we go drag that in a little bit more towards the middle looks good to me this is balanced as i'm going to probably want to get it right now click done now we're going to double click vibrance and saturation to get them back to normal and we can try to correct a little vignetting if if you'd like if you have some serious vignetting in your photos if you didn't take any flats normally i take flats but i just i thought i'd try to make this video simple all right i'm gonna make sure that no sharpening or noise noise reduction are on go down to our vignetting right here and just give it a little bump and you can see it's brightening up in that corner right there it's also kind of bringing out that glow though we're gonna end up cropping that out anyway later okay now let's make sure our first photo is selected hold shift and click our last photo this includes the darks and click sync and synchronize this to all of the photos so they'll all have the same white balance correction [Music] and as you can see these photos down on the end are no longer terribly orange but they still seem a bit bright on the right side and so i think i'm i'm just going to ignore these last few photos so let's export them click the first one and we'll go down here i had 65 photos but i think i'm only going to select about 55. [Music] so there we go file export i've got my folder chosen for youtube and we're going to make sure that they are saved as tiff compression none and you can go to custom settings edit and give them a name orion for youtube there we go i'm just going to click export all right now that those are exported we're just going to select all of our dark frames 10 sadly should have probably taken at least 20. anyway select our dark frames go to file export now i'm just going to click click put in subfolder and call it darks and click export now that everything is exported we're going to jump over into sequitur or is it called sequator i'm not really sure you guys let me know in the comments so let's start by adding our light frames by clicking star images here they are just going to click the first one hold shift click the last one and click open now we're going to add our dark frames by clicking noise images go to my darks folder select all those and add them in now we're just going to tell it where to save the final file by clicking output and i've created a folder in here called final all right there we go i'm just going to title this orion for youtube there we go now we're going to work down here in the left hand side i probably need to move my head so you can see what's going on over here there we go okay so we're gonna click on accumulation right here and click select best pixels as you can see this removes aircraft and things like satellites and i definitely have a lot of those in my photos all right and we're going to move this over to strict and that's really all there is to it so i'm going to click start and let it roll all right and it's done it took about three minutes and 32 seconds let's open this up in photoshop and here we go let's zoom in a little bit see that there is very little to no noise in here i just love stacking okay here we go we're going to start by creating a duplicate layer by hitting control or command j now we're going to do a levels adjustment by hitting control or command l i'm just gonna bring this in a little bit not too much my skies were already pretty dark and i don't want a solid black sky really i think that looks good to me all right let's do our first curve stretch i'm going to hit ctrl m command m on a mac i'm just going to start right here and pull up bring the highlights down a bit i'm gonna be blowing out any stars all right looks good to me hit okay now we're going to create a new stamp layer this pretty much takes everything that we've done and and creates and puts it all in a new layer and puts it on top so i'm going to do that by hitting ctrl alt shift and e altogether on a mac that's probably command option shift and e all right let's uh things are getting a little bright again so let's do a levels adjustment control l bring things in a bit it's getting a little red so we can always go uh where it says channel rgb look at our individual channels and adjust those individually as well bring that in it's definitely looking bit a bit blue bring the blue in maybe a touch of green bring that in a lot of people use numbers to do this accurately i just try to eyeball it okay i'm happy with this that last level's adjustment was pretty serious look at the difference so we're going to create a new stamp layer again ctrl alt shift and e doing that because the next thing we're going to do is create a star mask for my next curves adjustment i don't want to bring out any more of these stars i don't want to make them bigger i don't want to bring out any more of this smaller hidden stars and this star mask method is is a game changer it just really allows you to edit your photos without blowing out your stars too much so here we go first thing i'm going to do is copy this image so we're going to hit control a and ctrl c it's probably command a and command c on a mac now we're going to come down here and click add layer mask now we're going to hold alt or probably option on our mac and click the layer mask it brings it up solid white and we're going to paste our image into the layer mask by hitting ctrl v now we have a black and white image pasted in the layer mask and i want to invert it because i want the stars to be black and the background to be white if the stars are black that means every time i do an edit anything that's black will not be affected so let's invert it by going control or command i and there we see that we have a white background with black stars now i'm going to exaggerate those black stars now by pulling up levels control l i'm just going to bring the shadows in levels is so jerky when i try to do this within a layer mask like this i don't know why all right as you can see i'm really exaggerating the blackness of the stars now but my white background is turning gray so let's bring the white in to the left a little bit okay that's looking good click ok now there's some nebulosity in here that's kind of turning black too and i don't want that to be black i want the nebulosity to be brought out so i'm going to click my dodge tool it looks like a lollipop it could potentially be set to burn so just right click it if you need to and switch it to dodge and change my brush my my exposure to yeah about 50 will be okay and your brush size can be adjusted with the bracket keys on your keyboard i'm just going to kind of click tap tap tap unlike the orion nebula maybe some of the areas around the stars i kind of want to bring out some of that star color okay and the last thing we're going to do is go to filter blur gaussian blur i'm going to blur this by somewhere between two and three pixels that way there won't be any hard unnatural looking edges okay now let's click back on the actual photo on our top layer when you see these little marching ants that are around the edge of the photo it means it's still selected let's deselect that by hitting ctrl d okay let's get back to work i'm going to bring up um curves again by hitting ctrl m let's do another curves stretch and this time it should kind of leave the stars alone yeah there we go definitely bringing out that loop and i can definitely start to see the witch head nebula right here looks good to me a lot of people do an s curve i usually just bring the the darks down by using levels but that's really up to you however you like to process all right let's click okay it's starting to get a little messy a little out of hand but that's okay we're gonna hit ctrl alt shift and e to do a new stamp layer i'm gonna adjust my levels again ctrl l see if i can bring that in some more look at the individual color channels bring in red a little more green you don't want to bring it all the way up past the data see over here we're getting dangerously close to the edge and when you get close to the edge you're clipping data and that's probably the super black dark area right there which i'm not too concerned about i guess but you just got to be careful if you bring anything too far past this edge you're clipping data and if you you can't see your histogram at all just go to window and click histogram and just watch that histogram and make sure you're not clipping any data until we bring blue in a little bit there we go that looks good green is definitely on the verge of being clipped over here see that that's that's just too much all right now we just we just this needs to be handled uh and you know we can see this red glow is a problem so let's take care of this with gradient exterminator i love love love gradient exterminator i'm going to start by clicking the lasso tool and i'm going to draw a circle around my main subject here it doesn't have to be a perfect circle or anything now i'm going to go to select inverse now go to filter rc astro gradient exterminator we'll leave it at medium medium balance background color click ok check this out and that is so much better in my opinion uh let's deselect that and now we can do another levels adjustment control l bring the reds in a little bit bring the greens in a touch and the blues in a touch i had to bring the reds in just a touch more okay now at this point i'm going to do something completely different we're going to use star net plus plus to remove all the stars from the photo so i can edit the nebulosity separate and we're going to create a stars only layer so i can edit the stars separately as well so let me show you how to do this at least on a pc it's if you're using a mac you'll probably have to look up a tutorial on how to use star net plus plus because it is different on a mac but it's very easy to use on a pc so what we're going to do is go to file save as and we're going to save a copy of this file in your starnet folder i have mine on my desktop i'm just going to call it orion for youtube save it in the the starnet folder um i'm just going to call it orion for youtube uncheck layers you definitely don't want to do that it'll just create a gigantic file and you don't need all that and click save now i'm going to open up my starnet folder so go to desktop starnet and there we have it orion for youtube i'm going to click that and drag it into rgb star net plus plus you'll see this come up and it just it'll do its thing unfortunately this process can take up to 45 minutes so this is the time where you go to work make dinner do whatever it is you do i'm gonna go take a shower and i will see you when this is over all right i had a shower and some breakfast feeling good let's get on with it so when star net plus plus is done in the starnet folder you should see a file now called starless a tiff file called starlist so we'll just open that in photoshop i'm just going to drag it down into photoshop like this and there we have it it's kind of funky looking not as clean as i would have liked but that that's how it is so now what we need to do is make a stars only photo so what we're going to do is we're going to go back to the image we were working with before and i'm probably just going to go ahead and flatten this image just to save my computer resources it's kind of a destructive way to do things because you it makes it harder to go back and fix anything but that's what i'm going to do for now so i'm going to go to layer flatten image all right now to make this a stars only image we're going to go to image up here at the top apply image at source right here at the top we're going to select our starless photo at blending we're going to select subtract [Music] and leave your offset at about 2. click okay now check that out we have a stars only picture and a starless picture that we can both edit separately so let's get on with that shall we i'm going to start with our starless photo i'm gonna make a duplicate control j okay i might take the band-aid tool and go around here and fix any weird little problems that i might not want exaggerated it's not a ton you can adjust the brush size with the brackets as usual i call it the band-aid tool what is it actually called spot healing brush tool all right yeah there's not a whole lot i want to take care of so let's just be done with that we're going to do our final curve stretch because really after this it just starts getting so muddy i can't deal with it but can you see the witch head in here all right let's do this i'm gonna hit ctrl m [Music] just gonna bring that up definitely see some nebulosity coming out some more the witch head some more of these dust clouds in here [Music] but also you can kind of see where it looks like holes where the stars used to be and that's why i'm not going to stretch this anymore i might even bring this stretch down a little bit okay just going to click ok [Music] let's do a levels adjustment control l it's not a whole lot i can do right now i'm not too worried about clipping because the only thing that's really clipping i think um over here on the left are probably these super black parts right there for the most part i think we're okay drag that in just a touch more that that's about all i'm gonna do i'm gonna try running a gradient exterminator again let's see what that does click my lasso tool draw a circle around everything select inverse filter rc astro gradient exterminator click ok ctrl d and run one more levels adjustment there we go i like that a lot right now i'm just going to bring out some color a little bit start with barnard's loop so i'm going to go well let's create a new stamp layer ctrl alt shift e [Music] and now i'm going to go to select color range make sure sampled colors is selected i'm going to take the dropper and just click right in right in here play with my fuzziness i really mostly just want to get this loop selected so let's leave it about right there okay i'm going to go to layer new adjustment layer and i'm going to pick hue and saturation for this and the reason i'm picking hue and saturation over vibrance is because with my camera um it picks up the reds that the hydrogen alphas as more of a purple and i just i would like to see it a little more red it's like a pink purple and i like seeing like the horsehead nebula and bernard's loop in red so just bring up the saturation a little bit not too much because it does add noise and move the hue over until it's a little more red there we go that's fine all right we're gonna hit control d to make sure everything's deselected ctrl alt shift e for a new stamp layer and let's bring out the blues a little bit select color range sample the blues over here bring that up a bit all right got some of these blue selected now we're going to go to layer new adjustment layer vibrance just bring that up a little bit okay ctrl alt shift and e because now we're going to do some noise reduction that is definitely needed somebody's calling me but it says suspected spam i get way too many of these all right anyway noise reduction yes um filter camera raw filter sometimes i forget what i'm doing all right make sure you got the detail tab opened i'm going to zoom in by uh left clicking and dragging left and right look at all that it's just awful looking so first color noise reduction and then noise reduction and that really smoothes it out a lot now if i were editing something um a lot more zoomed in like the orion nebula or andromeda galaxy or anything like that where the deep sky object fills the entire screen i would not go nearly as aggressive with the noise reduction as i'm gonna do on this image today but because everything is so wide in this photo i'm gonna go a little overboard with it there's a lot of noise in this photo anyway okay i'm gonna click okay i might try to sharpen maybe the witch head nebula a little bit so ctrl alt shift e for a new stamp layer filter sharpen i use smart sharpen just gonna turn the sliders about like this for me i don't know i'm not gonna sharpen the whole image just a few places click ok now right now it just sharpened the entire image and that's not what i want so i'm going to create a new layer mask right here by clicking this button now i'm going to invert that layer mask by hitting ctrl i now it now you can no longer see any sharpening i'm doing to make sure that this right here is set to white since i have a black layer mask set this to white right here turn my brush on maybe about fifty percent now i'm going to just kind of tap tap tap over anything i want sharpened horsehead and flame for sure maybe the rosette i'm leaving the orion nebula alone because we're going to fix that later that's a whole another step okay that's about all the sharpening i'm going to do ctrl alt shift and e it's very subtle you probably don't even notice it we're getting close to the end of the starless portion of this uh edit i'm going to go to filter camera raw filter and do some overall adjustments go to the basic tab up here add a little contrast see what happens when we add whites without the witch head just a touch clarity just to touch but not much because that definitely adds noise and problems dehaze maybe a touch vibrance and saturation there's a lot of orange in here i wonder if i can get that out in the color mixer yeah there we go that's i like that a lot better it's just that was too much for me increase the reds a bit now i'm definitely going to do a little more noise reduction click the detail tab noise reduction see what happens if i add a little more clarity now that i've reduced some noise just don't want to go too crazy with all this now if this looks like a like a hot mess to you right now don't worry once you add the stars back in it suddenly just pops [Music] all right click ok i think that's starting to look awesome see a lot of cool detail in there now what we're going to do is we're going to go over to our stars only image and we're going to mess with this just a touch control j for a duplicate layer if you flattened everything now let's see i'm going to do a little bit of star reduction but not much because in this image you can see like it looks like holes where stars used to be and i want to fill those holes let's do select color range highlights adjust fuzziness up and range down get a lot of stars good and selected in there click okay that looks great let's zoom in for a second look at something now see how like in some of these stars like this the entire star is not selected that's why we go to select modify expand and expand it by two pixels there we go that looks a lot better select modify feather it by half of that expansion so half of two is one there we go now i'm going to hide all these marching ants ctrl h and go to filter other minimum i'm just going to do the star reduction at maybe 0.5 click ok yeah not bad okay let's do um ctrl d to deselect and filter camera raw filter let's just increase the vibrance and saturation of the stars just a little bit bring out some star color and if there's any noise in there hidden somewhere let's get rid of it some noise reduction and click ok now we're ready to add our stars back in so we'll hit control a command a on a mac and ctrl c to copy go back over here we're going to paste our stars on top control v there there it's done what do you think no i'm kidding um go to blend mode right here where it says normal and we're going to change it to screen boom that just i love it that looks so cool to me i mean it's it's not quite done yet but the the difference is huge look at that wow okay so it's a let's do a new stamp layer ctrl alt shift and e we're gonna do one more final camera raw filter adjustment basic tab maybe a little contrast touch of clarity i think the colors are popping enough i probably don't need to add any more vibrance or saturation detail touch more noise reduction trying not to go too crazy with this it looks okay to me yeah bringing it way up is not getting rid of any problems i'm seeing so we're just gonna bring it back down all right hit okay now one thing i'd like to do is fix the orion nebula because that looks like crap and then the star rigel doesn't look that great either so here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna go over here to this stars only layer and i'm going to close that out now let's um let's find the folder where we saved our stacked image from earlier our stacked but unprocessed image let's go ahead and find that here it is let's open that back up in photoshop again so this is fresh out of sequitur um also it's just kind of amazing to look at before and after like wow anyway let's do a little uh levels adjustments on this ctrl l pull that in a little bit looks good to me and a little bit of star reduction the same amount we did on the other photo so we're going to go to select color range highlights and adjust it to where we see a lot of stars here we go looks good to me and once again we're going to go to select modify expand by 2 pixels and select modify feather by one pixel and ctrl h to hide the marching ants filter other minimum and earlier i might not have said this but make sure preserve is set to roundness you want your stars to be round of course 0.5 pixels click ok all right great now what we're going to do is copy this by hitting control a for select all and control c for copy go back over to our stardust star uh the it's called starless layer but it's you know it's our process image and we're gonna paste it in here ctrl v all right now let's move our process image back on top so we want the processed image on top and the original image right underneath just like this okay and we're going to create a layer mask on our processed image make sure it's white i mean it's going to be white by default so make sure this is set to black get a brush going on going on right here and our opacity i'm going to bring that down to like 25 let's go ahead and zoom in select my brush again okay try to paint in paint the details back in there we go i think the star rigel needs it a little bit too yeah maybe beetlejuice up here hey yeah yeah that looks a lot better okay let's zoom back out yeah i'm quite happy with that now if you still see some some edges around here where it kind of looks like your edit is fake one thing you can do is go to filter blur gaussian blur just kind of make sure your selection is uh what you painted it on that mask is blurred a little bit it might be too much yeah some good blurred edges there all right and we're pretty much done at this point let's just do some cropping uh new stamp air control alt shift and e that should be good about right there all right everybody there you have it that is my orion consolation processing technique i hope you learned something uh please leave me some comments and let's talk about processing techniques and uh if you like this give me a like and a subscribe and and thanks so much for watching as always stay spacey everybody and clear skies bye [Music] you

Channel: Delta Astrophotography

Views: 22,135

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Id: 8QA3PlF-OV4

Length: 38min 9sec (2289 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021