Combine the Orton Effect & Synergistic Sharpening for Unbelievably Crisp Images

when I made this shot late last summer I was quite happy with it and why shouldn't I have been after a night of focusing the Williams optic Xena star Appo refractor dublet on the whirlpool Galaxy equipped with a simple uncooled planetary camera I was rewarded with this and it's not a bad image but then one crazy day I got the idea to do something very strange to combine an old photographic developing technique from the 1980s originally devised for landscape photography and then later adapted to piture called the Orton effect along with my method for synergistic sharpening by by dividing up an image into its low and high frequencies and then synergistically applying the unsharp mask Clarity tool and highpass filter to the high frequency information and the result was this now regarding myself personally I am simply amazed that this level of detail can be obtained from a mere 81 mm aperture 447 mm focal length Appo refractor its focal length is actually around 550 but this is with a reducer flattener and the camera use was just a player one Uranus C uncooled osc I mean there's nothing special about this equipment and what this tells me is that image quality is more about developing than equipment and I believe that we could push our images so much further if we just enhanced our our developing techniques that's so important because the software that we have available today allows us to take our developing so much further than ever before so in this video we're going to build on information from the previous four videos the First on improving your ability to sharpen with frequency separation linked here the second on sharpening synergistically also linked up into to the right the Third on applying the orts in effect to Astro images and the last on why I drizzle every image that I shoot all the videos are linked up and to the right and also Down Below in the video description if you would like to watch them I strongly suggest that you do you can make use of this video on its own but you'll get a lot more out of it if you preface that study with the previous four videos because each Builds on the other now this image here the original image which was made before refining it by way of frequency separation the Orin effect and synergistic sharpening it was originally stacked and veloped in pick insights using what I have come to call the a athetic development protocol and also bear in mind the image was drizzled by two when stacking as I covered in my video to drizzle or not to drizzle I drizzle everything with technology as it stands right now I can see no meaningful reason not to drizzle and the potential positive outcomes for it make it worth it in my opinion every single time so using the weighted batch processing script the image was stacked it was taken from an osc so there was just one one stack to do then on the Stacked image I ran the blur exterminator to deconvolve the stars then the noise exterminator to address noise of course and then finally separated out the deconvolve Stars I saved that star plate separately then I undid all the changes on the original image getting it back to its original state and then ran star Exterminator on the image to remove the UND deconvolved stars that left me with just the structure of the Galaxy to develop I stretched the histogram on that image adjusted the curves and then finally ran the noise exter Ator first to address noise and then using the blur exterminator as an AI powered sharpening tool set the blur exterminator not to sharpen stars and operate only on the luminance Channel and then ran it on the image to sharpen up everything the image was then moved over to Affinity photo where curves were adjusted a bit more and ultimately the stars were rejoined to the structure image simply by using the screen composite method to add the star plate back to the structure plate and that gives us what your seeing here and this is a good image technically there is nothing wrong with this image but as you just saw it can be taken further let's study how I'm going to drag this image into Affinity photo where I'll carry on developing by applying the Orin effect and synergistic sharpening and if you try this technique to improve your own images you can drag them into your preferred layer based non-destructive photo editor as well let's jump in so now I'm in Affinity photo where I've dragged in the image that you were just looking at on the right in the layers panel you'll see at the very bottom a background layer and a number of layers up above because I've already worked out the full development of this image and we'll step through the process now the bottom layer is the original background image notice the locked icon on the right that means that layer is locked and no destructive operations can be done on that layer it's pretty standard in layer based non-destructive developing to set your proof layers which are your importance Originals locked so that they cannot be changed by accident or intent in the process of developing they serve as Originals that you can go back to if you make a mistake that you cannot undo so we can't change the original layer destructively but we can duplicate it so I've duplicated it and from the duplicate I've made another image that's also known as background this one won't have the locked icon on it though this is an image that we could operate on though we won't this will be the original image that the proceeding layers will act on because the proceeding layers are going to be composited meaning that they will carry their traits down to this layer I'm going to make the working layer visible and the proof layer invisible and then the next step was to duplicate that working layer and when duplicated it was called background but I simply clicked on the name and changed the name to screen indicating which composite mode is applied to it this is the first step in applying the Orton effect to this image composite modes are ways to tell a layer to add specific qualities to the layer beneath the screen composite mode tells that image to add its luminance and color values to the layer below upper right of the layer's panel is the composite list there are nearly 40 composit options in Affinity photo from there I selected the screen composit option by the way composit options are called blend modes in Affinity photo and then the screen layer adds its luminance and color values to the original background layer below I've made the screen layer visible and the effect is very powerful to mitigate this the opacity of the layer was turned down about 20 5% was good this adds a useful degree of luminance value color value and even sharpness to the layer below now this does create a little bit of a problem the brightest regions of the image such as the core of the whirlpool Galaxy are inclined to become blown out because they're already pretty bright and yet more luminance is being added to them we need to mitigate this and this is easily accomplished by placing a luminance filter within the screen layer I've already placed luminance filter in the screen layer it's currently selected but it's invisible let me click the white dot so you can see it and see what it does pulling down the left side of the luminance filter restricts the passage of luminance throughout the image this Returns the space to a more natural color and restricts the passage of some of the luminance value even to the brightest regions of the image so that the core is no longer blown out once the filter is adjusted that looks good we can see detail in the galactic core again so that's where I'm going to leave the filter now in the screen layer if you look on the right beside the white dot that indicates that layer is visible there is a paintbrush icon this means I've done a little masking within that layer What I've Done precisely is selected the erase tool right there and then erased out the effects of the screen layer from the distant Galaxy right up here and from the other distant Galaxy right beside the whirlpool down just right of lower Center let's go over there [Music] now masking out just those two tiny portions of the screen layer Will Keep Those Distant and delicate structures from being blown out then the working background layer was duplicated again and that layer dragged to above the screen layer where it was labeled Vivid light and did is so named because on that layer I'm going to apply the Vivid light composite function now I could go into a lengthy explanation of what this does it combines color Dodge and color burn effects but we can just ultimately say that this enhances contrast while also enhancing color it's also a very powerful composition tool and can easily posterize an image so you'll need to turn the opacity way down a little goes a long way as you can see here at full power the Vivid light composite mode will completely posterize the image turning it down to just 15% will'll carry over as much of its color and contrast enhancing effects as we would want now in a typical application of the Orton effect to an image we would have also added a blur layer but we astrophotographers don't want to blur or create an an enchanted feel to our images at least not in general so we'll leave that part out you can think of this as the Orton effect modified for astrophotography through it we get enhanced luminance and color and that was our goal now we're going to turn all these layers into a new pixel layer that we can perform the next operations on so I'm going to right click on one of the selected layers and tell Affinity photo to merge all the visible layers that's the layers that are presently turned on or made visible you can tell those layers by the white dots at the right now a new layer called pixel will appear I'm going to make that layer visible and all the lower layer invisible now we're going to operate entirely and solely on the pixel layer this one layer now portrays our entire image of the warpool Galaxy which has been enhanced with the Orton effect now we needed to merge all those lower layers into a new single Pixel layer so that now we can effectively split it into high and low Bend information under the filter submenu we'll find the frequency separation tool the gray field on the shows the high bandwidth information I'm going to pull the radius slider in the tool all the way to the right telling the separation tool to extract all of the high frequency information when I click apply the pixel layer will be split into two new layers one called low frequency and one called high frequency if I turn off the high frequency information so that we can just see the low frequency information you'll see a blur of luminance and color because that's where low frequency information goes if I turn off the low frequency information you'll see the sharpness and detail within the image because that's where the high frequency information goes splitting up the pixel layer into a separate low frequency and high frequency layer will allow us to conduct sharpening operations only on the high frequency information this allows us to go about sharpening with less chance of affecting low frequency information creating the benefit of a reduced chance of making artifacts and it allows us to operate more precisely on the high frequency information now above you can see I've already opened an unshared mask a Clarity tool and a high pass filter and I'm going to drag each of those tools into the high frequency layer ensuring that they only operate on the high frequency information where our sharpness detail is located on the left of the layer I'll click the down arrow so that I can again see the sharpening tools now within it and I'll begin synergistic sharpening operations by starting on the unsharp mask applying this tool in this way you're only going to work the radius and the factor sliders it is extremely unlikely you would ever want to use the threshold slider I'll drag the radius slider over to the pixel setting shows what I feel to be the maximum sharpness within the image without creating grittiness in the image and then I'll see if I can pull out any more sharpness by moving up the factor slider this is an iterative process sometimes I'll back the radius a little down and see if I get better results by pulling the factor slider higher and sometimes I'll pull the radius slider higher and see if I can get more sharpness by leaving the factor low in this case a radius of 1 pixel and a factor of one seem to give the best results the next step is to operate on the clarity tool Clarity adjusts the contrast between pixels in the mid luminance values this creates an overall fine sharpening effect it is a very powerful tool though and it is easy to overdo it and create a gritty look within the structure your goal is always to create a look of natural sharpness without it going gritty now I had made a practice run with the clarity tool before separating out the highend low frequency information and before separating the information I needed the clarity tool at 18% but separating out the information makes the clarity tool much more effective because now we are only operating on the high frequency information where sharpness is and operating just in the high frequency information I find a mere 5% is plenty adequate this time with the clarity tool we have good mid-range sharpness and the image has not devolved to grittiness now we're going to operate on the last tool the high pass filter you have to tell the highpass filter how you want it to convey its operation on the layers below and I generally find the softlight composite mode to be good for the highpass filter will gently enhance the high frequency information on the lower layers the softlight composite tool seems to work the best with the clarity tool and The unsharp Mask as well in other words it seems to give them a good Synergy so I'll just select the softlight composite mode and then I'm going to begin moving the radius slider on the high pass filter back and forth until once again I think I have made the image as sharp as I can without it devolving into grittiness frequently the way I'll do this is I'll move the radius slider way up till the image is obviously gritty and then slowly slide down till it doesn't look gritty anymore take note of that position then put the slider at zero and slowly slide up until I see grittiness appearing and take note of that position then I'll place the slider somewhere below whichever position was lowest this just helps train my perception to be aware of when grittiness first appears this point looks pretty good and now we've pulled a lot of sharpness out of this image sharpness that looks beautiful not gritty but appropriate to the image let's take a look at the Tiff of this image after it's been exported bear in mind this was accomplished with a mere 447 mm focal length telescope and a $400 uncooled planetary camera I'm going to be a little nuts here and compare this to a Hubble image so here's the Hubble image let's reduce its size and compare it side by side with the image that was extracted from my humble little refractor telescope I think the image that we got out of an ordinary 447 mm focal length refractor using a cheap planetary camera is not that bad when you consider right beside it is a Hubble image when the image is reduced to about the same size as the image I shot I'm going to make the comparison yet a little more Apples to Apples by extracting the color out of of the Hubble image I was just using an osc camera with an IR UV cut filter nothing to really add any H alpha or any other color into the image so let's see how they stack up to each other when the color spaces are about the same there's clearly more detail in the Hubble image and you could blow up the Hubble image a lot more but at this scale it is a pretty good comparison isn't it that 447 mm focal length Appo refractor and that planetary camera when you consider that that whole rig costs maybe $1,500 compared to the roughly 10 billion of the Hubble well I'd say we're getting our money's worth and remember it's not the equipment it's the developing I remain a firm believer that we can get so much more out of our equipment if we push our developing skills further I hope you found this video informative and useful and perhaps it will enhance and improve your own final limit and workflows as always thank you for watching have fun learn something and get out there and shoot the [Music] sky

Channel: SKY STORY

Views: 2,164

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Id: kfwnhF0p6EY

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024