DSLR Astrophotography - Get the Best Results from your Camera!

if you want to capture amazing astrophotography images in 2020 whether that's a wide-angle Milky Way photo or a deep-space object then you need to capture a lot of light and this is a very simple concept but a lot of people tend to overlook it and I want to break down some of the problems I've faced over the past couple years doing Astro photography and how I took things to the next level so this photo here was taken a couple years ago with my nikon d750 these camera settings were f 2.8 15 seconds iso 6400 and a lot of beginners tend to freak out about the iso what i so should i use what i sell but they don't spend enough time thinking about how much light they should be capturing and to be clear the iso never changes the amount of light coming into the camera it essentially just brightens the image that's really all it's doing so this first photo here if I increase the exposure and the shadows you see this purple glow here this was pretty much baked into every single photo I used to take at night and it showed me crazy I couldn't figure out how to fix it how to stop it from happening and that's why a lot of my earlier photos had kind of a unique color scheme because I was the only way I could find to minimize this purple glow and stop it from detracting from my overall photo and then about two years ago I found a very simple solution and it's really changed everything and all that I have to do is capture more light and the best way to demo that is with probably this set of images here this is a 20 second long photo ISO 6400 F 2.8 and if I increase the exposure and the shadows again you'll notice that same purple glow and if we zoom in here there is a ton of grain all throughout the photo and this is what a lot of people's images look like you'll even notice some color model that's this weird splotchy greens and purples so if you're only capturing 30 seconds or less of light and the main reason you do that is to make sure your stars are sharp you're never gonna get a great photo because you didn't capture enough light to really take a good look at this photo and then watch what happens when I take a form in a long photo it's actual little bit longer but still drives the point home look how much cleaner the foreground is there's no purple glow and the images looks so much better so there's 20 seconds versus about four minutes and if i zoom in here to the car you can even see you the hubcap details there's no real grain anymore there's a little bit there's none of that splotchy colors that you can really see there's a few hot pixels but those are no real big deal if we compare that to the twenty second long photo huh look how terrible that is you can't even make out the H there for Honda and there it's crystal clear and I think this image really just drives home that point where if you take longer exposures your photos are just gonna look so much better and it's gonna change everything I'm sure you're immediately thinking we'll wait a minute the stars are blurry what are you do about that and that's where a star tracker comes in and this is why I've been so passionate about star trackers over the past few years and I've pretty much done everything around a star tracker because when you're able to take longer exposures it just changes everything so the way a star tracker works is you just pointed up to the North Star basically that's where all the stars appear to rotate around and to be clear it's the earth rotating but anyway once you point the star tracker up to that spot in the sky you turn it on you can attach your camera and now your cameras gonna follow the motion of the stars so when you do that you can take a four or five minute long photo and the stars will be sharp the only problem is now your foreground is gonna blur how so what you can do is you can come back here you can take your format along photo for the foreground stars bore out but that's okay then we'll take our tracker turn it on and then we'll get a form a long photo for the stars now the stars are nice and sharp and then we could take the two blend them together and create a stunning image and that's really the secret to creating breathtaking Ashta photography images whether that's wide-angle or deep space but one of the main points I want to touch on this video is that a little while ago probably couple months I asked for people to send in some images of their cameras so I can do some test I finally have the data for those tests that I can share with you guys today and it's we've kind of really touched on it but let's look at a nikon d750 this is what we call a dark frame where we just put the lens cap on the front of the lens make sure no light reaches the sensor in this case the person took a 300 second long photo ISO 200 I want you to be clear here the settings really don't matter for this test if you want to do it I recommend you do all you have to do is put the lens cap on the front of your camera put the camera to manual mode throw a shirt or a towel over the camera and then take anywhere from a 1 second to a 30 second to a form in a long photo again ISO aperture shutter speed doesn't really matter once you have that dark photo bringing in here to Camera Raw or Lightroom and then increase the exposure and the whites and when you do that you're gonna see the problems that are ultimately going to manifest in your photos if you don't capture enough light that's really what's going on so we say that same purple glow so this is another person's d750 if we compare that with mine though pretty much the same problem both cameras have that same purple glow although there are some differences and that's a thing you might have 3 or 4 the same exact camera but none of them are gonna perform exactly the same and you really got to test out your own camera rather than just relying whatever I show you to make sure your camera is performing correctly and with that in mind of all the photos I got in it was actually a Canon 6d that looked the best so if I'd stretch this out ignore the green and the grain and everything I want you to look at the overall flatness of the image if you will there's no bright areas and dark areas it's just pretty neutral all the way across I mean there's a little bit of bright around the corners but this is a very good sensor from the looks of it and let me show you what a bad sensor looks like so you can kind of get the idea what I'm talking about this is a Canon 5d Mark 3 and this is still the ugliest thing I've ever seen and when it comes to photography and it causes no end of problems I was working with a student and this sensor the problems in that photo were baked into the photos that we took so this is a photo we took earlier in the night with that same camera and what you'll notice is that there's the veil nebula there this had the potential to be a great photo but look at all this color grain here and the hot pixels I mean it looks absolutely disgusting and if you look right here see how it's kind of unnaturally bright we see the exact same thing in the dark frame and over here it's oddly dark we see the same thing in the actual photo we even see the glowing corners so my point with this is if you go and take that dark frame again the settings really on point is make sure no light reaches the sensor whatever problems you see here are gonna manifest in your photos especially if you don't capture enough light and in this case we captured a lot of light 240 seconds at f56 that's pretty darn good but that just goes to show you if your camera's not up to the task you're gonna be in for a lot of nightmares over the next couple months and years but if you had like a Canon 6d this very specific Canon 60 there's no bright areas there's no dark areas I unfortunately have a an image taken of the night sky with it but I can guarantee it's gonna work a lot better than this 5d Mark 3 now if you've been doing Astro photography for a little while now you've probably heard about dark frames in bias frames everybody online is gonna tell you that you need to take darks and bias and then stack those to reduce things like hot pixels and noise and even some of this banding so I wanted to test that out and show you what I found because I always like to do things my own way and I usually get a lot of crap for it but we'll see exactly what happens and one other thing I want to show you is that the past few nights we've been having a workshop and there have just been tons and tons of satellites I believe there's satellites going through our images just one after the other it was like a stream and I think there's a star link but it's kind of shocking I'd never saw anything like this before until this year so that's one of the downsides of Elon Musk all these satellites in the sky which I'm pretty sure that's what this is if you know more leave a comment let me know anyway going back to our main point here this is a single 90 second photo and for the workshop he took about 30 or 40 images one after the other then what we did is we used two different applications actually first we used secreto so if you're still beginner this is a free application that's going to stack all your images to reduce grain so we can double click on star images find all of our what we call light frames these are all the photos of Orion the more the better we load those in and then we're gonna add in our dark frames where it says noise images just to recap dark frames are taken at the end of the night you want the camera sensor to be the same temperature so leave it outside put the lens cap on use all the same camera settings and try and take as many as you can usually the more the better and again we're gonna load up all of our darks and in this case we actually had more darks then star images just because some frost start to get on the lens and it ruined some shots but then we would stack these all together so let me show you the results of those tests and we have this is kind of the way I do things I only stack the light frames because frankly I think dark frames are waste of time now when we stretch this you'll notice that the image is fairly clean out there's some color noise there because these were Roth photos that were stacked together but there's a lot of nice detail there in the Orion Nebula the problem starts to show up though when we stretch the image more and you might see it now there's that same banding we have a big purple band here that's kind of a yellowish one and that matches exactly with his dark frames that we took so here's his dark frame you'll see there's kind of like a yellow band there and it really noticeable purple one and if we look back at our stacked light frames the band's line up exactly and it might be kind of hard to see here but they're definitely there so again what everybody online is gonna tell you you don't want to just stack light frames you want to add in those darks which I just showed you but this is the result of that and when we stretch this we'll see the exact same problem so hopefully you can see there's this big purple band here there's two more below it and then we have that yellow one they're going across so keep your eye on the big purple one there and the yellow one I'm gonna go back to the dark frame and they line up exactly so even though we took dozens and dozens of light frames and even dozens of dark frames and stacked them together these problems are still baked into the photo and then that brings up the final thing bias frames these are allegedly supposed to fix these problems as well so we used an application called deep sky stacker this is another free download for Windows and we added in our light frames dark frames and bias frames I'm not going to get into how to do that today because as you'll see I think it's a waste of time for DSLRs anyway and when we come back here this was the final stack out of deep sky stacker and you can see it looks terrible which means we have a lot of work to do in Photoshop to get this to a presentable image and in fact I can't even really stretch it the way I need to to demo for this video but I did it off-camera and I found that the band's we're still here even when we added in the bias frames so I just wanted to be thorough here and say even if you include bias with your darks for those who know what I'm talking about in my experience it doesn't help with DSLRs and banding so if you want to do your own test and maybe send those in and prove me wrong I'd like to see it because I can't seem to get it to work but my main point with this little tangent is that you know for a lot of people with DSLRs dark frames and bias frames they're not going to fix the worst offending problems that you'll find baked in your images so they're really a waste of time and energy the best thing you can do is take longer exposures and as I showed you when you take longer exposures it's going to automatically remove that in most cases and that's always going to give you the best results and one of the problems we have with deep space astrophotography in particular is that it's very hard to shoot long exposures when we're using a telephoto lens and that's where you need to get into like Auto guiding and things like that if you're still beginning and just focusing on wide-angle night scapes don't even worry about Auto headers but if you kind of know what I'm talking about I got plenty of videos on that here on YouTube so be sure to check out my auto guider videos because that's going to ultimately give you better results if you can shoot longer exposures rather than taking all those dark frames and spending all that extra time and there's one other example I want to show you this was sent in as part of the group project and this was the original photo somebody sent in they took it with an 80 d from Canon and they already del the stacking ahead of time so they stacked in their bias and darks I believe but when I stretch the image we see the exact same problem this is a different camera but the Canon cameras as we talked about tend to have serious banding issues and even though he stacked everything the way they tell you online it did not remove this problem let me show you another example so we have a 7d mark 2 here and this was a 20 second long exposure the sky is fairly bright but the foreground is very dark as I increase the exposure and the shadows you might notice if you look very clear closely here we have some more banding going on you see that band band now if we take a look at his dark frame here what a surprise we see some banding just like we saw in the normal photo and I hope you're starting to grasp this concept now because this is so important when you take your dark frames whatever problems you see here they're gonna show up in your photos if you don't capture enough light and that's the same thing we saw with my images at the start of the video this is a dark frame from my camera we have the purple glow it's the same purple glow we see in my earlier photos because I didn't capture enough light but once I stopped taking 20 or 30 second long exposures and took form in long exposures the problem disappeared and there's one other example I want to show you from my camera this was a 15 second exposure taken arches it's a dark silhouette but maybe I want to get some more detail out of it if I pull it up there's that darn purple glow again but if I just take a four-man long photo now look how clean that is and that looks almost like we took it during the day just because I captured a lot more light now again the only downside with this method is that you have to blend in the sky so let's rig it your star tracker take a 4 min long photo with a star tracker and then especially with this photo you can blend it in about three seconds because there's a clean horizon if you want to learn how to blend all this be sure to check out my course is available on my website I've also got a patreon page where we go into all this I do new videos every month but it really takes some practice to get the processing down but the first step is just getting the good data out of your camera to start with and finally let's look at one other series of photos this is a Nikon d70 200 and you'll probably notice a familiar problem we have a purple glow and again I want to thank everybody who sent in those photos because it really allowed me to determine what's going on it seems like the Nikon cameras are very prone to this purple I would kind of call it amp glow but the Canon cameras tend to have problems with banding and this is an EOS R you can kind of see some banding there although I really like the EOS R it's a good camera but if we take a look again there's that 70 mark - right here a lot of banding there was also a 5d Mark 4 which is like their premiere camera but we see the same banding problem point being whatever problems you see in your dark frame they're more than likely eventually going to show up in your normal photos at night unless you take longer exposures as I showed you right here that was original and after all right well I think I've drone on long enough in this video just to recap if you want to start taking better images in 2020 first thing I'd recommend just taking longer exposures capturing more light when you do that you're gonna pull out a lot more detail you're going to pretty much get rid of all that grain in your photos and probably high that purple glow if you're an icon or some of that banding if you're on Canon and the big trick to taking things to the next level is a star tracker so if you want to learn more I got tons of videos here on YouTube I got my patreon page and I've also got full courses on my website which are really in-depth there's like 15 some hours in each one that's the way to go if you're just getting started but it's all I got for you today if you have a question you can leave a comment and my real big takeaway is that you should go grab your camera right now take a dark frame just throw a shirt or something over it put the lens cap on settings really aren't important we just need to capture the sensor essentially then bring it here into Camera Raw or Lightroom bring up the exposure and the whites whatever problems you see here again they're probably gonna show up in your photos so ideally you have something nice and flat like this 60 and now that we're looking at this for the last time you're starting to understand why this looks so good it doesn't have banding it doesn't have bright spots and it doesn't have my infamous purple glow so that's kind of what we're looking for out of a camera I guess that's why a lot of people like the 64 Astro but if you do these tests you'll quickly see how your camera is gonna do in low-light scenarios you

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 300,291

Keywords: astrophotography, tutorial, canon, nikon, deep space, milky way, nightscape, sensor, camera, star tracker, skyguider pro, star adventurer, sky tracker, banding, amp glow, hot pixels, grain, low light

Id: KMsW9slSwzc

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2020