M42 Behind the Image - Pixinsight & Photoshop Workflow

in a world where pictures of the Orion Nebula fill your social media faster than an astronomers natural reflex to talk about the weather one man decides to risk it all and share intimate details about how he captured and processed m42 again that man's name is Dylan O'Donnell and you're watching star stuff [Music] how team astrophotography I just like to thank Ben chard Matthew Altman and Judd underscore s who have been asking me for a full work flow video to show you how I process an image this particular video won't cover the dark frame calibration and image stacking that's in a previous video which I'll link in the description however this does go through a lot of my process for bigs inside Photoshop mosaic in color calibration star reduction and that sort of thing so hopefully you enjoy it I hope you guys have a Happy New Year it's a long one it's not very funny but hopefully you get some tips and tricks out of it so I actually just want to share my tips and tricks and I want you guys to become better too so if you like what I do here just hit like and subscribe because there'll be more of it over time enjoy hello YouTube I've recently finished a new image of m42 Orion it's been really nice to have some time off and so I thought I'd come back to this crowd favorite with everything I've learnt in the last few years I can actually show you my m42 from four years ago okay em so this was my first m42 from 2014 and it's it's okay that's pretty good I thought I was using a pretty high focal length telescope the 9.25 Veggie HD so I really had to get my head around guiding and stuff and it's not it's not the greatest photo it's rough the stars are weird it's weirdly processed there's not a lot of depth to it the clouds and the gas sort of finish about here but it's okay 2,000 years later [Music] so you can see there's been a little bit of improvement over the last four years now I really wanted to focus on the dust in this one so this is a really deep exposure as you can see I've got detailed dust detail right to the edges the stars look much better they're not perfect but they're much better it's just got clear detail throughout the image and the stars are nice and small as well which is always a bonus because when you're taking a nebula photo you don't want the stars to overrun the image you want to highlight the actual structure of the nebula itself so if i zoom into this one a little bit you should see yeah nice stars much more detail around the edge so I'm going to give you a little behind-the-scenes about how this image was created before I do that let's just look at if I do a google image search for m42 Orion you can see it's a it's a crowd favorite there are so many versions of this particular nebula and the color is meant to be like a salmon sort of pink color that's the natural hydrogen kind of color but what people tend to do is they push it to purple you know the purple here and and even this one it's just a little too purple it's a little unnatural looking to me anyway and some people go way overboard with the processing you know this this image got an iPod and I don't want to disparage the photographer here in and of itself this is an amazing image it brings out a lot of the dust detail but the sharpening is just so overwhelming in this you lose that you lose a lot of the natural clarity and natural smoothness of it I think that's just my opinion but it's such a popular target it's really hard to do it justice because so many people have so many great versions of it and there's a lot of bad versions as well so it's it's one that you can do very badly very easily it's a beginner favorite because it's so bright and big in the sky that anyone can can grab an image of it so I'll show you reasoning behind my m42 I ended up doing a to panel mosaic for this so in my data here I've got the first panel that was my first panel and it wasn't great so that's the first night I ended up having to redo this so this is just hydrogen-alpha the moon was out so I lost a little bit of clarity with the moon but I'll show you the second panel that I got as comparison and there's the second panel there now that turned out a lot better I the stars are just a lot nicer a lot smaller I didn't use a framing tool or anything like that I just left the camera where it was and shifted where the core was so the core on the first night was roughly over the middle then I just moved the core downwards and so I knew that those two would stitch together you didn't need that much overlap but it gave me a nice squarish image in the end so the first step for all of this stuff is is to stack your panels now I have processed this image and I've written the processing steps up in here I just used the normal screen transfer function to give it a stretch so it's already stretched whatever stretch you do if you're doing a two panel mosaic you want to apply a similar stretch to the other one so I sort of did an auto stretch and let it do an auto stretch on the second one panel so that all they'll both roughly the same level and they wouldn't look too too bad once I stitch them together now the other thing to note is that when doing the core I also did a lower stretch for the core so so there was one version then I stretched like that so that I would have more detail in the core some people suggest that you should do a run of you know smaller thumbs maybe thirty Seconds subs or something like that so you've got a lower core detail I just it's all especially if you go to CCD camera all of that detail is mostly there so you just you can stretch it and then save that off and use that as part of your mosaic now the other step that I did in this particular image dynamic background extraction dynamic background extraction gets rid of that vignette income what and that process is pretty simple you just have to go through and add these dots in the background so you don't want to hit a star you just we just want to go through and add a bunch of dots just in the areas that should be like the background of space these dark areas that sort of thing after the corners and you do that until you've got you know I don't know a hundred dots or however long you want to spend filling in that and then once you've done that you just go to target image correction subtraction tick all of these boxes you just hit that green tick there and it will make the change now obviously didn't go through that process here but you get the idea that's how dynamic background extraction works the other final process that I did was the star mask and morphological transformation so when you've got your stretch like this if you hit the little spanner here I've got a bunch of values that show up this is your shadows and this is your mid-tones it's easy to remember even though they're not labeled please remember that this is mid-tones because it's in the middle it's the middle column and this is shadows so we actually need this information and I'll show you why I want the star mask so when you're doing a star mask now this is a stacked I've already done all the stacking if you want to know how to do the image calibration and stacking I do have another video where I've gone through that process in in a lot of detail so I'll link to that video this is all the processing that happens after the calibration and stacking so here in the star masked all it wants these shadows and the mid-tones and that's what you pull out of that screen transfer function so I'll go back into that I'll copy this value all the shadows and I'll stick that in here and then I'll go back into that spanner copy the value for the mid-tones chuck it in there I remove the ticks so I have nothing ticked here these are usually okay with defaults five two one and two but you might want to change them if you've got really large stars that you want to try and reduce but for something like this there's not a whole lot of variety and a star size here's a couple of bright ones and for noise threshold there is a bit of noise in the image so I'm just gonna pump that up just a little bit and then drag it on to here you can try with the smaller preview if it this takes too long for you but I find it doesn't really take too long I just do the whole thing and see what it's like so this will generate a star mask for us there's our star mask now to apply that star mask we just there it is we just drag this tab here over underneath here and the mask is applied what masking means is that everything in the red is not going to be affected but whatever we do now the only thing that gets affected is the stars you can see them poking through the holes so the next tool we used morphological transformation for star reduction is going to only apply to what's happening at the stars here now you can see I've got some dirty pixels here so this stripe is where a hot pixel has come through so I'll have to clean that up in Photoshop later but for now because I know that this mask is applied I don't want to look at this I will go to the mask menu and remove show mask so I can just see my image I know that the next thing that I do will only apply to the stars which is the morphology morphological transformation now I've already done this to this image so these stars have already been reduced but I'm just going back to show you behind the scenes how I got to this point now I use two iterations for this so I'm just going to drag this from the triangle onto the image and we should see the Stars reduce boom now because I've reduced the stars already they're getting a bit too reduced so I wouldn't I wouldn't even consider using something like this but I'm just showing you how the Tool Works so I'll just undo that transformation and then the last step is applying that stretch because if we take the preview if we take the preview of that stretch away there's nothing there it's just zoom out again so that's stretched but our data is still nonlinear and that's with no stretch at all so we want to actually apply this stretch before we say that too far so I go into histogram transformation open up that tool and use this little triangle here to pull that stretch data across to this tool you'll see it change there we go it's got the stretch in there then I use that little triangle to pull that stretch onto the image when we do that you'll see that I've left the star mask on so I'm just gonna undo that I do this all the time that's something I do all the time I'm gonna remove enable mask and we're gonna do that again and it'll apply the stretch to the whole image and it's all gone white because we've still got this stretch running to the preview stretch so I'm gonna remove that preview there and now the data is linear it's ready to save off and at that point I will save as and save it as a tiff file which I've already done so let's go have a look at those I'll just close this so the next step would be to merge the image so this one's one that I've already merged this is the one I ended up with but what happened was I went to where is it automate photo merge and I then went to browse grab my two panels so that was panel number one and then merge that with panel number two where's my second panel it is so these are two files which I've processed the same way stretching reducing the stars with the star mask and so they're ready to merge in Photoshop so you just hit okay and it will merge those two files together and there's our mosaic so if i zoom out here you can see this is backwards because I'm using the rassa the image that you get is mirrored so I'll just rotate this a little bit so it's backwards this is a mirror image of what it should look like so I will go to image rotation flip canvas on tool and there's what it should look like however I did see that once I zoomed in you get those rings of death the stars were out of focus they were fine on this side of the mosaic quite clean but in here they just were out of focus so I ended up having to go back and do that photo merge process again and of course you'd crop out the edges to get the yeah to get rid of those loose ends the image crop and end up with your hydrogen-alpha data like that didn't end up using that one I'd had to shoot it again so I'm not gonna say that I had to shoot it again a second night and go through that process again to get a much nicer version so stars looking better they're now looking clean into end and that's the layer I ended up with for my hydrogen-alpha which i think looks pretty good we've got stars out to the corner looking sharp we've got dust detail all throughout all to the corners but of course the core is blown out and it's not in color and so the next step would be to repeat those process with the color frame so I went out and shot the same panels a panel here and a panel here in color with a color camera not using any filters or anything like that just an RGB camera in this case the qhy 12 and that gave me a color layer and I did the same steps that I just showed you there I merged them together one side stretched and reduced the Stars but in actual fact I didn't reduce the stars on the color layer because the stars are so small on this on the mono layer I actually like having the stars a little bit bloated on the color layer because it gives the outside of the star sand color because the inside of the star is going to be white anyway so most of the star color you get is going to be on those blurry out of fringes of the star so I actually use any star reduction on the color layers but what I did do is mask back in the core and remember I was saying the core is way too blown out here and that's okay like it looks dramatic but that's a little too dramatic so in this layer here you'll see I've got the core so if I toggle this layer I've dumped the core back in now let's look at this without the mask so that's the lower stretched frame that I dumped over the top and that's registered so I've used the star registration tool so it completely matches the rest of the image now I label that mask again and the mask if I show you what the mask is you can see I've just painted it manually so I can actually take my paintbrush and paint in how much of the core I want so I'll show you what I mean by that so I use the black brush we're back out so nothing is masked here our mask is completely black now if I reverse so I'm using the white brush now I can actually just paint back in the core as I'd like it which is pretty good but I'll just go back a couple of steps to leave it the way it was now the next thing I would do and did do is add some levels so I've done something tricky here I've brought out a bit of brightness but I've masked a bunch of stuff so I don't lose the or and this level here if I open up levels you can see I've stretched this I've stretched the black point in here to give the blackness of space and then on and this that's unmasked then on the next bunch of levels I'm just pulling a little bit of brightness back out again because I want that brightness in the dust I want to see the dust but what's happening if I look at the mask here you'll see I've done a funny trick the mask is sort of a black and white inverted version of the picture and what does that mean I don't want the brightness to pull out the core so all the core is dark and I don't want the brightness to make the stars any brighter because then they'll get bloated I wanted this particular stretch this level stretch here to only apply to the dust itself so cool trick you can do I am delete this mask you can see the core just blows out I'm trying to get the dust to come out but the core blows out completely so a cool little trick you can do is go to your bottom layer select all copy that layer to click into that layer mask paste in the image and I'm going to invert it now this is a cool trick because it protects all the stars and it's protecting this core area and I'm gonna use I'm going to adjust those levels adjust levels and because I want to protect more of the core so I'm going to pull that level down now it's protecting a lot of the core and the stars and we can actually pull the white slider in just to give us more of that dust the dust will be affected by this adjustment layer here now if I hit alt again so we can see what's happened that's what we wanted to do so it's bringing out the dust but it's protecting the core so the core doesn't blow out okay so the next step is our color so a color mask is here this is our color layer now if we look at the color layer itself so I'll just change the blending to normal this is the image that I took of the color not blended at all so this is just the color image and it's a little bit noisy there are some weed pixels here which need to be fixed up there's some more weird color pixels which will have to be fixed up in posts so I would go through with the healing tool and just brush those out so I'd sit here for a you know half an hour or whatever going through and just fixing up those weird little cosmetic details but that's the color layer and there trick with the color layer is it looks pretty good but it doesn't look near as good as the final result right because we want to mix in the color with the mono detail which I got which is a lot more detailed so in the blending layer here we just change it to color and that's pretty good now we've got all of that dust detail back now we've got all of that detail that we got from the mono camera we've also got some color here but it's not nearly as colourful enough and also the color is a little bit noisy so if I change this back to normal you see it's a the colors noisy so I actually made a copy of the color layer this one here and I blurred I actually did some noise removal to be honest I went to topaz lab topes labs topaz D noise 6 and I did a really heavy noise removal so you can see the difference that's the noisy color layer and this is the topaz noise removal so that looks a lot better but there's still not a lot of saturation it's a cool image but the blue is sort of a bit pale and this is sort of a bit passed away now it's really tempting to just go crazy with your hue/saturation layer so if I enable this layer you'll see my slider up here is plus 50 now I could go crazy with this and make it super deep and people do and that just looks terrible to me I like the color balance here in that blues and the Reds and the Browns are all pretty even but that's just way too harsh there is one other one other step I haven't shown you which is how I got the color to this very even point so maybe I'll just quickly jump into pigs inside again and show you how I got my color level to look this nice there's a color image now if I stretch this you'll see it looks awful it's totally green biased which is partly the fault of the camera and partly the fault of light pollution in the atmosphere generally but that's obviously not the colour we end up with in the end so I'll show you a cool trick for getting down even color if you've got a colour image like this in pix inside these are my go to steps color calibration so I'll just take this tool and default settings I'll just pull the sitting across from that arrow in and that fixes a little bit but now I'll go to the next tool that I use which is background neutralization so this recognizes that most of the background is green and that's not correct and background neutralization will change that back to a gray that's much better and the final thing that I do is noise reaction SC n R SC n R sort of gets rid of the green bias you can see it says color remove green so I used leave that as default because it's sort of very subtle but you can still see this is sort of green so I'll drag this in here yes you know and that makes it really nice and gray so there the three steps that are used to calibrate my color stacks and that's how I got that color to look so natural because I don't want to I don't want the color to be subjective I don't want it to be my eyeballs and my brain just trying to show you or show the audience what the color should be for an astronomical object I'd really prefer that the pewter and the algorithm worked it out and that's what I really like about that background utilization it knows that the background is meant to be a shade of gray and once it sets that all the other colors are natural so let's hop back into the image as we have it now so I've got a few other level adjustments here so I've got another layer adjustment with a small mask here so I'll hit that and you can see I've just darkened those two nebulas to just pull back a little bit of that brightness and if I look at the mask so you can see how that mask is made you can see it's a big circle and the way I would have got that is by creating a big circle using the shift this is sort of a lot cleaner than numb then using the paintbrush tool and then I would have gone select modify feather and the maximum feather is 250 so I would have feathered it by 250 which makes it a nice gradient and then hit the invert to invert that from black to white and let that through so anyway that's how that that lamb asked work on that and that just brings back a little bit more detail there in both the nebulas which is nice now one problem I had with this image as you can see this is purple line here and that's because of ambient light pollution which you know we all encounter some time to time the bottom of the chip has a little bit of bleed here where it's just going into red so I've created a huge justement layer here and you can see I've just pulled the saturation down if we look at the layer mask for this one that's it there I've just used the gradient tool to pull a little layer mask on that side so there we go that's with that's with it that's without it now curves obviously a nice little tool for adjusting your colors and the curve properties here I've just pulled back let a little bit of the signal on the top end and pulled it in from the bottom end and I've got a couple more adjustment layers here ring and still I'm I'm still trying to deal with this background it's still a little bit purpley for my liking so I've got a layer here which removes some of the red this is the levels and you can see I've pulled the red across just a touch and I've got another levels here which just pulled a little bit of green out of the image I think the because the the image is still a little green for me so I've pushed it just touch towards the purple red end but not too much that it looks like big bright purple thing and there is a final step which I'll show you so at the moment this image is huge if I go in that's at a hundred percent it's huge but I've also not applied any sharpening to it and I've got this beautiful structure in here the Cascades and all of this dust but you don't want to apply sharpening until right at the very end so this is what I would do at the end so once I've got the image the way I like I go image image size I'll change the width to 204 eight now 200 for 8 is still big it's like wallpaper HD big but it's also optimized for social network so if you go and share your image on Facebook or Instagram or anywhere else 204 8 looks really good on almost any monitor or any device so I I'll change my resizing there and at this point the image is sort of the way I want it so I'm going to flatten it so I'll flatten image there we go and now I want to get this sharpened and I also want to remove a little bit more noise as well because there's still a little bit of noise in here you can see it's a little bit noisy in the edges so I'm gonna go used topaz labs D noise 6 which is a really great plugin I use it for both for planetary and for my deep-space images now the sharp the denoising that I'm going to use is around 6 very subtle but six are fine even for planets works works really well it pulls out a lot of that noise without pulling out the detail so that's the first thing I'll do that's much better you can see how clean this image looks really smooth smooth as a baby's bottom that's great but sharpening is the last step we've already resized the image now for sharpening when you go to sharpen you lose the softness of the stars you get all this extra detail in the dust which will sharpen up but you lose the stars so what I'm gonna do is copy this layer so we've got two versions of it sharpen I use smart sharpen okay you see but this this level of sharpening which is what I ended up using it's pretty good like you get a lot of that detail in the dust really lovely but all the stars turned into these pinpoints which I just don't like you lose all the softness of those stars so I'll turn the preview off that's nice and soft stars are nice and soft they have a bit of a glow around them turn it on and the stars suddenly become these dots they almost look like hot pixels so that's what we want to avoid and that's why I made this second layer so I can mask the stars out again so we'll apply this sharpening and you could go like brutally heavy on this if you wanted to like if I bump this up to 266 and the radius it's you know the sharpening can get ridiculous and we don't want it to be ridiculous I usually leave the radius down around the one area and we'll pull this back to 156 and that's a more sane sharp and it's still soft and beautiful and buttery but you can still get the sharp edges which is nice so I'll apply that and now we want to fix these stars so if I go back to the way it was I'm sharpened I get nice does then I add it again you can see the stars just become too too sharp and too prominent so what we're gonna do is mask the stars and a good trick for this without doing the inverted layer mask truly is you can just use the Select tool on a star now you can see I don't have contiguous ticked up here so if I click on a star it selects every other star as well so we've got all of those stars selected it's got most of them you can see they're all the stars are selected so at this point I'll go select modify expand I'll expand the selection by say 10 mmm that was a bit big I'll undo that I'll go select modify expand by five okay so we've got a nice edge around the stars and then I'll feather that selection so it's not just a sharp cutoff make it three now I'll hit the mask option at the bottom here and that creates a mask I look at this mask now it's only applying that sharpened layer to these areas we've cut out and I actually wanted the opposite of that I actually want the stars to be protected so we're black around the stars now if I go back and turn this on and off you can see the stars are not affected or at least the big stars that were selected these stars up here I still get a little bit sharpened but these big ones still have a nice outer glow of color which is nice and we're still getting the sharpening happening in our nebula detail but not too much and there is the final image which I think looks pretty cool and I'm really happy that you guys enjoy the image as well it sort of did very well on reddit and my Instagram where you can follow me if you do want to know more about the gear that I use including the telescopes and the cameras and all of that sort of stuff I do have links on my videos where you can go and find that stuff on the Amazon affiliate links that I post so just a joy to be able to get some time to to do something like this Center to do an image and the feedback from for many of you said that this was one of the the bed hour or even the best image of Orion that you guys have ever seen there are better ones out there there are some amazing astrophotographers who I really look up to and I don't but I'll try and copy but obviously they give me inspiration as well to come up with processes that pull out this detail in Orion so that's that was the intention for this image to see the dust detail and I'm really happy with that you can see the difference in color between the blue areas and the brown dust and how they interplay up here in the folds we've still got some core detail which was masked back in the nebula is sharp where it needs to be but the stars are soft and glowy where they need to be it's all around I think it's a pretty balanced image I'm really happy with it so that's it from me I hope you enjoyed this processing tutorial I know a few of you have been asking to know a bit more about my workflow so hopefully this behind the scenes of this image gives you a bit of that insight I had a really great year the channel has gained like 5000 subscribers this year which is amazing to me I really appreciate the support and I'm gonna go out because it's New Year's and I'm gonna have one or two or ten drinks and remember everything is meaningless and we're all going to die you've been watching star stuff with Dylan O'Donnell it doesn't matter if you hit like it doesn't matter if you hit subscribe because as you know everything is meaningless and we're all going to die

Channel: Dylan O'Donnell

Views: 30,567

Keywords: dylan o’donnell, astronomy, processing, pixinsight, photoshop, masking, layers, m42, orion, astrophotography

Id: m9t3aj_PpiU

Length: 35min 25sec (2125 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 31 2018