Orion Nebula WITHOUT a Star Tracker or Telescope, Start to Finish, DSLR Astrophotography

Are you a photographer that has always wanted to try astrophotography but you weren't so sure about investing hundreds or even thousands of dollars into a hobby before you knew if it was for you? Well then watch this video because I'm gonna show you how you can capture and process a photo of the Orion Nebula with gear you might already have. For this tutorial, I'm just gonna be using five pieces of gear a DSLR, a lens, a tripod, an inexpensive intervalometer, and this last one is optional this is a cheap bahtinov mask. Hey, if you're new to my channel welcome my name is Nico Carver. I'm a deep sky astrophotographer and my website is nebulaphotos.com. With this channel I just want to share my love of astrophotography and especially help newcomers to the hobby get started. I also just want to mention really briefly here at the start that I do have a patreon. Thanks so much to everyone who already supports me. It really keeps the channel going at a steady pace. If you're interested, my patreon starts at just one dollar a month. Today I'm gonna show you how you can capture deep sky objects meaning objects out in space that are outside of our solar system. This tutorial will work for many different deep sky objects. I'm going to be shooting the constellation Orion which is setting in the West right now and we should be able to see after processing the Orion Nebula the Horsehead Nebula and the flame nebula and we're gonna do it with just five pieces of equipment a stock DSLR fast lens tripod an intervalometer and a bad enough mask if you've seen my most popular video series it's called Orion Nebula start to finish this is going to be somewhat similar to that with a little bit of overlap but the technique and the processing will be different since we're not going to be using a tracker or a telescope as they did in that video series for those new to ask photography what a star tracker does or when they get a little bit bigger they're called a mount an astrophotography mount what it does is it moves your camera at a constant rate that rate is called the sadirah rate so it has a little motor in here with gears and then it just moves everything on top called the payload at the city really and that rate what it is is it's the rate that the stars seem to move across the sky from our vantage point here on earth and you can keep time to it just like we normally keep time with the solar rate of course it's not really the stars moving they're so far away from us that they're practically fixed it's really that the earth is rotating very fast around its axis called the celestial Pole and that's why the Stars are seeming to move across the sky so another way to think of a star tracker or amount is the device to counteract Earth's rotation so Earth's rotating this way the star tracker is going to move in the opposite way at that satiereal rate and what that allows you to do is take long exposures of the night sky and have sharp stars and bring out those DSOs deep sky objects through long exposure but they'll remain it nice and sharp because you don't get the the motion blur from Earth's rotation with the star tracker but today we're not going to use the star tracker or a telescope because I want to show everyone out there that you can start doing deep sky Astro photography with gear that's really more just common photography gear gear you might already have at least a lot of it and I'm going to repeat this a lot your gear does not have to be the same as mine to follow along with this video as long as you have some kind of camera that can do some you know manual exposure control you have some kind of lens to be better if they can shoot f4 or faster a tripod and you have some way of taking many exposures without having to touch the camera each time then you have everything you need for this tutorial first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about each piece of equipment to all be using tonight and we'll start with the tripod first thing I'm going to say if you already have a tripod use the tripod you have for your first time trying extra photography there's no need to upgrade anything that you already have that being said the sturdier the tripod the better I'm a big fan of Manfrotto tripod legs these are aluminum monferrato tripod legs that are probably 15 years old I'm sure that I bought it used because I just trust in mine Frodo's quality they held up really well all their stuff works really well but the sturdiness comment and the the reliability also goes for the tripod head you want to use the biggest sturdiest tripod head you have and for me right now that's this video head it's not designed for astrophotography but it's just it has a nice big platform for holding the camera I know for a fact that when I lock down the tilt or the pan that those stay in place and can hold a lot of weight so with the tripod head bigger the better if it's a ball head just make sure that it really stays stable okay next piece of equipment is the DSLR this is an eight year old camera it's my Canon 5d Mark 3 that I bought the year it came out it's a very nice full-frame camera but that really doesn't matter just use whatever you have I repeated this a number of times now and the reason is I've often heard people remark well I'd like to do extra photography but my gear isn't good enough my camera is not good enough it's not true if you have a camera that can you can manually control the exposure you can do this one other aspect that's really handy and we're going to be using in this tutorial is you want your camera to be able to controlled with an intervalometer so almost any DSLR that you have will do this just you if you don't already have one you might have to look up what kind of intervalometer you might want to get they look like this and what it is is it allows you to take many shots so I've tried a bunch of different models I have a fancy wireless one so the way the wireless one works is the controller is this thing and then it has a little receiver that goes on top of the camera and plugs in and then I can control from I don't know something like 30 meters away or something like that it's handy but not necessary it's a little bit more expensive to get a wireless one a wired one works just fine this is the newer model I think it's about 30 bucks and they all basically work the same way so just get whichever one is designed for your camera for people that are new to this device all it does is it allows you to trigger the shutter so normally we just hit the shutter button on top of the camera but without touching the camera physically and the reason that we want to do this is we're taking a long exposure we don't want to add any vibration shake by touching the camera when we take that exposure so we can just hit the shutter button right there to take the exposures but what an intervalometer does in addition to just being able to take a single exposure like that is to take a sequence of exposures so what the camera will do is it will take hundreds of exposures in a row and the way you do that all you have to do is program in the sequence right here and press Start so really easy I'm going to show you how to use it if you are still on the fence about buying one of these if you don't already have one it's about 30 bucks keep in mind that these are also super useful for time-lapse photography but if you're not in the time-lapse you're also a real cheapskate and you really don't want to spend the 30 bucks then what I'd recommend instead is just a shutter release cable so it looks sort of like the intervalometer except it's smaller and all it has is the little external cable release these go for as low as like 10 bucks so the downside to this of course is you can't program that sequence so what you're gonna have to do is just get out there and sit in a chair next to your tripod and be careful not to move and just take hundreds of exposures hitting the button each time manually okay so it's another option I don't recommend it though Oh last thing I'll say about intervalometer is canon is a bit weird they've never put an intervalometer into the actual firmware of the camera to my knowledge maybe and some of their really newer cameras I haven't followed it too closely so don't quote me on that but a lot of camera manufacturers have been doing it for years and so read your manual or google it because you may find out your camera already has a built-in intervalometer so you don't actually need to spend any money on this you can just program it right in your camera and have it rip through a sequence of exposures without you touching anything next up we have the lens and I'll be using this lens this is a lens that I bought for filmmaking it's called the Rokinon cinema 1.5 the optics are the exact same as the Rokinon 85 millimeter f one point-four just so you're aware again use whatever lens you have even if that's your kit lens that came with your camera use it if you do have a choice of lenses though I would recommend a lens with a focal length of at least let's say 50 millimeters and one that can shoot faster than f/4 so what I mean by faster is the number will be smaller because remember focal ratio is a division so f2 is faster than f4 because the aperture is actually bigger because one half is bigger than 1/4 right for astrophotography you really just want that focal ratio to be faster so you let in more light more signal with each exposure also for astrophotography is a general rule of thumb prime lenses like this one where they just have a fixed focal length so this is just an 85 millimeter lens will perform better than zoom lenses where they have a range of focal lengths like a 70 to 200 millimeters however that's just a rule of thumb because I know that every lens is going to perform differently and some of the Canon L Series lenses which are very expensive zooms do perform very well for astrophotography so just take that with a grain of salt primes as a general rule of thumb will perform better than zooms the last piece of gear I'll mention and this one is optional because I'm also going to show you how to focus without it is a Bahtinov mask and what a Bahtinov mask is is it's a manual focusing aid and the reason I recommend it is stars are one of the trickiest things to nail focus on and we have to do the focusing manually even if your lens has auto focus because typically the cameras firmware that actually controls the lens autofocus system doesn't work on the stars because it just isn't trained to do that and there's just not enough light typically for it to do it well so the Bahtinov mask is a tool for accurately manually focusing on a bright star and it really especially with a lens that star has to be really bright like one of the few brightest stars in the night sky for this to work at all the good news though this is cheap this is I believe about ten dollars from Amazon it's just plastic it's not going to hold up forever but it works okay to when if you are interested in buying one I'll put the links in my description and the way that you're gonna choose one is measure the diameter of your lens shade here and then just make sure that that falls within the range listed for that botton of mask and then it has these little adjuster pins so that it will just fit and be centered right on your lens like that for people that are watching this that maybe have been doing Astro photography for a while and are interested I do have much better Bahtinov mask for lens based systems this is called the lonely speck sharp star - and this is the 100 millimeter edition but I really only recommend investing in something like this if you're really serious about Astro photography and specifically lens based Astro photography and you have a number of different lenses you want to use it on otherwise I just think it's a little bit too expensive especially if you don't already have a filter holder system to invest in a really nice bottom of mask like this the reason that it does work better is I don't know if you can see that but the the pattern is very fine on this it's actually printed right on this piece of plexiglass if you compare that to this one you can see that the pattern is much coarser on this one and what that means is that this one is a lot more precise when using lower focal lengths and that's it for gear there are a few things you're gonna want to plan out though before leaving the house so let's go over them the first thing and this is something that I often forget to do until the last minute when it's really too late is charge your camera battery you need to do this probably an hour too ahead of time so there actually has time to charge and really you might want to start in the morning because if you have extra batteries you want to make sure that those extra batteries are charged - the last thing you want is to get out there your battery's dead and you just we're done for the night until you can charge up all right the next preparatory step we're gonna take is we're going to figure out where we're going to shoot and so for this I've pulled up light pollution map info and over here on the right hand side there's different overlays and I'm just going to use the latest information here from 2019 in general I wouldn't trust this completely but it's a good start at least I find that it's a little bit optimistic especially this verse survey if we switch over to the World Atlas survey you can see that's a lot more pessimistic and it's probably a little bit more accurate actually but the it's not quite as detailed as these later surveys which is helpful - so anyways I live right here in Somerville Massachusetts and you can see that's in a really bad place for light pollution it's quite evident if you just step outside in the look at the night sky because only like the 10 to 15 brightest stars are even visible I can see you know Polaris and but I can't see many of the other stars in a Little Dipper for instance so that gives you an idea for how bad the light pollution is but I'm a member of an astronomy club and the astronomy club has an observing field and clubhouse up here sort of near this Westford Chelmsford area so it's al it's a quite a bit better skies up there a few magnitudes better really and so this is where I'm going to go to take the shots for this experiment we're doing in this video if you have a local astronomy club I would recommend talking to them consider joining you might not even have to join just to find out where some good spots are in your area that you can do some astrophotography you can also just google around and and and try to find this information online but this light pollution map also gives you just a general idea another idea I have for you is you can you can look for parks especially some state parks might have some like open parking areas that you could pull off the road and and set up at night you don't want to get trapped in a park of course so just be careful out there make sure that you're not getting locked in or something like that that's happened to me a couple times but usually it works out okay so yeah the idea here is to look for a place that is not one of these brighter hot colors the red orange and yellow but one of these cooler colors the green and blues and blacks are really the ideal place if we just zoom out and look at the whole US here you can see I'm I've lived for the past dozen years or so along the eastern seaboard which is one of the worst places in terms of light pollution in the US when you go out here to the west it's much easier to find a really dark site really nothing that over here on the eastern seaboard is except if you go up to Maine maybe or down to West Virginia is going to be nearly as dark because even when you escape the really bad light pollution you still have a huge light dome whenever you point your camera from where I am to the south of the East from the Boston the city of Boston so even if you can get out a little bit you you really have to get out quite far to really escape light pollution if you live in a big city but the point is just try the best you can to get to a darker site because that's really gonna make your photo much better and much easier to process okay the next thing this is gonna get a little bit technical but I think you can handle it is we have to figure out the proper exposure length if you're coming from the photography world this you'll know this is shutter speed but in astrophotography since we're typically dealing with long exposures we don't usually call it shutter speed we call it just exposure length or sub exposure length and let me explain what sub exposure means or sub for short you can think of our final processed image as the total exposure are often called the total integration and it's a combination of many shorter sub exposures because what we're gonna do is we're gonna stack many sub exposures together to reduce overall noise in the picture so what we're trying to calculate right now is actually the length of each sub exposure and there's two factors to keep in mind one we want to expose as long as possible on each sub exposure to get as much signal hitting the sensor in each sub exposure but two we want to have round stars and the Earth's rotation is what makes that difficult that's why we might invest in a star tracker to counteract that but we're not going to use a star tracker so we have to figure out how long we can expose for before the Earth's rotation turns our little round stars into eggs or lines or arcs or whatever whatever they're gonna be we want those stars to be round not misshapen and finding out that exposure time for round stars you can just do it with trial and error so we can get out under the night sky we can start let's say at one second take a picture look at it okay we got round stars let's go to two seconds take a picture look at it yep looks good three seconds take a picture look at it up now they're no longer around stars I think our maximum exposure time then is gonna be two seconds so that's one way of doing it trial and error if you're happy with that go for that and you can skip over the next ten minutes of this video because the next 10 minutes I'm going to talk about formulas for trying to figure out your optimal sub exposure time the most famous formula is called the rule of five hundred I have a whole video comparing that to the rule we're actually going to use I'm not going to go into it but we're not going to use the rule 500 it's not that great if you're planning to stack your exposures because we're stacking we really want round stars and so instead we're going to use the npf formula there are two places you can access the npf formula one is free and the other one is in a paid app so let's first look at the the free one the free one is on the website of the société do Habra where the original developer of the formula Frederic Michaud has a nice calculator all this mentioned briefly here the other method is the photo pills app and that app cost $10 so I'd only really recommend buying an app if you know that you're really in desk photography but I'm going to show you how to use both tools right now because maybe some of you might already have the photo pills app and but never used the npf formula in photo pills we're gonna start here with Frederick's web calculator okay looking at the website here if you do read French then you can use it in the original French but if you don't then I'd recommend using Google Chrome because built into Google Chrome browser is the Google Translate so if I go up to the address bar in the upper right here's the translate button and I can click translate this page and choose English and it does its best job to translate to from the French to the English so that should help a bit understand the rule and learn something from the page I'm not going to go through this all because I want you to read this on your own one thing's a little confusing is it changes from the npf rule to the MFN rule not sure why anyways we just go through here and all the things that we need to fill out are highlighted in this blue and then when we're done filling that out the results will be down here in the yellow so we start with picking our camera brand and then pick the model so I'm using the 5d Mark 3 today then we're gonna put in the information about the lens so I'm just going to use the example of the lens that we've been talking about which is the nifty 50 so it's 50 millimeter focal length and an aperture of 4 is what I'm gonna use then this is nice that you don't really have to know the declination of your object you can just tell it which direction you're shooting so I'm going to choose southeast I'm going to choose my latitude of my location here which is about 42 degrees and my target location is about 40 degrees above the horizon if you don't know these things ahead of time you can look them up in stellarium or one of the many planetarium apps last thing to choose here is whether we're going to shoot it horizontally or vertically and we just click calculate the exposure time button and all of the information is down here in the yellow box and we can see with a rule 500 we would have 10 second which agrees with what we've been talking about with a simplified MPF rule we have six and a half seconds we could round that down to six and with the complex npf rule we have some difference here across the sensor but basically three seconds we're gonna round down to three if you keep scrolling down in this page it explains exactly how he calculated the npf rule and how he came to the formula and it explains it very well so I would definitely recommend reading that all again the author is frederique Mashhad and i really like that he took the time to put this together and figure out this formula so I hope other people find it as useful as I did so another way to calculate both the MPF rule and the rule of 500 is with an app I found called photo pills I've actually had this app for a while but didn't realize it did all of this you can get this app from the App Store it's available both on Android and iOS devices and it's currently $9.99 on either App Store so it's a little bit expensive for an app but it does a lot more than just help you calculate exposure time it also has a virtual AR planetarium and all these different cool features built in for planning your astrophotography so right here on the home screen for photo pills if I scroll down a little bit one of the tools is called spot stars so I'm just going to click on that it has a camera database so I'm going to search for my camera I've already chosen the candidate 5d Mark 3 but I'm just gonna choose it again here we're gonna put in the focal length of the lens so I'm just gonna use 50 millimeter again the aperture I'm gonna use a 4 the declination of the object and it also has an AR mode which is pretty cool it puts a planetarium on top of your camera and then you can just find the object you're looking for in the night sky and set it that way then the last thing is it says default or accurate and what this is is the default is the simplified MPF rule and the accurate is the full complex npf rule I've looked at this app across many different focal lengths and apertures the declination 's and all of that and these results for both the complex and simple and VF roll do match up with Frederick michaud's website so I feel that you can use photo pills instead of the website it's very handy to have this sort of mobile app when you're out in the field for calculating and PF rule and not having to do all that math and then you can also compare it right below to the rule of five hundred okay now that we know our correct exposure time for each sub exposure let's look at some of the other camera settings we'll want to set before going out okay we're gonna look at some other camera settings here of course this is a canon camera so the men user might be a little bit different if you're using a different brand but hopefully a lot of this will carry over I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on and the first thing that we can do is we can go ahead and set the exposure or shutter speed to what we figured out in the npf formula so for the 85 millimeter lens I'm using at f/4 with this camera that and the Ryan Nebula right now that's two seconds I'm gonna use an ISO of 800 I would recommend using somewhere around 800 to 1600 especially if you have a canon camera this seems to be sort of the sweet spot for Canon cameras but it's a good sort of starting place for any kind of DSLR really okay next thing we're gonna go into the menus and starting with the first option here in the first menu image quality we can go ahead and turn the JPEG option off and we want just regular full-size raw image so if your camera has raw capability definitely just use raw no reason to use JPEG if your camera only shoots JPEGs then use JPEG but use the highest quality JPEG that it offers but if it does have raw use raw because you're going to get better quality images that way okay for image review I'm going to go ahead and turn that off the reason being and this is sort of important we don't want to have the monitor actually active at all when we're shooting after photography there's a number of problems that can happen when you have the monitor or LCD active including irr leaks and just heating up the sensor in general so go ahead and turn image review off I'm also going to turn the beep off I like to just turn off any sounds that are going on mirror lock-up is actually not a bad idea for this but I'm not going to talk about it just because this is a beginner tutorial and I'd rather keep it more simple I'm not going to go through every option here for white balance I usually just put it on daylight it really doesn't matter though if you're shooting raw but if you're shooting JPEG I'd recommend daylight white balance colorspace again probably doesn't matter but I'm just gonna leave it on Adobe RGB picture style does not matter unless you are shooting JPEG only if you're shooting JPEG only I would recommend faithful or whichever picture style just says zero zero zero zero so it's not adding any sharpening or any effects to the JPEG okay next up here we have long exposure noise reduction that sounds good but we're gonna do an actual manual calibration so we don't need it and we actually don't want it so we're gonna go ahead and disable long exposure noise reduction same thing with high ISO speed noise reduction go ahead and disable that too basically from this point on I just sort of them going through and disabling things we want as a raw and output from our camera as possible so usually that means disable disabling a lot of the neat tricks that your DSLR is supposed to be able to do let's see we do know these matter I'm going to enable exposure simulation I believe what that's gonna do is make the picture a little bit brighter on the LCD which is something we would want autofocus does not matter I don't think really anything else in here matters I'll just mention you can always format your card in camera to have a fresh slate so you have plenty of room on your SD card that's another pitfall sometimes people run into is they don't have enough room on their SD card so I'd recommend just backing everything up before you start and then format in camera oh and I should actually mention right above that right here we have auto-rotate I have heard that sometimes this can mess people up even with raw pictures so I would recommend turning any kind of auto-rotate off I have my auto power off set to disabled that's a personal preference you might be more comfortable with it being set to eight minutes or something like that auto power off is only going to happen when you're not taking pictures but I just find it really annoying whenever the camera how-to powers off so I have it disabled on my camera it's up to you if your camera has LCD brightness I would recommend turning that all the way up so that you can really see what you are working on because everything you're going to be shooting is going to be sort of dim so having a high LCD brightness is helpful but I'll just mention that you might also want to turn this down because if you are doing like photography with a telescope you might want to know that you can actually turn this way down to and save your night vision a little bit but for astrophotography I'm going to turn it up while we're waiting for the Sun to go down let's talk about calibration frames so I would highly recommend if you're following this tutorial to take calibration frames they're going to make your picture much better and easier to post process what a calibration frame is is it's something that alters the raw picture in a way to either remove noise or to correct optical issues and so there are three types we're going to talk about bias frames dark frames and flat frames let's start with bias frames I think they're the easiest to understand with bias frames it does not matter when you take them or what temperature the camera is at all you just want to do is just put it on manual exposure setting and just keep going all the way over until you're at your shortest exposure that the camera can do on my camera that is one eight thousandths of a second so the shortest possible exposure on other cameras that might be 1/4 thousandths of a second or something like that and you want to set your ISO to whatever you had it for your subs often or also called your lights your light frames so for my camera I set that to ISO 800 for yours 800 1600 400 whatever it is just make sure it's the same as what you were using when you took your pictures of the night sky and then we're just going to set up our intervalometer to take let's say 50 bias frames and we just let it go and it takes 50 of these very short exposures with the body cap on and I would also want to get away from these lights just in case there was any light leak because you want to do this in complete darkness you don't want any light hitting the sensor because what the bias frames are doing is they are just looking at the pattern noise that the sensor produces so just the inherent noise of the electronics on the sensor that's what we're trying to take in the bias frames and then we'll subtract that out in our processing with deep-sky stacker or pix insider whether or astro pixel process or whatever that you use the next up is dark frames they're similar to bias frames and that we do them in the dark with just the body cap on or with the lens cap on the lens but they're going we want them to match the exposure time of our light frames so we've determined using the npf formula that we're going to be taking two-second exposures I'm going to be using ISO 800 and so I just set that up on my camera this is should be the exact same settings that we use when we actually take pictures of the night sky called our light frames and again just take at least 30 I'd say if you have the disk space you can take 50 but 30 is probably enough just set it up on your intervalometer set the end the number to 30 and just let it go taking a bunch of two-second exposures in the dark that's darks well one last thing about darks unlike bias frames it's important that your dark frames also match the temperature of your light frames as closely as possible so what I would recommend is get out there early let the Sun set when it's completely dark and you've let your camera adjust to the outside temperature take your dark frames then it's gonna get even darker because even when it looks dark to you the night sky will get a little bit darker over the next half hour to an hour and you now have your dark frames done then why then start focusing lining up your camera with Orion and start taking your shots of the nebula or whatever deep sky object you are shooting okay the last type of exposure we need the actual lens and we need it to be at the exact same focal point and aperture as when we shot the lights so what I would recommend is if you can bring something out into the field to take your flats if not just be very careful when bringing it into the house that you're not messing with the lens at all what the flat frames do is they will take care of vignette emit especially with a lens based system and then also if you have any little bits a dust or anything on your lens or your sensor they'll also take care of that and what we need for a flat is we just need a nice as the name suggests flat white surface to take a picture of so there's a lot of different methods for doing this you can try using Scott this the the sky as a flat I haven't had that much luck with that since the sky brightness fluctuates a lot I've had people you know just take a picture of a white wall with some even lighting on it what I usually do is I have like a LED tracing pad but you can also use an iPad or a computer screen and just put that flat up against the lens shade so that you know that it's completely flat up against the lens shade and then just take pictures of that the one drawback of doing it with an LED tracing panel is sometimes you get into the problem of you have such a short exposure that that you get into the the sampling rate of the power source they're not explaining this better but you you see these lines and your flats so if that happens you just need to take a slightly longer flat frame or diffuse and but sometimes to take that longer flat frame you're gonna have to diffuse what you're shooting a little bit so just put pieces of paper between the LED tracing panel or the iPad and the front of the lens shade here and that should diffuse it enough that you can then take your flats how do you know how long to expose flat for though this is where it's helpful to use the histogram on your camera if you know where that is so basically just bring up the histogram feature you should see a little bump that's all of the information in the picture all the pixel values and just bring that bump halfway over on your histogram on your camera and that's a properly exposed flat it doesn't necessarily have to be all the way halfway over if it's between 1/4 1/3 or halfway over as long as you don't have it like way over on the right side or way over on the left side it'll probably work but halfway over is a good rule of thumb for a properly exposed flat frame and how many to take just like with your darks I would take somewhere over 30 50 would be probably better but it's not necessary so at least about 30 flat frames once you know by trial and error where your flat frame is based on the histogram the exposure value then you can just program it with the intervalometer and and then take 30 to 50 flat flames okay hopefully that all made sense so we again have the bias frames those are the ones that are as short as possible within the dark with either the lens cap on or the body cap on the camera we have the darks which have to be matched in both temperature and time to our light frames are our subs and then we have our flat frames and this is where we need some kind of flat source of light and this can be like an iPad or LED panel or a wall or whatever you have we just want to make sure that it's perfectly square with the camera and the flat frames we're going to expose so that the back of the camera histogram is about halfway over and again will take 30 to 50 of those I'll just finish up this section by saying calibration frames are important I know a lot of people are going to want to skip them because they sound difficult or tedious or whatever it is they're really a good idea to do though and get in the habit of doing for all kinds of deep skies to photography all right now night and I'm all set up here I've brought out a table this is optional of course but I like to just have a table so that I can have some things already so I'm an intervalometer ready there's my botton off mask I have a little headlamp here and then I'm going to be doing some other things later in the night so I have a bunch of other gear here but what I'm also using this for right now is just as a way to sort of block some lamp street lights and house lights over there from getting into my shop so if we get down to the level of the camera this thing is blocking those lights but right above that is Orion we'll just go through the different steps we're gonna start with focusing or not we're going to start with finding Orion then we're gonna focus on a bright star and then set up the intervalometer and then take our shots and really that's it the only other thing we have to do during the night is after a few hundred shots we'll adjust and recenter Orion in the viewfinder alright let's go alright the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to find the rhein constellation and like I said earlier we're not going to be using a finder because with a 85 millimeter lens it should be easy enough to just find the Orion constellation with live view I do have live view set to ISO 8030 ii exposures just to trick the exposure simulation into giving me a nice bright view this might not be necessary on all cameras but on my 5d i've noticed it works ok so now i'm just going to loosen the tilts and the pan on the tripod here I'm gonna start moving the camera around a little bit and you can see I've already sort of lined it up with where I see Orion in the sky so all I really have to do is just sort of tilt up here and there it is Oh Ryan is one of the easiest constellations I think to find in your live view because that Orion belt is so bright that it's really easy to see we keep going up here there's a Betelgeuse there's Orion's bow and arm and there's the belt if I wanted to Center the Orion Nebula it'd be right there in the sheath but what I'm gonna Center first is Rigel which is this lower star at the bottom here and it's the brightest star in the constellation which is why I want to use it for focusing because with a lens you really need a bright star to focus if you're using a bada knob mass like we are going to hear especially a badenov mask not really designed for this focal length so we'll see how that well this works again if it doesn't work we'll go to my backup which is the sharp star system okay let me go ahead and zoom in I'm just going to press the Zoom button adjust towards pointed get Rigel centered there and then press the Zoom button again to get it ten times zoomed and if you don't have any kind of Baden oov mask you can still just focus with live view the way to do it is just grab your focus ring push it in one direction you'll see the star gets bigger that's an infinity infinity in quotes because it's not actually working so you can see then as I start twisting the focus ring it gets smaller and then it starts getting bigger again so you just want to find that that place in the focus ring where the star is smallest so I'm gonna go down again it gets right about there what you can do to test is now take a picture I'm you know I don't want ISO 8030 seconds because that would be completely blown out so let me adjust these here first I'm gonna adjust the ISO down to 800 and then I'll adjust the exposure down to let's try 2 seconds I think that's what we thought all right exposure time would be okay I'm gonna take an exposure okay and then I'm gonna go to playback and I'm gonna zoom in as far as I can and just look at those stars and what we're looking for is do the little faint small stars look fairly pinpoint or do they look sort of blurry and looking at Orion Nebula there you can see we have some hot pixels and noise but we also have some stars here I think there's a little bit of motion blur from my using the shutter button rather than a remote timer so let's try that again this time I'm going to set the camera on oops wrong button timer mode let's do a two second timer okay let's zoom in again that looks pretty good though what I would really recommend if you have some time is to just adjust just just try it sort of try different focus points until you see that it looks the best so I'm gonna zoom in again I'm gonna try focusing it again and I'm gonna take another exposure okay I'm going to go back to playback mode zoom in and then I'm going to compare between this exposure and the last one and I think you can see here that this one is much better and so I know that I'm on the right track here when the stars are smaller and I'm seeing more faint stars in the picture so for instance here's the new exposure with the new focus point here's the last one they can see more faint stars and those stars are smaller points so with trial and error you can get good focus with out a Bahtinov mask but it's just much easier with one so let's move on now to using one and I'm going to start with my cheap one here all right it's in there so now I mean a zoom in and this might be a little bit harder to see but we have this little line now that's coming out from the star core and if I move the focus back and forth you can see that line move as well and what I'm going for is to try to get that line right in the middle I think that looks pretty good could help to have a magnifying glass if you have one push that right up to the right up to the live view and you might be able to see a little bit more but let's try this okay I'm going to go back to playback mode take up now to playback mode sorry and I left the botton of masks in just to show you what we can see there it still looks sort of just like a central spike I'm not really seeing the X pattern so I'm gonna try a slightly longer exposure and see if we can get that X pattern to appear ok still no xpadder oh maybe I can actually see it slightly yeah actually I can sort of see it there really faint but it is there and I can see that this is good focus and I'm gonna take the Bahtinov mask off and take another exposure I'm going to put it back down to two seconds okay and this looks very good to me so I think that the Bahtinov mask did help get a very good focus I can see a lot of small stars so now that we're focused the next step is to set up the intervalometer okay the first setting in the intervalometer is delay so that's how long it would delay before taking the first shot so I'm just going to set that to two seconds the next setting is long so that's how long each exposure should be and we already found out using the MPF method that this should be two seconds so each exposure will be two seconds set that the next setting is interval and so this is how long it should wait between each exposure since I'm just going to assume we're not going to use mirror lock-up it might be a good idea that I don't have it set up right now I'm gonna go ahead and do a two-second interval between each shot this will just give the camera some time to settle between each exposure so we're doing a two-second to long exposure and then a two-second interval and then n stands for a number so the number of shots we want to take and I'm going to set that to this is sort of annoying you just have to keep pressing it on this one okay I'm gonna said that to two hundred since we're doing untracked astrophotography we're gonna have to move the camera as Orion drifts out of the field due to the Earth's rotation so 200 I think is a safe bet before we want to adjust the camera a little bit the last sitting on this intervalometer is do you want to make a sound when it takes shots and I'm gonna say no I don't want it to make any sounds okay so now that we have everything set with intervalometer all we have to do is just have it hooked up to the camera and press the start button sometimes this will be a play button to start the process all right we'll let it do its thing and then look at what we get all right as you can see after a couple hundred shots or Ryan is no longer centered so all we have to do it's just recenter Orion like that and then run the intervalometer again before we do though I would recommend howie's whenever you start a new run let's just refocus so I'm just going to Center Rigel back up there look put my botton of mask back on zoom in on that guy and try focusing again here I'm gonna take a four second shot just so that it can see that a little bit easier okay that looks pretty good okay so you have to remember when you're focusing take that button of mask back off before you start your next sequence but now we're ready to go so I'm just gonna hook the intervalometer back up and let it rip for another two hundred exposures one other thing I should note I was remember to do before you start your intervalometer is turn off your live view because if that live view is on sometimes it will stay on and that will heat up the sensor giving you more hot pixels and it also drain the battery a lot faster alright we'll take another couple hundred and then we should be done for the night okay after you've taken a few sets of two hundred exposures each time moving the camera over a little bit centered Orion you can call it a night personally I'm gonna stop now but when you think about it when you're just taking two second exposures that doesn't make a very long integration something like fifteen minutes total so if you want to keep going and you want to take you know thousands of exposures to combine together that would be even better on you'll be able to get more out of it that way and be able to reduce the noise further but in the interest of this just being in demonstration I'm going to stop at a few hundred but I encourage you to go as long as you feel like you have the sanity and dis space and time to do so next up what we're going to do is we're going to take what we've shot tonight and look at it on the computer and then get into calibrating registering stacking and post-processing so all the fun stuff if you're following along you can download these from Google Drive and just follow along with my example files here or if you're doing it on your own I would recommend organizing your files into these four folders you have them all ready to go for the next step here which is we're going to use deep sky stacker to calibrate the lights with the flats darks and bias files and then we're going to register those lights which means match them based on the star patterns so that they're all lined up and then stack them into one complete image that has all of that data combined together and it rejects a lot of the noise both through calibration and just through the process of stacking the images together we can reject a lot of things like hot pixels and and just the inherent noise of the sky and uncertainty of light so we're ready to go here let's go ahead and open up deep sky stacker which is this right here I'm using the 64 bit version it does tell me a newer version is available for download I'm using 4.1.1 and this says four point two point three is available I'm not going to upgrade right now but I think it works the same way we start over here on the left-hand side with and we just basically step through these different steps we start with open picture files and I'm going to navigate to that folder I've showing you before Orion 85 millimeter and I'm gonna start by loading in my lights I'm gonna press ctrl-a to select them all and click open okay now those are all loaded I'm going to go ahead and check all of those just to see how many we have here we have 451 lights I'm now going to go up here back up to where it says registering and stacking and choose dark files go into my darks folder here again click once and then press ctrl-a to select them all and then click open okay we loaded in 31 dark frames I'm gonna click on flat files load in my flats control a to select all click open load it in 20 flats I don't have any dark flats this time I'm going to use a bias so click on thighs files open up my bias folder press ctrl a to select everything and click open and we load it in 60 bias frames ok so we now have everything we need here lights darks flats and bias the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this register checked pictures link right here we can see here there's an actions tab and an Advanced tab it says dark flats and bias checked that's good I'm gonna leave automatic detection of hot pixels checked I'm going to go to the Advanced tab and I'm going to compute the number of detected stars here okay it found 200 stars with a 20% star detection threshold that seems fine if I wanted to I could try raising that and then just try clicking that compute button again to see what happens okay when I raise the star detection threshold that number of stars goes down if I lower that star detection threshold like let's say to try 15% we get a few more stars this is probably fine I'm gonna leave that at 15% I'm going to click into recommended settings and just see what we have here it's saying that we're using Sigma clipping combination method and sigma clipping median for the other calibration frames that all seems fine basically if this recommended settings thing found any problems instead of showing in green it might show things in red to fix certain things would this all looks good we can click on stacking parameters here and just see what it's doing so it's doing a median Kappa Sigma clipping you can hover over these different stacking modes to find out what they do this all looks fine I'm gonna click OK and I'm gonna click OK again and it will start creating all of our master calibration frames it starts with the bias then goes on to creating the master flats in the master dark and everything else and then it will go ahead and calibrate everything and register those check pictures together once we have all that done we can pick the best light frame to use for the final registration and stacking and then stack all these pictures together so I'm gonna let this go for a while here and check back in when it's done ok it's now done I'm going to go ahead and sort these by score and you can see the top score here is 1862 so that means that this has been when deep-sky stacker looked at all the different lights it found that this one had the roundest and tightest stars in terms of focus so I'm going to go ahead and choose that one as the reference frame I'm going to right click on it and choose use his reference frame we now get this little asterisk right there I'm then gonna go over here to stack checked pictures which is the next thing down and it looks like I didn't take my bias frames it is the same ISO as my darks and flats and lights that's not good but oh well it's too late now probably work out fine you can see the total exposure here is about 15 minutes because we took 450 frames at two seconds each at ISO 1600 I don't want custom rectangle what is that just one standard mode I don't know what I did there I'm I there's an option to stack based on a custom rectangle and I must have somehow messed up and put that in so you always want to check all these things make sure that it's what you actually want I just want a standard mode where it's framed by they're based on the reference light frame which we just set I'll use Kappa Sigma clipping that's fine all these other things are fine let's click OK I'm just gonna click on recommended settings and just check through here looks good ok one thing to keep in mind when stacking a lot of DSLR frames like this 450 is that it can temporarily use up a lot of space on your main hard drive this is just because it uses a temp folder while it's doing his work so you can see that this is going to use sixty two gigabytes of my 80 gigabytes free on the C Drive so that's just something to keep in mind you might need a fairly large amount of free space in order to stack a lot of frames at once like we're doing here but I seems to have it now so let's go ahead and click OK and let it do its thing of stacking these all together okay it's done stacking doesn't look like much here but that's because it's not stretched really here so we're just seeing the bright blown out parts but we can see Orion's belt there and things like that but we're going to do the stretching in other programs so all we have to do now is make sure that it saved the autosave dot TIFF which if I look in my lights folder here scroll to the bottom there it is autosave dot TIFF that's all we need actually so we're gonna use that in the next steps and move on to the actual post processing programs because this was just what we call pre-processing so it's calibrating registering and stacking and then we'll actually do the fun part right now okay so we're finished with deep sky stacker we're going to go ahead and move on into Photoshop here I'm gonna go to file open and I'm going to open that autosave dot TIFF file that we generated out of deep sky stacker first thing I'll point out here is if we go up to image mode we can see that this is a 32-bit image eventually we're gonna want to bring it down to 16 bits per channel but for this initial stretch we can leave it in 32 bits but a number of features you can see are grayed out here and part of the reason for that is because this is a 32-bit image and not all features in Photoshop will work with a 32-bit image but once we change it to 16-bit then most of them well so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate the background layer and you can do that by either pressing command J on a Mac or ctrl J on a window windows machine or if you don't like keyboard shortcuts you can right-click and choose duplicate layer two and I'm gonna call this first stretch okay and then we're gonna start stretching the image right now it's in what we call a linear state meaning we haven't taken the curve and basically flatten flattened it out into a nonlinear State if we look at a histogram right now just open up a histogram here oh it's not working because we're in 32 bits okay it never mind let's go ahead and stretch this up so I'm going to go to image adjustments levels or I can press command l and okay well here's our histogram so we can see that this spike of information is all the way over here on the left hand side and what we're gonna try to do is bring it over to the right while also spreading it out so the way we're going to do this is going to take the middle slider and push it over a bit press okay and you can see we've already taken that spike of information here this is all the the pixels and so you can see you've already taken this spike this is basically all the information in the image and moved it off from this left-hand side which is the shadows and we're gonna do that again getting a little bit further off the left-hand side and don't worry that the image is looking really gray at this point we're going to fix all that and press command L again this time I'm gonna take this a shadow slider the one on the left and I'm gonna bring that over a little bit this is resetting the black point now we don't want to do it just by look because if we do that we're going to start clipping information and we don't want to clip meaning permanently bring any pixels down to a zero level yet so I'm just going to bring it over here right on the left of the the histogram but not actually going into it and then I'm also going to take the middle slider and bring it over again we're going to do that a few more times you can see this time in addition to moving the histogram bump over it's also spreading it out which is what we want we want to spread this out right in this area between the shadow and the mid-tone slider so I'm going to take this over again take this over again and that time I just reset the black level but this time I'll take this over and I'm just gonna reset this one more time okay so it still looks a bit weird but that's okay this is just our first stretch as I said if i zoom in now though what's cool is we can already see there's a lot of cool detail here there's there Ryan Nebula and you can see the outer lower rim of it there there's the the Running Man Nebula you can just make out the horse head and flame there too so things are not looking too bad the next thing I want to do though is I'm gonna go ahead and turn this into a 16-bit image so I'm going to go to image mode and switch it to 16 bits per channel and I'm gonna say don't merge okay now I'm gonna duplicate this first stretch layer just by pressing command J I'm gonna rename it and call it background prep okay I'm going to select all by pressing command a or control a on Windows I'm gonna press command C to copy that layer and then I'm going to press command N or I can go to file new and it will copy over the size of the layer from the clipboard so I don't have to change anything there I want to make sure that I'm working in 16bits and I'm gonna call this BG for background then I'm gonna go ahead and paste in my clipboard just by pressing command V or control V on Windows and I'm gonna go ahead and start working on this for some B's go ahead and delete this background layer okay I'm gonna start basically using the dust and scratches filter to get rid of everything but this gradient in the background which we're then going to subtract from over here so that we don't get this distracting light pollution in the shot okay so let's go ahead and go to filter noise dust and scratches filter noise dust and scratches and I'm going to use a slightly bigger radius maybe something like 60 and using a 60 pixel radius on Dustin scratches means any feature that smaller than 60 pixels will basically just be filtered out so we still have these big star halos Rigel and the belt stars and we still have our Ryan there so to take those out I'm just gonna use a Spot Healing Brush so if you go over here or you press a J and your keyboard you should get the Spot Healing Brush and then I'm just going to click over those little spots that are left to get rid of those and maybe I'll just follow up with a little bit of clone stamp here the way the clone stamp works is you just press alt or option set a sample so I'm going to set this sample to the left here and then I'm just going to and now I don't like that actually maybe I'll just use this Spot Healing Brush a little bit more but turn down the hardness a little bit okay I think that improved it a little bit basically we're just going for a smoother gradient in here as we can get without any hot spots we do have some weird stuff going on in the corners here but I suspect we're gonna crop those out anyways this is looking pretty good so I'm gonna go ahead and just save it just save it to my desktop is the background and after that saves I'm gonna go ahead and save my main document to basically whenever we've put in you know more than 15 or 20 minutes of work it's a good idea to save so I'll just save this as a Ryan save it as a Photoshop document okay we still have our selection outline there so I'm just gonna go to select deselect or you can press command D control D on Windows to deselect okay so now we have we've deselected this I'm gonna rename this layer from background prep to background removed as we're about to remove the background from this layer and what I mean by that is we're gonna take this which is the gradient of the light pollution and the really bright sky and we're gonna remove it from this revealing a lot more detail we're gonna use a little known thing in Photoshop called apply image so if we go to the image menu up here at the top and choose apply image by default it applies the image we're working on to itself and it multiplies it what we want to do is we want to use that background image that we just made so I'm going to choose under source and choose BG PSD and I think it just has one layer so it's probably fine to use merge but if you're seeing something weird here just you can just choose layer one but just has one layer cuz we deleted the bottom layer so that's fine for channel we want to use RGB for the blending mode we don't want multiply we want to go down to subtract because what we're trying to do is subtract the background gradient from the image but leave everything else and by default it's it's subtracting very aggressively and the reason for that is because the offset is zero but we want to put in a bit of an offset and this may vary depending on your image so I would just recommend starting with ten and then basically increasing the offset by ten until you get to a point where basically you have a fairly gray image like this it can help to zoom in because you can see you might have thought oh well the image looked better when he was at an offset of ten but we were then clipping out a lot of the detail so what we want to do is we want to keep bringing that number up that offset until we're not clipping into the any of the actual shadow detail and so you might need to bring that offset up to 40 or 50 or 60 before you can be sure of that because we can always bring the black level back down but we don't want to clip any data at this point so just just make sure that you're not clipping anything I think that looks good so if you want to just sort of look at how my image looks here and try to get yours looking somewhat the same as mine this is sort of how we want it to look we've really removed that gradient but we're not yet done processing so don't worry about it looking perfect yet I mean go ahead and click OK so now to compare what we just did versus where it was when we first stretched it I can just turn off and on this layer called background removed and you can see that was before and that's after so we've really flattened out the background gradient and it looks a lot better already but it's not a very dynamic picture yet we haven't messed around with curves or saturation or anything like that so the next step is I'm going to duplicate the layer again pressing command J and I'm going to call this second stretch and the nice thing about duplicating layers like this is if you ever get into a bind and you really don't like the work that you've been doing on for the last so many minutes you can always just delete that layer and try again so I always just after I complete a step in Photoshop so we went from the unstretched background image this is when it was still in 32 bits then we stretched it we turned it to 16 bits we use the apply image trick to remove the background and now the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna stretch this layer second stretch so let's go ahead and click on that and press command L to bring up the levels again and I'm going to go ahead and and bring this over a little bit and bring the black level in a little bit and you might need to zoom in to really see what you're doing but basically I'm just trying to add contrast to the image by stretching it out and I'm especially looking at the Horsehead there and there Ryan Nebula and we're starting to see the witch head here too so as you stretch an image you'll notice that new things appear but possibly also new issues like we reveal a lot more noise in the background but that's okay there's m78 that's a cool little nebula right there okay next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do a curves adjustment so I'm going to do image adjustment curves or command M and I'm going to apply pretty aggressive what's called an S curve here where you take down in the shadows and bring up in the mid-tones and this is basically the same thing we were doing with levels it's just a different way of doing it okay at this point what I want to do is it's looking pretty cool but I want to bring out the saturation a little bit so I'm gonna go to image so I'm gonna go ahead and say that's good for the second stretch let's duplicate that again call this our saturation layer let's go ahead and save the image let's go ahead and raise up the saturation a bit on this saturation layer I'm gonna go back to my image menu adjustments I'm going to choose hue / saturation and sometimes you know this is when you really want to zoom in and out a bit to see what this is doing because sometimes it's hard to see and I'd also look at different parts of the image like you might bring the saturation up like that and think that looks really good on Orion but then when you look up here there's it just brings out so much ugly color noise that and then when you look back you're like oh the color noise is right there - so be careful here I'm gonna maybe do 30 plus 30 to the saturation it's still added a nice boost to Orion there like if I turn the preview off and on you can see it did boost the saturation of it we can also if we wanted to get fancy do some targeted saturation boosts so we could we could mask the nebula and just saturate that part okay I'll go ahead and show you how to do that so I just cancelled that so let's say we just wanted to really give a ryan here a big saturation boost but none of the rest of the image or let's say we just really wanted to give the Horsehead in the flame a saturation boost what we can do is we can add a hue / saturation adjustment layer not the image menu option because that applies it directly to the layer well this is going to just apply it as an adjustment layer that applies to everything below and I'm going to go ahead and bring that saturation way up like we did before bring it up to like 50 but then on the hue / adjustment layer you can notice that has this mask it's called the layer mask and we want to just go ahead and fill this with black you can do that if black is your foreground color you can just press option or Alt Delete and that's going to fill that layer mask with black another way to do it is just edit fill and we can fill with black that way so you can see since we just filled that hue / saturation layer with black it took it off so now we're back to where we were but what we can do is we can now paint where we want it to apply so I'm going to choose the paintbrush here I'm going to make it about 80 or 50 or 80 pixels something like that it looks good I'm gonna make it a nice soft brush so I'm going to use 0% hardness and I'm gonna turn down the opacity - so I mean it's turn the opacity down to 70% and then I'm just going to paint in where I want this to apply and I have to make sure that I'm painting with white so if black is your foreground color right now just press X and that will switch them or you can use this little double arrow down here to switch the foreground and background color I want to make sure I'm painting with white and then I'm just going to come in here and I'm going to increase the saturation of my nebulae with the paintbrush and some people will hate that I'm showing you this because they don't believe in this kind of painting on your image but as a quick hacky thing I think it's fine if you're doing this for yourself and you just want it to look how you want it to look then who cares how you do it if you're really concerned about the ethics of imaging and you you think that this is a bad thing to do then don't do it anyways what I just did was I increased the saturation of Orion and the Horsehead in the flame without increasing the saturation anywhere else maybe I'd also want to do it on these bright stars I think that looks sort of cool do it on Rigel here yeah okay so this is looking pretty nice still have a little work to do with making it look really good let me go ahead and add another curves layer I'm just gonna reset my black point here a little bit something like that okay so last thing here if we're doing just doing a quick process or no there's two more things one is if we look at our corners these are really bad also the edges have this weird color modeling so we want to crop this down a bit I'm just gonna grab my crop tool here put it on unconstrained and I'm just gonna go in from the corners a little bit keep a Ryan roughly centered do something like that and I'll just examine it make sure that now all the corners look good yeah it's still a bit of weirdness up there so I maybe I'll drop this in a bit more and to keep it Ryan roughly Center at all edge this one in a bit - one thing I'm looking at over here that I don't want to crop out is you have the they've the witch head nebula really faint in right there so I don't want to I don't want to crop that out okay that looks pretty good though okay in a quick process the probably the last thing I would do here is these bright stars all have this sort of magenta into violet ring around them and I just find it pretty annoying especially when you're looking at it at about that scale or something it becomes pretty noticeable and strategists tracks if you don't find it objectionable then you might be done with this this looks pretty good but if you want to work on those violet hid halos a little bit I'll show you a technique we can use first when I do these kind of local adjustment things you want to you want to work on a fresh new layer but now that we've added these adjustment layers we can't just duplicate the last layer we're working on so instead what we have to do is get to press command option shift e or that would be control option shift e on the windows and what that does is it takes everything that is visible here and it creates a new layer based on that so this layer will look exactly like what we had visible for but it's a fresh new layer we can start working on hope that makes sense so I'm just gonna call this removing violet halos okay and so the way we're going to do this is we're gonna select the violet halos and then change their color and desaturate them a little bit so to select them I'm gonna use select by color range which is under the Select menu and I'll start by just clicking once on the violet halos and you can see it already did a little bit here fuzziness starting at 40 that's fine then I'm going to switch to the add to sample mode if you want to do this on the fly you can just hold down shift while sampling and that will also switch it to that temporarily but I'm just going to since I want to make sure that I'm using I'm just gonna go ahead and choose it there and I'm just going to select a bunch of these halo colors I want to be fairly zoomed in and careful while you're doing this not to add anything that's not what you want okay and then to see how well it's selected what I can do is I can turn the selection preview from none to grayscale okay and you can see that it did select some of our nebula there that's okay we can fix that in a second but on these some of these lower stars here you can see it didn't quite complete the halo so I'm going to go ahead and switch this back to none and grab a little bit more okay I think I went overboard so I'm gonna go ahead and undo hmm okay I think I messed that up well we'll just start over so to start over just go back to your regular eyedropper here and we'll start again this is a pretty common thing with with a color range tool so you can go overboard pretty quickly and you might have to start over we might not be able to get all these really faint ones that's okay though though the ones that are more distracting are the bright violet halos okay let's see how that looks I'm gonna play around with the fuzziness slider a little bit here zoom out a bit and when we do play around with the fuzziness slider you can see that sometimes it's really picking up on color noise in the image and sometimes it's not I'm okay actually with it picking up on a bit of color noise because that actually might improve the image to reduce that a bit but for now let's just focus on the halos because instead of just completely desaturating them like we could with the color noise I also want to xur to try to just turn them a little bit bluish instead of the the violet so let's try that I'm gonna turn down the fuzziness quite a bit turned it down to 11 okay and now you can see especially if we zoom in that it has all these little halos selected but it also has some stuff in there Orion Nebula here that we don't want to turn so I'm gonna press Q which brings up this sort of Ruby overlay and you can paint on this with the brush tool I want to paint with a hundred percent opacity and I'm just going to paint in black where it's picked up something that's not a star halo which is picking up a lot of the Ryan Nebula and here I don't want it to do so I'm gonna go ahead and paint that all in him with black let's see how it's done the running man yeah same thing with the running man we don't want it to eat away into the running man okay good enough zoom back out here press Q again that just altered the selection now we're gonna go ahead and click on hue / saturation an adjustment layer sorry hue / saturation adjustment layer and what it did if i press option or alt and click on this layer mask is it just took our selection and it added that automatically to the layer mask for this huge / saturation layer and now what we can do is we have a lot of flexibility we can open up I'm going to zoom in and we can open up the properties for this hue / saturation layer and we can play around with this to try to fix these stars a bit so you can see if I do that it gives it a very artificial look but we could change the the star halo colors the mask isn't quite good enough I'd might want to blur it if I wanted to do that too much but what I'm going to do is I'm mostly just going to D saturate and turn down the lightness of these bright halos and what that does if I turn this off and on is it basically just shrinks the stars and really de-emphasizes those halos so if i zoom to sort of a normal level here and I turn that off and on no sort of hard to see at that level try they're sort of subtle but I think you can see it it's it's basically you have these really bright halos and then we can DM ffice eyes them a bit with this trick and you know your violet halos might be worse than mine it's really all up to how the lens is designed okay I know I said that was the last thing but this green cast is still bothering me a little bit so last thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up a selective color adjustment layer here and I'm going to go to the blacks and I'm just going to take out a bit of cyan take out a bit of yellow and a little bit less of the magenta and increase the black level just a bit oh yeah I think that improved it a lot you can see here's before I hope you can see this in the video there's a good there's a go green cast sort of across the the background sky and then just playing around with selective color blacks taking the sine and yellow down to negative five the magenta down to negative three and the black plus six I think that's a big improvement on the sky color okay so the focus on on this picture I think is clearly a Ryan Nebula and the running man we captured that pretty well we also have the nice bright star Rigel here we have a little bit of the witch head you can see her nose and mouth a little bit and chin zooming around here we have the nice belt stars and we have the horse head and flame so we've captured a bunch of nice nebulas I hope that you have learned something in this tutorial last thing I'm going to do here is just save this for the web so I go to file save for web in newer versions of Photoshop I believe they've moved this to the export command maybe just look around for it it might say save for web legacy but it's a really nice way to save off your extra images because it just has a lot of options in a nice big box I just really prefer this and you can you can change things very quickly you always has that convert to srgb option it has a nice estimate of how big the image will be lets you scroll around and see when you change for instance the quality what its gonna do to the image if it's gonna soften it too much but I'm just gonna save off a 100 quality JPEG oh and then another thing you can do down here is you can change the size so let's say I didn't like how this looked at 100% so I'm gonna change the size to 3000 pixels wide see how that looks now yeah maybe I liked the look of that better it gives you these different options for how it's going to resize it for Astra images I would always recommend bilinear I wouldn't use by cubic or nearest-neighbor definitely not nearest-neighbor but I think of these options by linear is your best bet as the resampling method when you're shrinking an image I should point out I I would never recommend blowing up an image making it bigger and larger yet so if you're shrinking an image used by linear okay this looks good let's just fit it in view just to make sure I still like how that looks yep that looks cool so let's go ahead and save it Orion dot JPEG I'll save it to the desktop here and take a look in preview make that full screen yeah I think that looks really nice gives you a sense of most of the constellation maybe I could have framed it better vertically and gotten Betelgeuse in there oh well next time so I'm happy with this I hope that you've learned something about taking short exposures and showing that you can bring out a number of nebulae in even wide field exposures with the right techniques I hope that you subscribe to my channel and if you have want to keep seeing videos like this one you can also support me on patreon. Well till next time, Clear skies! This is Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com

Channel: Nebula Photos

Views: 777,147

Rating: 4.9103794 out of 5

Keywords: astrophotography, DSLR astrophotography, beginner astrophotography, no tracker, tripod astrophotography, astronomy, orion nebula, cheap astrophotography, rokinon, canon, manfrotto, intervalometer, horsehead nebula, flame nebula, orion

Id: iuMZG-SyDCU

Length: 114min 28sec (6868 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020