OSC Galaxy Processing Tutorial in PixInsight - Free Data & Workflow

hey there guys how's it going today we're going to be taking a look at a start to finish processing tutorial for one shot color galaxies in particular for this one we're going to be processing m63 if you want to process alongside with me on this one and use the exact same data as well as the icon set that I use for all of my images just check the description box down below where I've got the data and that set all hosted for you on my Google Drive so feel free to download that and work along with me now if you want to follow along with this tutorial you are going to need a couple of extra tools as this is a kind of a full fat tutorial it's just how I process my images basically so the things that you're going to need are the Russell chroman processing Suite that is to say blur exterminator star exterminator noise exterminator you'll need gradient expert it's semi- optional but I always end up tending to use it so it's in there you'll need pix in sight of course up to date and run in with the latest versions of most of the tools so as to say you have access to spcc that's spectral photometric color calibration alongside the files that go along with that to allow it to do its job and finally you're going to need ghs that's generalized hyperbolic stretch once you have all those things which is things I would highly recommend you have anyway we can go ahead with this tutorial so let's dive straight into it now and if you have downloaded the data it'll be coming a folder looks something like this m63 300 PDS ASI 2600 MC the unfiltered and then process icons loot just select both of those drag them in and it should all be loaded up for you go ahead and minimize that window and now if your tools haven't loaded in for you right now don't worry just right click and click arrange icons and there should be pulled from whichever workspace they're on onto the one that you're currently working with so here we have our data let's go ahead and open up stf click the little nuke icon to be able to actually see what's going on in this image now this is just a screen stretch the data is still perfectly linear nothing's actually been done to it at this point but now we can really see what's going on as you can see this data is a bit of a mess really there's some strong gradients from left and right hand sides both converion in the middle there's a lot of stacking artifacts going on it needs rotating too it's upside down as as the stack finished um from the normal position which you view this galaxy so there's a lot to do but it's a perfect actual opportunity for us to do some teaching and learning with so first things first we want to get rid of all of these stacking artifacts now I'm going to do that just using Dynamic crop double click the icon right there make sure your window that you going to work on is selected and just pulling in from the corners you can do this two at a time that's absolutely fantastic just go for it do think generally speaking with the Galaxy crops that you can be a little bit more zealous if you will with these rather than kind of a nebula where a lot of your image is framed in the framing itself you can do some framing after the fact with a galaxy image with your crop before processing however there are a few different parts of this image that I'd like to leave alone so I'm not going to be too uh too crazy with this crop I'd like to leave this galaxy for example this background galaxy in the field of view um there's a kind of a field of galaxies over there on the right side I want to leave those two if you are however photographing something that's just solo on its own You may wish to do a much more aggressive crop I think about it see which way looks best for your particular data set for me that's done you'll know that I finished the crop by having the central pip over the core of the Galaxy that makes sure it's all nice and centralized or as close as it can be now as I mentioned this is I know it doesn't really matter in space but it looks upside down to me from the position which I'm used to seeing it so I'm going to use uh fast rotation right there and I'm going to rotate it 180° and now that's how I'm used to seeing this galaxy the the right way up if you will now that's finished can go ahead close down fast rotation and we can start to actually get this image prepared ready for True processing to take place now I want to go ahead and use Script image analysis and image solver on this I'm going to get get the image plate solved so we can properly color calibrate it using spcc next so first things first we're going to select the actual Target that we're working on in my case it's m63 so I'm going to search for that uh select it from the drop- down box as you can see it's just found it sunflower Galaxy m63 hit okay and now we're going to have to give it a little bit of information as you can see for me it is populated for you it may not be so I used a 3.76 micron pixel camera you just type that quite literally in there and the focal distance was actually 1,500 mm before any corrections are applied from extra glass in the path and plate solving um so we're going to go ahead and with those settings that should be about right let's go ahead and click okay don't worry about the popup box uh just hit continue anyway all right few moments later and that image is now plate solved pix sight knows what is what in this image now it knows the position of all the stars and from that it can use spcc spectr photometric color calibration to actually apply a really accurate color calibration to this image if you don't have this tool already fully set up I highly advise you give it a go you can get great color calibration without it but this makes it just so easy uh I just don't see why you wouldn't want to do it really now you can select a few bits of extra information on this uh now for example the quantum efficiency curve right there I know that I took this with an IMX 571 based camera so I'm going to go ahead and select it because why not I didn't use any extra filtration so the colors uh the color filters right there are actually correct Sony color sensor r g and B that's all great I don't need to generate any graphs for me and everything else should really be left alone it should just work nicely okay so a few moments have passed and it's now just finished color calibrating this data going to go ahead close down sbcc and once again I'm going to hit it with an SDF stretch so I can see what's going on in this image we can now start to really work on tackling the real issue in this image which is these really pronounced gradients now you just comes with a choice at this point does the tutorial if you have the latest version of pix Insight you can opt to use gradient correction on this which I find is capable of giving really nice results if you take a little bit of time to actually dial it in and I'm going to go ahead and show you what that kind of looks like right now as best I can uh so just as always I would recommend trying a tool first at defaults and then go from there because you may be trying to fix something that isn't really broken in the first place so I'm going to go ahead and apply see what this result looks like and as you can see it's not done a tremendous job it's left a quite a large grade in the left hand side there and still some of that gra kind of Remnant gradient over on the right hand side so I'm going to right click undo that and I'm going to try again this time with convergence mode so it's going to run through multiple iterations until the difference between the current version the iteration and the last iteration is minor very minor indeed okay so we reached convergence after six iterations right there if I can just show you on the process console it went through six separate iterations and then it reached convergence Point looks a lot better A down sight better than just one iteration did but it's still not quite there for me there is still this gradient on the left hand side and still remnants over on the right hand side so we can assume couple of things is potentially happening right now so it could be structure protection I've had issues with this in the past where it erroneously finds areas of overcorrection such as this that's happened in this image and protects them when it shouldn't be and it can also be the actual scale of the um the gradient in the image as in the complexity of what's going on in here now this doesn't look too complex but I am going to try it all the same with a lower value which will indicate to it I'm going to go all the way there is actually a quite a complex gradient going on so let's give it a go at that and see how close we get now okay so this is the closest attempt of them all so far hopefully you can see it has done its best effort yet but still we do have evidence of a glow over to the left hand side and I think we could be running into the issue with structure protection please do correct me if I'm wrong with this but I'm going to go ahead undo one more time and let's just give it a go with structure protection I have untake to I think we'll go ahead and actually increase the protection threshold just a chunk there up to35 and maybe give that a go and I'd say that that's probably the closest we're going to get so far with this tool without spending absolutely ages and getting lost in the Weeds on this tutorial now if you're stuck along with all that good on you you must be very patient indeed for me generally speaking I'll just make a copy of this as we can continue to work on it afterwards and I'll undo what we just did on this old version I'll show you the opposite option which is far simpler so we're going to go to scripts toolbox and Grading expert if you have't installed definitely give it a go on your images and see what it looks like so I'm just going to go ahead left the defaults and hit execute and see what we get okay so gradient expert has just finished it has shown me the background which has been extracted which looks extremely promising that brightened left and brightened right seems to be removed and sure enough it has it's attached a stranged cast to the image which I'm just going to re SDF and it looks to have done quite a nice job now one good test for gradient removal I find is to actually not zoom in on the image but really zoom out and it gives you the opportunity to look at those larger scale structures in a smaller scale on your screen so you can see when you do this that Galaxy's kind of been buried in a slight black void just in the middle of the screen right there by uh gradient expert it's not too noticeable when viewed full size like this but it is there if you zoom out hopefully you can see that even through YouTube's compression can be a useful test but when compared side by side there with the admittedly much more laborious gradient correction if we just select these two so I'll put the gradient correction on the left tile them both hopefully you can see I think there is a clear winner in this case and that is the gradient correction one over on the left it looks that little bit nicer to me but we've tested both ways and uh you know if you don't think it's worth the extra effort I certainly don't blame you I'm going to go ahead and process the left one just because I've taken the time to already do it so close down the right you don't have to do any of this of course I just wanted to demonstrate the power of the two tools to you and we can continue on now with processing so we've taken care of the stacking artifacts we've taken care of the color calibration we've taken care of the gradients in the image now we can actually start to really work on uh the detail in this thing so to do that and I'm going to use first off blur exterminator now again definitely give it a go just at defaults in most cases in and I mean the vast majority of cases is in 95% of the time it's going to work just fine at defaults you can dial it in a little bit further if you should wish most of the time it's just not going to be necessary though take a look at the results from this now it's finished and uh wow I have to say as always this tool I mean if I just go back and forth a couple of times there you can see that kind of flocculent fine detail in the Galaxy bam it just leaps off the screen with one button press you know what I mean these tools they they've just changed the game for me they're absolutely phenomenal I would not want to process without them I've said that many times and quite simply I just mean it if you're interested in giving these a goal there are trials available absolutely you know no uh no commitment whatsoever I will say trial at your peril because I just can't see you know someone downloading these tools giving them a go in your own environment and then thinking ah not for me it just it doesn't seem likely they are that good um I'm sure everybody out there who's already got these tools knows what I'm talking about but uh if you don't have them yet do yourself a favor you know give them a goal I think it's the best money that you can can spend basically in astronomy um next up I'm going to run through noise exterminator I do want to say as well I do have affiliate links for these tools uh just in the description box down below so if you want to use those it really does help me out each month when you guys uh make use of those things uh giving me a little bit of a kickback at no extra cost to yourself um Shameless plug there it is but you know I got to keep food on my uh table all right right noise exterminator just finished and once again you know I didn't use that at default as you'll notice uh I were talking too much but I did drag down the Doo's value ever so slightly because I think when it comes on its default value it's just a touch too strong for most situations but as you can see if I just cycle again back and forwards the details being left alone completely so areas of low contrast small details such as this little region over here for example not being affected by the D noise at all in fact it's being allowed to stand out even more by the fact it's not combating with kind of salt and pepperish noise or that color mtal noise in the image anymore it can just stand on its own two feet and look good I have to say these tools are just the uh the the absolute best out there now at this point you can make another decision me personally speaking as this is how I'm going to process galaxies through this galaxy season I'm not going to use star exterminator right now but there are situations where you may wish to pull the stars out and and separately kind of stretch those throughout the next steps um I can cover that in another tutorial and in fact I did cover it in my lrgb tutorial the last one that I just put out for the sake of this one though I'm just going to show you exactly what I actually do so going to make sure my main window is selected reset the stdf and I'm now going to open up generalized hyperbolic stretch going to fire up a preview real time preview there with the little icon I'm going to select an area of background with a left Mouse button just on the preview right there and click Send to SP that's going to set our symmetry Point hopefully somewhere in a nice middle background value at this point now I'm just going to raise the stretch factor up to the point where I can actually see what's going on in the image I'm not applying it yet I'll just kind of stretch this window a little bit so you can see better what's going on but all I've done at this point is rais that stretch factor I'm now going to create a drawn preview window if you will by selecting a little square icon down there drag it over the main piece of the image that I'm actually interested in m63 now I'm going to continue on with my stretch I'm going to talk you through it so I'm going to raise that stretch factor to the point where the core of the Galaxy just burns out so right here I'm just starting to lose detail in that region around the cor so there's no more any of that fine flocculent detail to actually look at and appreciate in the image it's lost it's Whited out at this point I'm going to raise now the local intensity just a step so Watch What Happens so we just a small movement the car of the Galaxy is once again preserved the overall Dynamic appearance of the Galaxy still preserved because we haven't gone too far with it and everything is now visible almost like a HDR combination in a way um it's quite possible these days to do with these really high dynamic range cameras to get practically a HDR looking image uh just in one stretch using generalized hyperbolic uh I really do love the tool I'll show you what happens if you go too far with this by the way it's a bit of a balancing act but let's say if you go too far over to the right on the local intensity the image is going to start to appear really flat and kind of lacking all life anymore in it so once again I'll click to reset the local intensity caruse burn out and I'm just going to pull it across over to the right just a touch till the car is no longer burnt out but the Galaxy is still a beautiful Dynamic looking object the car should be bright so let it be bright but don't let it overpower the rest of the image if if that makes sense so for our first stretch that's perfect I'm going to go ahead and hit apply for our second stretch now going to once again just select the region of the background with the left Mouse button you can see it's putting us a yellow SL orange line right there in the middle of the histogram view I'll just stretch that window a little bit so hopefully you can see what's going on that's representing the background value going straight up through the center of the kind of convergence point of all the data in that histogram um if you're having trouble placing that you can also just click wherever you need it to be actually on this window so straight up the middle usually a great place click Send to symmetry point and now we're going to go ahead and apply another small stretch so I'm going to use my cropped preview window again Zoom right in on the object of interest in this case of course m63 and I'm going to apply just another very small stretch nothing dramatic this time uh it's it's easy to like lose all the progress your point Z mid at this point with just a small twitch you know what I mean so take it easy take your time play more attention to what's going on in the preview window than over on the histogram right here so I want just a small stretch and this time I'm going to pull the local intensity slider over to the left rather than the right so I'm going to kind of kill that brightness just a little bit nothing dramatic and hopefully if I just cycle back and forth if the preview window would would play ball for me I just cycle back and forth you can see the effect that we've had so before after before after took it up a notch I'm happy with that I'm going to go ahead and say that that is stretched we're not done though with this tool just yet so we need to reset it once more and finally you'll notice that the histogram is pushed aways from the left so there's all this huge amount of value here which is making that background appear gray and space isn't you know truly black but it's not far off so we don't want it looking kind of this horrible uh wall gray color what we instead want to do is use the transformation type as linear I'll just Str this window for you again so you see what's happening and just dragging the left hand side of that histogram window pull it across keeping an eye on the left hand window to the point wh however you're satisfied that the background color is where you want it to be that looks pretty close to where I want it actually just visually and you can see the low clip right there LCP is full of zeros that's that's great that's what we want to see that means nothing's being clipped it's okay to clip a few pixels in there no problem at all so if you pull it across a little bit further to the right and see one two4 Etc very small amount of being clipped that just means that in some of those darkest darkest areas you are losing a tiny bit of information what you don't want to do is pull that Black Point into the actual data uh I know it can be appealing to have that Inky back blackground but quite frankly it's it's just wrong you are losing data uh as you can see by that low clip we are clipping a significant portion of pixels we don't really want to be doing that so let's just back it off a little bit and once again just visually I know it takes some time to go through this but hopefully you can see as I'm speaking through it why I'm doing what I'm doing and it should make more sense that looks good to me we're not clipping any pixels apply reset and now we can go ahead and close down generalized hyperbolic stretch I'm happy with it I'm finished with it now our image is color calibrated it's stretched it's cropped it's rotated you know what I mean the gradients got on it's it's looking pretty good so far but it is lacking in color I think you would agree it's looking pretty neutral right so what I want to do is I want to make a mask for this image and then we're going to selectively add saturation just to the areas of the image that need it so to do that I'm going to go to process mask generation range selection using the preview window going to select that going to tick screening and I'm going to wind up the lower limit just to the point now if I'm just going to draw you a small window you can see what I'm talking about better just to the point where the fainter regions of that Galaxy so that is to say if you notice just over to the left right here there is still some Galaxy information over to the right here the same kind of thing is visible you can see small amounts of Galaxy don't want to be excluding those if we can at all help it so I'm just going to pull it up gently to the right to the point where they're just about to go and then we're going to stop and at that point we're going to add a little bit of smoothness I'm going to go out to the full view once again so we can see what's going on and I'll talk you through this want to get rid of most of these small stars and also soften the edges of this mask a lot I'm going to drag it up most of those small stars are now disappearing the brighter stars are being left alone the Galaxy's being left alone as you can see it's all being included in the mask anywhere around about here is perfect for this there's a wide range of acceptable values like I say anywhere down here is fine here is fine here's still fine here's maybe a little bit too far you get the idea it's hard to get this one truly wrong so don't swear it too much so going to go ahead close down the mask tool right there and with our range mask selected I'm just going to drag the identifier across drop it below right there if you didn't see that just once again just like that and now with our main image selected you can see all the areas that are masked out are red and the areas we can work on are still visible open up curves once again hit a realtime preview select the s for saturation curves and this time zooming in once again on the Galaxy a little bit of a wider crop so I can make sure I'm not accidentally saturating anything I really shouldn't be so we don't want a horrible mly background which we should be protected by this mask if you did it correctly we can go ahead and start cranking up that saturation good chunk so that's starting to look really cool already I'm going to use that as one step you don't have to do this all in one single gigantic leap it can make a lot more sense to do it in a few different steps I've reset the tool going again I'm applying some more saturation looking really really nice right now I would say and one more just zooming in on the region I want to actually pay attention to and I think about there is where I'm going to leave it that looks well saturated to me we can see all those beautiful little regions of nebulosity those knots and such in spiral arms of this galaxy popping up we can see the color of the core expressing itself now on the on the image we can see those beautiful blue spiral arms the dark Dusty Lanes the flocculent detail is now appearing in the correct colors that dark Browns and creamy colors looks tremendous you could go to far with this of course so if you just demonstrate what that kind of looks like we're starting to really break down the image now and there's a lot of kind of color model happening obviously it just looks strange too nothing about it looks natural anymore but so too does this look a little bit anemic right you want a balance wants to look um appealing to you because you have the Wonder do the work at the end of the day so uh I'm happy I'm happy about there hopefully this is a good visual reference for you you can see what it looked like with another application that's too much so reset the tool close that down close your preview down right click and remove your mask and you are just about done now I sometimes at the end uh if you just notice with a actually added a tiny bit of color model uh kind of color noise into this image so you could have a another pass of noise exterminator just weekly applied so about 50% strength right there and as you can see it's gotten rid of all of that if I just go back and forth It's left alone the detail it's left alone those nebulous regions preserved all the color in them but it has gotten rid of that kind of mortal noise and we're left with I think pretty striking looking Galaxy really um especially from these bottle seven Skies it's amazing what you can do with these processing tools these days uh I'm really happy with that I guess there's one final thing uh worth noting and it's appearing on this image too it may not appear in your own images depending on the amount of light pollution you're dealing with but there's a slight green cast which really shouldn't be there so I'm going to get rid of that with scnr you could apply it at full I'll just show you what that looks like can alter the colors in the rest of the image though so I'm going to undo that and I'm going to instead apply it slightly more conservatively out there and yeah that's done I'm going to say that that's just about finished now guys and I hope that that was useful to some of you out there I hope you didn't mind me taking a little bit longer to go over some of the potential options when procing a Galaxy like this uh my intent really is to just help you guys learn and uh skip some of the frustrations that I dealt with while trying to teach myself so um yeah hope you found this useful and as always if you did find it useful please do leave a like on the video for me as it really does help out don't forget those affiliate links down below if you want to use those and really really really help me out that's massively appreciated as always a huge thanks to everybody on my YouTube memberships patreon all the direct support that you guys give is absolutely phenomenal it's out of this world and I couldn't do it without youself thank you thank you thank you very genuinely uh I hope you know I'm which I appreciate you all that's about it from me anyway hope that was useful look after yourselves guys and I will catch you in the next one so so until then good luck and Clay guys

Channel: lukomatico

Views: 11,130

Keywords:

Id: q8vIcPc1Jgk

Length: 28min 33sec (1713 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024