Planetary Image Processing with AUTOSTAKKERT!, Registax, and Adobe Photoshop

hey good morning or good evening folks so mars opposition is coming up on october 13th so everyone is asking how do i take a good picture of mars so if you see on the left hand side this is the live video that i captured of planet mars and this is the stacked image of mars right so folks are asking how do i get from here to here right it is a two minute video when i captured it and i captured in the raw eight format in the sharp cap sharp cap is the live imaging software i used i used the celestron 14 hd telescope and i used a teleview powermate 2x which is like a barlow which multiplies the telescope focal length twice and then i used a zwo adc which is a atmospheric distortion corrector or dispersion connector whichever way you call it and those that's my setup and i used a planetary camera which is the zwo asi 290 emc so and i used a phd for guiding like i was getting on a corner star near the field of view in my guide camera on the top that you can see in the back of my background so how do i get from here to here right that's what i think everybody is interested in right so you take the soft you take this picture which is the avi file which is like roughly around 1.7 gigabytes by the way if you are all interested i don't mind sharing this data so i'm actually uploading it to my google drive and if and i'll leave the link in the below of the video description so you guys can download it okay and let's get started so this is the picture this is the video file you need to download a software called auto stacker and if you download and open you get a file like this right there is a window here on the right and then there is a kind of options over here you can actually drag multiple files from here same time but rather than making this tutorial way too advanced i would just drag one file at a time okay so you take this you can open and do that one as well it doesn't matter how you do it but if you do that you get that one file one of one and you see the picture on the right side okay one of the things that you need to do is on the right side go through the frames and keep going like basically it has 3600 frames so when you are looking at these frames you know like you know the atmosphere is moving and maybe one frame is better than the other you don't know which one is better but if you wait and do it slowly you will start seeing whenever you stop in some places you think that you got it right okay so it's okay to select the one that is kind of enough details right so i'm still browsing through to see if i can find a good one i'm moving rather faster but i'll try to move slow yeah you wanted it to be round the planet not like bouncy right but generally like this one is pretty good not good enough then find something else right look at something that is decent with all the data that you wanted it i wanted to stay here at this level okay this is kind of what i wanted to see a bit of yeah i'm not able to make up my mind but yeah i'll i'll take this one all right so now you see the image size is 800 by 600 that is the resolution at which that i took a picture notice that in the video file when i was showing you earlier the picture is black and white but here it is showing color right so in the color options here i left it as auto detect so now the color is coming up sometimes you have to force to rgb or rggb one of those but generally if everything is correct and if you did captured it on right generally auto stack it will automatically detect the color okay now on the left hand side i left it as planet dynamic background gradient noise robust s4 local and you could actually go multiple steps like analyze and stack but generally the way i look at it is this picture here generally is okay so if it is generally okay you can let's say at least every other frame or you know at least one frame out of three frames the frames are coming okay so you can decide what would be the best number like i would put at least 50 above for this level but if you are a little concerned you can also try maybe like 36 or or 38 or 58 i'm just putting some different numbers so that it creates them in separate folders selected rgb align i didn't want to select the drizzle auto size is quality based and i selected tiff as the file format that it has to create after it does the stacking now on the right side you could zoom in and out of this image that's one of the options that you can do if you wanted to see them all you can see it and then you can manually select you can manually select the frames here but i would prefer leaving that to 24. some people suggested me 48 but i like 24 and i put max brightness as 20 based on the brightness and let's say if you click place the ap grid the alignment points the aps are going to place automatically and they look pretty good good enough that i don't need to if you are worried in some cases you might need to turn on this close to edge but i have not seen trouble with place ap grid so far it works okay and now you click on the stack generally people select analyze and then they will select the right percentage but you can do eyeball i put 56 and i put 38 and i think that will 58 and 38 i think that will pretty much do the job if it is not then when it analyzes it you can actually look at the graph the quality graph and decide i would leave that to the system and usually when you are processing several videos you don't want to like you know deeply analyze every one of them eyeballing it is generally good enough to get the idea but this numbers will help you because you wanted to go maybe a bit lower or maybe a bit higher frames in terms of stacking and if you click on stack this will take some time depends on the computer and the number of frames and all that stuff but once it all completes it saves the images in these two folders okay so i'm going to come back once this process is done okay now it is done it completed the image stacking and it must have placed these files in these folders all right here are the directories the 38 and the 58 so we can actually look up the image so this is the 38 one let me minimize this so this is the 38 option and look let's look at the sorry 58 and let's look at the 38 one as well so this is the 38 one so if i compare these two whichever one has more details is the one that you would like to select right so when you come here i don't know i started liking the 38 one yeah this one has it's hard to tell honestly which one has more details i'm just eyeballing it and i see the black more black here than here so but here it is a bit sharper in this side versus here i would go with the 58 for now it's not much of a difference but it's your choice you can make the choice i'm seeing the resolution and the sharpness is better here for the ice caps then here this one is little bit not sharp so i would go with this okay so this is the one that i am going ahead with so if you go back to the directory it created this is the image that we are working with okay so step number two once the auto stacker process is complete you can actually close auto stacker and then open another program called registax so registax is a free software as well both auto stacker and registered registered acts are free software i forgot to mention that earlier so this one when you open you could actually take this image the one that you got drag it over here and you have multiple wavelet settings here and multiple functions here okay so one of the things that you can do is you can make changes to here okay so when you increase the sharpness here you will see lot more details here let me show you what i mean let's say if i put like maybe three and if i drag this over to the right you'll start seeing fabulous details right at the same time it does create a lot of noise so you may want it to reduce the noise like you know 40 percent noise reduction so let me show you what i mean by noise reduction if i click on view zoom this is what it is so if i didn't turn on the noise it's like this right but if i did turn on the noise it becomes less grainy but of course it loses some of the sharpness and details but definitely it improves the noise right so this is the image that you are going to get you can do that at multiple layers i went to the lowest level layer but you can change these and play around with it forever so i have multiple settings here like the ones that i always use so i will for these ones you can save these once you got a got an idea which one is better click on save scheme so you can load them up so i'll usually try from the top i'll play with each one of them so this one is i'll i'll i'll show you guys each one of them and you can pause the video if you are feeling something that you wanted to use these are the settings that are changing for each one of them i like the third one better but i'll see oh this is too much we don't want to use four number four for sure it's too light too much too much it's okay let me see the difference between this last one and the third one third one is making it better okay so it is doing like 0.12 sharpening all the way and 0.18 and this deserves a little bit more sharpening if we wanted to get a bit more details so i will go and bump up this to 18 to get a bit more detail okay i don't want to go way too much i'm just matching that to the sharpening on the left and the d noise on the left because i have quite a bit of details i think it is getting less grainy so i'll stick to the lower layers i think this is almost pretty close so even this guy for this layer i will just reduce it a little bit i don't want to overdo it because you might get artifacts if you overdo it i think if you stay at that level i think it may be okay it's very natural looking when you zoom in it's pretty good you don't want like if you use the control you can move this around and see if you are going to create if you start seeing any stacking lines on the image that's when you know like you are overdoing it but right now i don't see any stacking lines i'm okay for now right there is a little bit of color correction that we may have to do on this one for that click on the rgb align and there is a alignment box here so what you need to do is you can highlight this okay and put it in the view zoomed so that you actually can see it what is going on and click on estimate this actually does the rgb align fairly well i really like the way it does sometimes your adc if you don't have an adc this one actually makes pretty good estimation if it is showing some numbers here then it gets a bit more complex then you need to fix for those like you you can manually move that up and down but if it doesn't show any numbers here you don't need to use this manual option at all okay so some people rather than doing an estimate they would actually move this around to make any corrections i would prefer leaving at estimate and if it is showing zero i would just ignore it i'll leave it at that point okay now i wanted to go and do rgb balance now okay so here you can actually move the sliders red green blue like for example if you do like this you get that color in the back if you do this it's too much green is showing up right and if you um put it in the middle it is this is where it was so if your d is like you know if you want to put more color like red into it you actually get a bit more red because it is mass but what i would prefer is i don't want to mess around with this and i will click on auto balance auto balance is the best way to go because you don't want to change colors with this program i would prefer like a photoshop and change the saturation there rather than making any changes at this particular point right so i'll leave it at that i think this will give you a fairly good image for that standpoint but remember all we did was we used these settings the sliders are right to move to the right make sure because there are zeros in the beginning but if you do save it once this will come up automatically okay now this is not the end of it like what you need to do is you need to save and when it saves it it will tell you this you have not used the do all function dual is nothing but do this do the rgb do the balance right so press yes and it takes your old image and converts that from old image to a new image which generally i will call it for youtube okay i'll remember that usually i'll put like underscore v2 but for me i must have processed this already so i'm just putting a different name for this file i don't want to overwrite my stacked image because if i learn a better way of doing it i can come back rather than stacking again right and i save that image okay and then you can close this program so the next one that i would do is i would go to adobe photoshop and i'm assuming most of you use photoshop if you are advanced you can go to pixelm site but i think i am showing you with photoshop because most of us are using you don't need to buy the entire photoshop license now they have a cloud license version so you can use that if you are interested but i use the cloud version of it and that will do a pretty good job you can do this in lightroom if you are very familiar with it all i'm doing here is i'll show you couple of steps so i'll put it in this image the new image that is coming through i prefer dragging it rather than second guessing so let me see this is my y2 image and i'll put it here all right so now the image is loaded here the first thing that i would do is i would try to go to image adjustments and levels if the levels is showing something like this there isn't much we can do i mean if you can see if you move the levels down a little bit it gets a little darker okay so you can go this is the maximum level i would go to i wouldn't go beyond this okay but i would stay a little bit to the left because i don't want to make it like too dark all you're trying to do is uh make it a little bit darker regions a bit more dark that's all you're doing when you are making when you are moving to the right if you go to the history if you see the open it's too bright probably i was taking when the moon is on and i'm just making it a bit darker so that the background is going to come up right and that's where i would want to stay here on the levels i don't want to go to curves adjustments at all if you do go into curves you are going to change the image and that's not my personal taste and if you go to sharpen in the filter there is something called smart sharpen so these are my settings here and already you can see the amount i prefer to use is like 224 radius is like 3.8 reduced noise is like 39 percent if you have a better way please feel free and if you click ok let me show you by zooming in this one okay so this is what it is right now this is what it was before right you can see that maybe the smart sharpen is a bit more than what i expect because i don't want to see that it just gets bright so i would tone down a little bit let me go back to the smart sharpen filter sharpen [Music] smart sharpen and here i would reduce the amount a bit more drastic and now i think i am seeing lesser of that issue right so this is uh this is pretty good good enough okay and then the next thing that i would do is i would go to the filter and the camera raw filter and things that i would generally do is increase the saturation slightly higher gives a bit more color vibrance not too much maybe a little bit better right i change the temperature so if you go all the way you can see the temperature is changing right so i would change it to somewhere here but you lose the darkness of it when you increase the temperature but you do want it somewhere here or here so it's personal choice this will put a bit more color into it but i don't want to overdo it right so just increase a little so that at least people recognize this is mars not moon right so that's all i would do just make it make the tint higher a little bit and that's pretty much what you need to do i don't think you wanted to do anything else this is basically the image that you got when you started here by doing these steps you got this image so from here you move to this image just by making sure that you change the shadows and all that stuff so now you got a pretty good image of mars here i would save this as the same file with an extension of maybe this is photoshopped so i would put it as ps and okay and also i will export this as a gif file as a jpeg file sorry so change it to jpeg it does a pretty good job exporting it to jpeg and it will save right here so now if you go back to the same directory that's my background desktop background so okay so if i go to this directory i have a photoshop file here which is what i have here so so this is the file yeah it looks good i don't know every time i process it the image change a little bit so there is no science behind it honestly other than following those steps but let's not overdo it when you are doing it i think if you stay at a decent level i think you get a pretty good job so if you open this image so this is where we started with the avi file the video file and that's what the mars image that you are going to get i hope this tutorial is helpful for the coming up mars supposition there could be lot of better ways to process than how i processed it so i'll share my data with you all and you can follow this process or make improvements to this process but if i did make any mistakes please do let me know i will also correct on my side if there is a better image that you are getting or even if you are getting a an image that looks like this or even worse do tag me in those images and let me know when you are using my data i i'm on instagram uh youtube facebook and twitter so you can tag me anywhere wherever you are posting that would be very helpful thank you all for watching if you are new to this channel and if you do like this video please feel free to subscribe to my channel and click on the like button thank you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Ray's Astrophotography

Views: 7,010

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Id: iv8cmm7Vl_E

Length: 29min 49sec (1789 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020