Processing the M31 Galaxy using PixInsight in 15 minutes

hi so uh in this video what i'm going to do is uh process my m31 andromeda galaxy in pixel inside um as quickly as possible so you get to see how i process and what i do um so first things first yeah just auto stretch and what we're going to do is just do a quick dynamic crop based on the rough area where i [Music] want to keep so i'm going to go for a rectangular crop and make sure that i'm not right on the edges because of either did the ring or just guiding issues and things like that so trying to keep as much of the image as possible go with something like that click the check box to click the tick to complete the crop and command zero just to zoom in a bit that's control 0 on windows just going to do automatic background extractor set the box and the box separation to 8 correction to subtraction discard the background model replace it um and i'm going to probably run this maybe a couple of times i'm going to have to auto stretch this again so you can get to see what it's done and it's got rid of that cream green color cast let me just run it maybe one more time just to try and get the edges smoothed out a bit more sort of the vignetting fixed um so i'm kind of i'm happy with that so far next thing you want to do is uh background neutralization just to kind of remove any any background casts as well select the view which is the only image i've got open drag the triangle and that completes background neutralization the next step is on to color calibration so this particular galaxy or this particular image i can do this by selecting the the main core of the galaxy for the white point uh select that's preview one so any kind of previews that you create uh you can use option n or alt n on windows and that gets you a preview so create another preview area in a very the darkest area i can find within this particular galaxy and that is in the top area of this particular galaxy so preview 2 select that drag the triangle onto the image and that is color calibration done what we want to do next is to go through a de-noise activity and what we're going to do is create a linear linear mask sorry to linear a luminance mask by clicking that button then you stretch this and you can see the mask but we actually need to sort of completely stretch this and create a linear image so we want screen transfer function histogram transformation select the luminance layer and auto stretch that drag the triangle onto histogram transformation and then drag the triangle onto the luminance layer we then reset by clicking those little arrows in each of those controls and we have a luminance layer which is now stretched so we can use this um in a number of different places but what we first need to do is to attach that luminance layer to this image and you can see that the mask has been created all of the red areas are protected and the white areas are what would be modified we need it the other way around so we're going to invert the mask we're also going to disable the mask so that we can see what we're actually working with let's close that luminance file and we've got this open here so what we want to do is denoise using the multi-scale linear transform so that is up here i can never find anything in the menu so i just go for alphabetical we now want to go down to target and we're going to target luminance data only and for this we want just four layers again select noise reduction for the first layer and the values three 0.35 and three iterations select layer two noise reduction 2.5 0.35 and 1. layer 3 is going to be 1.5 point two five and one all of these values you can just um tweak and play about with however you want um and you can see how they how they fundamentally have an effect what we can do here is just quickly going into preview open up the preview here and it will address so if you turn preview off you can see the noisy part of the image as it's only luminance you can see that the noise rather than the chromium chrominance apply that and it's uh it's then flattened so that's good we're happy with that and we can now drag that onto this image to remove the luminance noise let that finish uh processing uh reset this particular layer then we want to go to target and chrominance so we'll open this preview again so you can see whilst i'm doing this and we're going to select seven layers in this particular one so it's selecting noise take defaults noise again take the defaults so layer 3 noise drop this to 2.5 we're going to set this to 0.8 and that's one then the fourth layer which is the final one and that's going to be default point eight and one so if we turn off the preview you can see that this is slightly colored you've got greens reds and blues in there enable the preview and it's all pretty much gray at that point in time so kind of really happy with that i'm going to select the image drag the triangle onto it and that is now noise reduction done and get rid of that mask now and we're at the point we actually want to do the uh stretching so open up screen transfer function histogram transfer select the image that we're working with doing kind of a nuclear stretch uh drag that onto there [Music] and then drag the triangle onto the image reset these controls again and we have our stretched image um it's kind of a bit sort of uh sledgehammer to do the stretch in that way it's always better to do it manually but just kind of showing you uh the rough flow at the end of the day so to get these details i'm going to open up the hdr multi-scale transform which is there and we also want to do this with the mask in place as well so we're going to select mask select the luminance because we've still got the file open here so that all works so that's done one case turn that on and off and we can see what we're working with um so red is protected white isn't which is good because that's the area that we want to work with and we're just going to try here so keep everything as defaults turn d-ringing on and just literally apply that wait for this to process because it takes a little bit of time normally do this with a preview but i'm happy with the the defaults in this this particular situation so undo redo that's the change that it's made [Music] next thing we want to do is a local histogram equalization [Music] and yeah we need to be careful um normally the sliders are whacked all the way to 100 and that's that's just way too much if we just do a quick preview one in here um and accept that it it's not too bad in this particular preview let's let's create a different preview um slightly wider area because it doesn't look very good with the defaults normally um so that's it applied that's it without it it's just a bit too extreme so what we need to do is just kind of drop this down to wherever you're happy with basically i think that is is better and not too much so that's good i'll keep it about that and let's close that go out to the image and apply that's before that's after it's quite subtle but it's bringing out the dust lanes within this particular image um so let's get rid of this mask what we want to do now is use um star masks so that we can then process the image further but only selecting the the stars themselves and this is partly for uh for star reduction really um so setting the value to 0.4 scale to 8 large scale 1 small scale 1 compensation 2 smoothness 14 and then the shadows mid tones and highlights all the same values truncation has just been dropped slightly and that's that's pretty much it we'll apply that to get the star mask and what we're going to be doing with this is using the the star mask as a mask and so so we apply that to the image itself um purely so that we can do some star reduction um just to bring these the the intensity of the stars down down the tab so we're going to do that by using a morphological transformation another great name for a control i'm sure it means something to someone um i do need to do a bit more reading up on this um so yes that's using erosion minimum um the amounts to about 0.46 in this particular instance that's just what i kind of like size one and make sure that you've got sort of rounded stars selected so if we drag the triangle onto that you see that this intensity of the stars has dropped a tab but not too much so that's star reduction done can use um next to sort of see if there's i don't think there's too much sort of green cast but we can use um scnr um with the color drop down of green drag that onto there to see if basically remove any kind of green tint to the image but i think it's pretty much okay anyway so i'm kind of happy with that anyway so that's that's all that done what we now want to do is um some further enhancements to the the galaxy itself so what we're going to do is remove the mask and what we want to do is go to processes all processes and down to range selection so we're going to use range selection open up a preview to basically get to a point of um only selecting the the core of the galaxy basically and so actually just reset these sliders so this is how it'll appear to you and what we need to do is increase the lower limit to get as much of that galaxy as possible that we're happy with and then increase the smoothness so that we we're blurring out all of the other stars and we can get rid of those in a future step i'm happy with that i'll cancel the preview and we've got our new range mask what we want to just do quickly with this range mask is actually use curves here as well on rgb just to reduce the intensity of the elements around or outside of the core of the galaxy so that they're not really making any impact there as well so we've got our range mask drag the range mask onto the image itself so we've now got the only the the galaxy itself is now highlighted and what we can do in using this is kind of cancel and bring all of that down which is whilst we've got that selected and what we want to do is use curves transformation to to boost this particular area so we can bring down darks a bit just to boost a bit of contrast and the lights up to make the galaxy pop a bit more i'm kind of happy with that and then the the saturation itself so boosting the saturation to a degree where you're kind of happy that it doesn't look [Music] too false so i'm kind of happy with that um also what i'm going to do just with this particular image is um to boost the core of the galaxy just just bring out the yellows a bit more not that much and also bring the blues out a bit as well but it's bring that all the way down there this one all the way up here it's quite tricky to get that right but um that's it before and basically not really much color there at all and that's it after and i've kind of just boosted the the area of color around here so it just looks a bit more interesting [Music] um so at that point we can kind of apply this so close the preview drag the triangle onto there [Music] and that's pretty much the final image so i hope you found this video useful um if you did please hit that like button and also if you want to see videos like this in the future please hit the subscribe button and also the bell so you receive notifications it would also be fantastic if you can leave um comments in the comments section um your views on how i've processed is there any better way of processing things uh just so that we can all learn from each other that would be really good so uh i'll leave it at that thank you for watching and clear skies

Channel: astrojourneyuk

Views: 1,903

Keywords: astrobackyard, astronomy, astrophotography, astrophotography for beginners, astrophotography image processing, astrophotography processing tutorial, astrophotography tips, astrophotography tutorial, beginner astrophotography, deep sky, digital image processing, galaxy, galaxy photography, how to, how to process astrophotography images, image processing, pixinsight, pixinsight processing, pixinsight tutorial, pixinsight tutorial beginner, pixinsight workflow, space, tutorial, andromeda

Id: 5hy2J4IadHY

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021