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| M51 03-2024 I was really pleased with how this image turned out for me and would like to see other processing attempts at it. Feel free to give it a go  For reference, my version is  M51 (Whirpool Galaxy) March 2024 The stacked .tif is comprised of :
The one thing I feel is lacking in this image is sharpness, I'm aware that this is a function of the optics and guiding performance, however maybe someone could try running BlurXterminator on this in PI, as I don't own or use PI. For me achieving natural colours is also challenging, as the blue tones in my images always have a yellow/orange cast to them, so I usually fix this by dragging down the orange saturation in Adobe Camera raw and then masking the parts of a galaxy or nebula I know are supposed to be blueish with an unalterd layer. |
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| I don't own or use PI either, but I'm giving it a try with Siril, and maybe Astrosharp. |
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 That's a quick edit I did in 10 minutes in PixInsight. Color was difficult, although I could do better If I had more time. |
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| For a zoom camera lens, that is a remarkably sharp image of M51. |
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| Ohhh, zoom lens?! I thought this was from something like a 4 inch high quality triplet refractor; this is unbelievable for a zoom lens. |
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| Not in the original, rather soft focus. Besides, isn't really fast at f/6.3. |
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Here's my take on your data using Pixinsight. Then the second picture just has the steps I took.  |
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Okayyyy, so here's what happened: I did a normal process with Siril (no sharpening), and some tweaking with Photoshop Camera Raw, and I got this image (which is cropped):  It lacks sharpness and color, and there's full of noise in the image, but Siril is horrible compared to PI. So then I brought this image into Astrosharp, and I got this image, which is worse in color and details in more extended parts of M51, but sharper in the middle: Using "second beta" Astrosharp model:  So then, I was annoyed, and I wondered what would happen if I superimposed the blurrier one as luminance with 50% opacity, over the sharpened one, and so I did that with Photoshop, and I made more tweaks, like lowering highlights and increasing shadows, and I got this:  It's noisy, but it doesn't look too bad, right? Now somebody has to copy my process and make a full image version instead of a cropped one... I had to crop it because Astrosharp freezes a lot and my laptop is not old; Astrosharp is glitchy too, so a cropped image is easier to deal with. |
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| Ahh jeez, my images look like junk compared to the Pixinsight images. You can ignore my Photoshop processing techniques. I wish I had PI... |
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Here is mine. I took into Pix, used SCNR, BXT, Localhistogram. Took into Affinity and used its BG removal function. Took into Capture one and sharpened a bit.  |
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Ahh jeez, my images look like junk compared to the Pixinsight images. You can ignore my Photoshop processing techniques. I wish I had PI... Why don't you get Pixinsight? For all the money the equipment costs, the $250 or whatever seems really inexpensive for something that is kind of becoming mandatory for Astrophotography processing. |
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Here is my attempt: Gotta say i would have never guessed it was a zoom lens based on the data alone. Pretty good stack i would say, the background is a bit strange though. I think you may have to go through your subs and see if there is high cloud or something like a neighbor's porch light on in some of them or something, and then get rid of those before stacking. Judging from the file name you have plenty of data to spare, so you can afford to ditch the bad subs for sure. My processing workflow was as follows: In Pixinsight: Crop, DBE, BlurXterminator in correct only, Image solver, SPCC with IMX183 settings, SCNR green at 0.5, BlurXterminator again with stars at 0.15 and nonstellar at 0.8 with correct only unticked. Asinh stretch at 1000, slight histogram transformation and exported as 16-bit TIFF for Photoshop. In Photoshop: Downsampled the image a little bit, StarXterminator, work on the starless layer and star layer separately finalizing the level of stretch. NoiseXterminator at a few different points. Smart sharpen applied to both layers at slightly different settings. Saturation increased to my taste and exported as the JPEG above. You should consider getting PixInsight for BlurXterminator alone, it really is a match made in heaven for galaxy images. |
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Dan Kearl:Ahh jeez, my images look like junk compared to the Pixinsight images. You can ignore my Photoshop processing techniques. I wish I had PI... Will get it one day, but I've been really focusing on spending my money on physical things, like an OAG, IR pass filter, UV-IR cut filter, filter drawer, and dust blower; I would think at least 3 of those things were mandatory for my setup. So once my acquisition is good, I'll put my money into processing. |
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So once my acquisition is good, I'll put my money into processing. This seems a bit backwards to me. How will you know if your data is good if you can't process it correctly. Processing tools are cheap compared to acquisition hardware. |
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Bob Lockwood:So once my acquisition is good, I'll put my money into processing. EDIT: I can do an autostretch, then a color calibration, then a background extraction and predict from there whether my data will be good or not I can see if there are strange artifacts and things with just these steps. |
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Ohhh, zoom lens?! I thought this was from something like a 4 inch high quality triplet refractor; this is unbelievable for a zoom lens. Thank you! I'd like to believe I'm really pushing the limits of what's possible with a zoom lens. Some day I'll invest in a dedicated scope. |
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Quinn Groessl: I think this one by far is one of my favorite! Thanks for listing all the steps it will be helpful for me to follow the workflow whenever I invest in PixInsight and am on the learning curve. Honestly I'm fully convinced at what @Oskari Nikkinen stated, I would never have thought I had this much potential out of this image. The brown central dust lanes were really difficult for me to achieve in Photoshop. Great edit! thanks for sharing. |
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Okayyyy, so here's what happened: Thanks for sharing your edits. Your first image looks near identical to how my first fully stretched layer looked like in photoshop. I use an arcsinh curve stretch method multiple times and then I will run StarXterminator and screen blend an mildy stretched version on top of the starless version. I agree despite having 210 darks, it's still pretty noisy when the stretch is pushed to the limits, I had to run noise reduction multiple times to get the sky to look as smooth as it does in my image. I downloaded and tried Astrosharp and yeah it's pretty buggy. I have yet to utilize it's full potential because I read that it requires Siril to obtain a PSF measurement to use for the setup which I have yet to do. |
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 Down and Dirty Crop DBE run twice (division first then subtraction) BXT (Correct only) SPCC BXT (Default) EZ Proccessing "Soft Stretch" NXT (Default) SXT extracted Lum and made a range mask LHE (Masked) Curves with Saturation (Masked) Sharpening with MLTsh and USM Histogram adjustment on background Increased saturation on the Stars Recombined Starless and Stars with Screening (Pixel Math) Cheers Tim |
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Oskari Nikkinen: Thank you! With enough careful focusing and low enough HFR values across my subs I was able to get some pretty clean data. To your comment regarding bad subs, I will admit I'm one of those integration addicts that probably hoards onto bad subs when I could still stand to cull some. While I pulled out all the subs with bad shaped stars from my collection, there are probably a few in there that were taken with high cloud cover. Also my sky towards the north is generally more light polluted that towards the south. Fun fact, I actually completed work recently on a little side project where I developed a Python script to parse my sub file names and sort by starcount and hfr, then rename the subs with a quality rating based on that and a 4-digit serial number. I really love the blue color you were able to achieve and I feel is the most accurate, I assume this was because of SPCC in PI? Photometric Color Correction? Glad to see that some people still use Photoshop as a compliment to the processing workflow and not exclusively PI. I'm one of those people who have always had the lingering thought "can't I execute the same basic processing functions in photoshop, so what's the point of ever venturing into PI?" however I know PI has vastly more functions that are tailored specifically towards an astrophotography workflow. Thanks for processing and sharing! Fabian |
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Fabian Butkovich: Thanks, I appreciate that. Pixinsight was a game changer for me. I started using DSS and GIMP and really struggled. The complexity of Pixinsight scares people off, but once you get a workflow down, it's really fun to use. RC Astro's tools certainly make things simpler, but there are free alternatives to them. That's not to say Pixinsight is magic though, I still struggle sometimes with some datasets. Then another thing I think I could really improve upon is the background in a lot of my images. I'm good at not clipping blacks like a lot of people struggle with, but I find it difficult sometimes to get a nice even background. Then other times I want to get that red Ha background you see a lot in IOTD images, but I've never quite figured that out. I think part of it is my process. Then I'm not sure, but I think using ZWO's filters make that a bit more difficult to do as well. |
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Fabian Butkovich: SPCC= Spectrophotometric color calibration, currently the most accurate method at least in my opinion. I am not sure i have seen it go completely wrong on any image i have fed it, although sometimes a tweak can be necessary. There is also Photometric color calibration in Siril, which is very good and free. If you dont want to go full Pixinsight right away you should give Siril a try for linear processing. Actually since you mentioned sorting subs, Siril also has a feature that does this for you. After registration you can inspect a plot drawn by Siril which includes FWHM, star count, background level and roundness. You can immediately see which subs had high cloud because they have a high background level and a low star count. You can one-click exclude all the bad subs from the plot, highly recommend giving it a try. |
