Hey this is Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com hopefully you've watched part 1
of this series where I showed you how
to capture the Orion constellation with
just your DSLR and lens and in this part
we're going to look at how to process
those pictures with a program called pix
insight. Pixinsight is a paid program I
think it's well worth it and it's
designed just for astrophotography so if
you're getting serious about doing extra
photography I think it's one of the
better programs out there it is
available cross-platform meaning I'm
gonna be using it today on a Mac but you
could also use it on Windows or even
Linux so let's open it up I'll just note
here that I have my files all organized
already so we have biased darks flats
and lights I showed how to take these in
the part 1 let's open the program here
pixee the site does offer a free trial
it's a 45 day free trial you can sign up
for on their website so if you're
interested in trying it out at some
point you can you can try before you buy
is a full trial meaning there's no
limitations on what you can do let's
jump in here and the first thing that
we're gonna do I'm not going to show
everything I might normally do because
this is just going to be a trying to be
a beginner video so I'm going to try to
do things as simply as possible and with
that in mind I'm not going to show the
full calibration and registration and
integration process I normally do
instead we're going to use a script a
lot of times that what happens is in pix
inside a process means that it's a
single process that you can do with your
images and it's usually gives you full
control over that process well a script
often combines multiple processes into a
handy package that takes care of some of
these things for you or just puts it all
into one unified interface and sometimes
scripts end up as processes as they
become more refined anyways let's go to
script batch processing and down to
batch pre processing and what this is
gonna do is it's similar to deep sky
stacker if you have not seen that
program you can see it in part one or my
gimp tutorial it basically takes all of
our lights flats darks and bias frames
and uses these calibration frames to
calibrate lights registers the lights
stacks the lights does all of this stuff
for us there are a bunch of options here
the most important ones is if you're
using DSLR images like we are we want to
make sure that CFA images is checked
CFA stands for color filter array and
if that's not checked then you're gonna
end up with black-and-white images the
other thing we want to look at here is
the debayer settings which is connected
to a CFA image debayer setting just
means it takes the individual filter
pattern from your camera and it tries to
understand that so that it can make a
full color image normally if you use
something like Adobe Photoshop this it
takes care of this for you this is the
most common debayer pattern our ggb and
this is the most common method vng so
I'm gonna leave it set to that anything
else here we're not going to use master
bias master dark or master flat because
we are gonna actually use the individual
frames we took to create those but if
you did have like a master bias for your
camera you could check that and then
just add the master bias over here
rather than all the bias frames okay I
think that explains these settings
pretty well let's go ahead and add our
frames so I have the lights tab open
here I'm gonna click on the add lights
button at the bottom find my lights
folder and if you're on a Windows PC you
can just press ctrl-a for some reason on
my Mac command a doesn't work so I'm
gonna just click on the first frame and
then go down to the bottom here and
shift-click yeah for some reason command
a doesn't work especially with pix in
sight when I'm selecting files like this
so I always have to click and then
shift-click to select everything in a
folder it's a little bit a weird bug I'm
gonna click opened it adds all of those
frames
like that they're all in this thing
called binning one this mostly applies
to ccd cameras where you can bin to make
bigger pixels but we that you don't have
to really worry about it that's fine
we'll go onto flats so I just click the
flats tab so I have that open so I can
see that it's adding them and then I
click the add flats button go into my
flats folder again click and shift-click
or if you're on Windows just press
ctrl-a that's done go into my darks tab
click the add Dirk's button repeat this
process click shift click open
interesting somehow I can tell that the
darks are all 2 seconds but the lights
doesn't it's not so sure about maybe
something weird stuck in there it
doesn't say that for the flats either
that's sort of weird okay whatever I'll
add the bias frames here we go and all
these files are available from my
website I'll put the link below so if
you want to follow along with my files
that I'm using right here you can or you
can of course follow along with the
files that you took ok so we have
everything loaded up there on the left
just make sure you have your lights
flats darks and bias all loaded in and
one thing I'll point out here is that
when you switch the tab you then get the
settings actually for that tab so this
is the settings for the bias frames this
is the settings for the dark frames for
the flats and so on so if you know a bit
about image integration and you want to
change something here you can I'm just
gonna leave it on the defaults but
if you do feel that you have a better
option you can choose it so and it does
explain some of the rejection algorithms
here if you hover over at this last
thing we have to add here is we have to
tell it which light to pick to register
against if you ran something like
subframe selector or blink than you
could know for certain which is the best
light frame I know that I had good focus
after I took my first for my first light
because that was right after I adjusted
the focus so I'm just going to use my
first light here as the reference frame
to register all the pictures against but
if you have if you use subframe selector
than it can actually tell you which is
your best frame statistically and that's
a that's now a process or a script it's
a little confusing it started out as a
script but then now they've made it a
process to subframe selector okay so
I've set my reference image I'm now
going to set my output directory and
what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to
make a new folder click a new folder and
call this DPP for batch pre-processing
and it will put everything that the
batch pre processing script creates into
that folder ok this all looks good I'm
going to go ahead and click run and if
there were any issues with what you set
up there it will give you a warning here
this warning about integrating your
light frames is something that will
always pop up even if you do everything
right and it's just telling you that to
get the best results after you run the
batch processing script you should
really run image integration with some
more fine-tuning and we may choose to do
that or we may skip it but that's what
this little warning is about if you
don't want to see it anymore you can
just click this got it don't
this anymore I'm gonna click continue
and now we play the waiting game since
I'm using hundreds of frames even though
I am using a pretty good computer here
to do this processing this is still
going to take many minutes to run
through all of this calibration and
registration and stacking so in the
video I'll just speed this section up
and we'll catch up here when this is all
finished in one thing that I actually
really like about pics inside it takes a
little bit of getting used to is if
you've ever you know done things on the
command line you'll you know that you
can set up a command line process to be
sort of more verbose it can tell you
everything that it's doing picks insight
does that by default it tells you
exactly what it's doing in this process
console so right now it's integrating
the bias frames and it's you know you
tells you which pixel row it's doing it
on and all that kind of stuff so this is
very this is one way in which picks
insight is a little bit more technical a
little more open in what it's doing then
Photoshop which is a little bit more of
a black box but some people you know may
find this all this information a little
bit overwhelming don't don't feel that
you don't really have to pay attention
to it if you don't want to we can just
let it do its thing now
alright that took a couple hours it's
now done and we can just click exit down
here in the lower right and it says you
sure you want to exit will say yes and
we can see that it didn't actually
produce anything on-screen but it's
created a bunch of different files so if
we go to file open to open the files we
can now go into here and go into that
bpp folder that we created at the
beginning of the process and see that
there are calibrated flats and lights
and registered lights and master files
and all kinds of stuff in here
so let's just take a look at the master
light that would be the final result and
see if it looks okay so we'll just go to
bpp master light bending one and click
open okay and it opens three files here
these are rejection Maps so if we
stretch them we can see what it rejected
this is the high pixel rejection this is
the low pixel rejection so you can see
there's a there's a fair amount of
rotation between the frames and shift
and things like that that's what all
this these lines are is the shifts but
that's normal we can go ahead and close
those and take a look at this and what
I'm doing to stretch this temporarily is
using this little button up here it's
the auto STF auto stretch and so you can
just click this little it's like a
little radioactive symbol and when you
click it it shows you what the stretched
image looks like and when you if you
want to turn that off the stretch or
reset it you click this little red
circle with a white X in it right here
when it's on you'll see that over here
on this tab there's a green line and
when it's off that green line disappears
so that's an indication that you you
have an auto stretch on or off it's that
green line so when we stretched it you
notice that it the blue channel became
dominant your image may look completely
different you may have a dominant green
channel or a dominant red channel this
is nothing to worry about though just to
show you how easy it is to remove that
color cast if we just run process
background model ization automatic
background extractor
and just say that we want to under
target image correction and run a
subtraction and then just apply that
process by hitting the square here at
the bottom of that process and then we
stretch the result you can see that that
blue color cast is very easy to get rid
of and we can do some some more color
correction in here too if you want to
know what that did exactly basically
models dominant structures by sort of
smoothing and then figuring out well
where is the gradient in the image so if
we look at what it actually subtracted
here the background this is what it
subtracted from the image it goes from a
light corner down here to a darker
corner up here and it's a very blue
thing that it subtracted if we zoom in
here we can see Orion and the running
man look very nice so do the Horsehead
and flame and there's other features
that are coming out here too if we
scroll over it here we can see here's
the witch head right there if we scroll
up we can see there's m78 and then this
little bit of red right here is actually
Barnard's loop right there is the
boogeyman nebula so a lot came out
considering this these were just two
second exposures and even just from this
initial you know processing and stacking
in pre-processing and stacking in pix
insight and running the automatic
background extractor to me the results
are already more promising than they
would be in
Photoshop so it sort of shows you the
power of this program if you're
interested in it anyways I this was just
an example I'm gonna go ahead and close
out of that background I'm going to make
this window a little bit smaller by
choosing I guess they can't make it
smaller let me just do this okay and I
mean it's gonna put this over to the
side so I can see it and what I'm gonna
do now is I'm actually going to run a
different background extractor on this
image it's called dynamic background
extraction and it you can be a little
bit more precise than you can be with
the automatic and so hopefully we can
get a slightly better result but the
first thing I'm actually going to do
before I run the dynamic is actually use
this to figure out a good crop for this
because the dynamic background extractor
is going to work a lot better if we're
not having to deal with weird frame
issues with the crop so I'm going to
open up geometry process geometry
dynamic crop process geometry dynamic
crop it looks like this I'm actually
going to apply it to this picture I just
clicked on this picture and then I'm
gonna reset it with this little reset
button down in the lower right
that just makes it so that the crop box
is the entire image here and then I can
pull in from the top and the sides once
I've pulled in a bit then I can go out
to a corner here and rotate that and I'm
gonna do something like that now I'm not
actually going to apply this crop yet
because I actually want to apply that
exact same crop over to this image so
the easiest way to do that is just to
make a new process icon a new instance
of this process with these settings
available then we were going to do that
is just take this little blue triangle
here at the bottom and drag that out to
the workspace and I'll be able to see it
says process oh 1 then we can close
dynamic crop and just drag the process
icon onto this to see how it looks
yeah and I think that looks quite good
I'm gonna go ahead and drag that same
process onto here and now I'm going to
run we can actually done with this now
so we can get rid of it I'll just delete
it right click delete now we can run the
dynamic background extraction so I'm
gonna go to process background model
ization dynamic background extraction
since it's a die manic process you click
on the image that you want to run it on
and then you're locked into this it's
not like other processes where you can
work on other things at the same time
dynamic processes you're sort of locked
into this relationship here that's fine
though what we're gonna do is I'm gonna
move this a little bit down so I can see
this image over here
as I'm working on this image because I
want to place samples judiciously so
that I'm not placing them on nebulae so
there's a lot of nebula in this photo
like
Barnard's loop the Horsehead and the
witches head and so forth so I don't
want to accidentally place one on one of
those and the other thing you want to do
is you want to get samples into the
corners onto the edges in at least one
into the center you don't want to place
too many samples because it can it can
then overcompensate and try to create
too complicated a model basically you
want a fairly smooth simple model so
let's go ahead and just start by placing
a sample in this corner just by clicking
and down here it shows you what that
sample looks like these things that are
black are stars and they show a black
meaning that it's going to ignore those
pixels because they're so bright what I
usually do is I take the sample and I
move it around a little bit until it's
not focused on too many bright stars
because then the sample is actually
sampling more of the sky background like
that the other thing we can do is if we
want to make the sample bigger we can
increase the radius so if I type in 20
you can see then we get a bigger sample
box
or if I want to make it smaller I could
type in 10 and then we get a smaller
sample box so I could do something like
that and just get basically only the sky
background values I'm gonna go up to
this corner next and do the same thing
and you can see that looks quite
different because it's a darker corner
do one up there do one down here do one
over here
oh and note this one that we just placed
turned red that means that it is
wouldn't be used in the model but we'll
fix that in a second here and we're
looking on this little preview that's
showing up completely black which is not
exactly what we want we'll fix that I'm
gonna place one over on this side and
I'll place one sort of here off a little
bit off Orion that's good
place another one sort of right above
the running man and let's see then the
other places I want to do it is where we
have these sort of bright spots to try
to minimise those a bit I'm gonna place
a few more samples down here and one
over here let's say
actually this one might be getting a
little too close to Barnard's loops I'm
going to just move it over a little bit
okay so that's what my sample selection
looks like now the next thing is we want
to take care of these red samples
because right now those wouldn't be
included so wouldn't be a very good
model so let's go ahead and close up
this little sample selector thing here
it says we have 15 samples that it's
working on let's open up model
parameters and the first thing I'm going
to do is I'm just gonna change the
tolerance it's right now set to 0.5 and
I'll just double that and raise it to 1
and nothing happened with those samples
the reason is because they're already
basically created with the previous
model parameter so we want to do
something called resize them and you can
see when I did that
one changed from red to white but the
others didn't so I'm gonna keep raising
my tolerance here I'll go up to 1.5 and
resize all again and now this sample
turned over let's go up to 2 okay and
now every sample except for the one in
this corner turned over so at this point
I'm gonna actually going to go here to
my minimum sample weight and bring that
down a little bit
meaning that it will take in samples and
weight them even if they don't meet a
certain threshold it'll just weight them
lower so I'm gonna bring that down to
0.5 and again click resize all nothing
happened
I like that smoothing factor so let's
bring this all the way down to 0.3 hmm
this one is still resistant so let me
just see what happens if I move this
Oh from that corner a little bit
all right let's try bringing up the
tolerance just a bit more bringing up to
two point two okay and now we can see
something there
let me check a very
oops
now the only problem with bringing it up
that far is now these samples are just
these samples in the upper half are just
completely white so it's sort of about
hitting a balance here but let's just go
ahead and try it as is I'm going to
choose under target image correction
subtraction and we'll apply that and see
what happens okay
it comes out fairly you know dark here
we can look at the background alright so
that's pretty good if we compare that to
our automatic it did it was able to
bring down these hot spots quite a bit
and I think with careful processing this
is going to turn out quite well you can
always you know do another round if you
think you can improve on that but from
my experience usually you know doing it
multiple times only gets you so far
so I'm gonna call that a day and close
this out especially since this is just
gonna be sort of a an intro to these
tools I don't really want to go too deep
into them so basically looking between
the the DBE the dynamic background
extraction and this automatic background
extraction
I like the DBE much better so I'm just
going to go ahead and close out of the
a/b II without saving and I also can
close out of this and don't save but I
am gonna save this one at this point so
I'll just call it file save as
and I mean I go back out to my root
folder here and just call this try one
underscore DBE
and I'll save it as an X is f file
that's the native format of pix insight
if you are planning to bring this into
another program then you might choose
something else like Fitz or TIF but for
it if you're staying in picks insight
then you can just use X is f and that's
the ones that's that that's the file
format that's the best supported I'll
click Save
I'll leave all these options alone when
you want 32-bit floating point that's
all good click OK ok and now we've we've
done that so we've we've cropped we've
extracted the background and we've saved
it the next step is we want to
neutralize the background a bit and
there are different ways to do this but
I'm going to show you a fairly simple
way which is we want to create a new
preview if I go up here and click this
little new preview button and then it
gives me a little thing that lets me
draw out the preview I'm just gonna pick
a spot in the picture which did which or
it doesn't look like there's many stars
and it's mostly just sky background and
I'm also looking for a spot where the
the sky background looks fairly normal
like not super bluish and order or weird
and then I'm gonna go up here to process
and go down to background model as you
know sorry go down to color calibration
choose background neutralization
and for my reference image I'm going to
pick that preview that I just defined so
preview 0 1 and then I'll just apply
that background neutralization to the
picture and you can see it seems to have
made the picture very blue but remember
that we had a screen transfer function
and auto stretch applied so if I
actually just delete the preview take
off that previous auto stretch and then
apply a new one this is what it looks
like now it still looks fairly blueish
so let's try this again
I'm gonna undo that let's try a
different area of sky I guess that one
maybe wasn't that representative so
let's try up here and see if that works
any better this time I'm gonna undo the
auto stretch before I apply it ok
yeah I think that looks better and we
can keep going with this sort of idea by
drawing out another preview I'm gonna
draw out a preview on the core of Orion
there is my white reference and go back
to color calibration and this time
choose color calibration for my white
reference I'm going to choose preview to
and floor my background reference I'll
choose preview one apply that and this
time what I was expecting to happen last
time happened it made the picture very
grey but if we undo the auto stretch and
then redo it now it looks very good this
this color looks a lot more accurate to
me I'm gonna go ahead and delete my
previews here and that looks very good
we can see some nice Reds it took care
of that blue cast for the most part if i
zoom in a bit there's still a bit of a
green color noise to this picture so one
thing I can do to take care of that is
go down to noise reduction SC & R and
remove some of the green noise from the
picture we don't want to leave it the
amount at 1 or it will really screw up
the colors but if we just bring it down
to something like 0.25 let's say so 1/4
of the strength and apply that it can
just do a subtle thing where it just
removes some of the the the green
background noise in the picture okay
we're moving along here
the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
stretch out the picture so right now
we're actually still in a linear state
we do
can see everything because we have the
auto stretch applied but if I reset the
auto stretch then you can see that's
what it looks like so I like to apply a
little bit of saturation boost while
we're in this linear state so I'm going
to go down to intensity transformations
open up curves transformation there's a
bunch of different things you can apply
curves to down here like you could apply
it to the luminance or the Alpha Channel
or the whole you know different red
green and blue channels I'm going to
apply it to the saturation so that's the
icon all the way over here on the right
the s and I'm just gonna take it up here
at the 75% and just raise the saturation
about midway up on this 75% part of the
curve and then you can see what that
does is it sort of gradually slopes down
and actually I might just even bring
this part down where it sits into the
background to create what's called an
s-curve it's is a shallow s as you can
see and then I'll just apply that to
ways to apply a process so you might see
me do either one if you just have one
window open you can always just click
the apply button which is the square but
sometimes if you have multiple windows
open you you find that it's easier to
tell it which one you want to apply it
to by just dragging the little triangle
the new instance button onto the picture
and that works as well and you can see
that did maybe something but not too
much so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna
raise it up even a little bit more and
apply it again okay and we can close out
of that
I'm going to drop the auto stretch and
now I'm going to stretch the image with
histogram transformation so under
processes intensity transformations
histogram transformation we have this
over here in the histogram
transformation where it says no view
selected I'm going to go ahead and
change that to my picture and you can
see that the histogram peak is way way
over here on the left hand side so what
we're going to try to do is basically
stretch it out over here and I'm going
to do that by taking this middle slider
and moving it over quite a lot something
like that okay
and every time you stretch you want to
pay attention to what's going on with
the image you can zoom in and look at it
and then think about how you want the
next stretch to be so I'm going to go
ahead and do another stretch not quite
as dramatic as the last time okay and
I'm not going to get into this with this
press one because we're trying to keep
it simple but a lot of times what I'll
do just as a tip here is I'll do one
stretch and then I'll make a copy of
this image just by dragging out dragging
it out from the tab you can make a clone
the reason I do this is because a lot of
times you don't really actually need to
do HDR what you can do is basically and
what I mean by HDR is just high dynamic
range what you can do is just do a
moderate stretch like we just did and
you can see we still have a lot of core
detail here in Orion and then you do
stronger stretches and you can combine
this this more moderate stretch
in with your final result to recover a
lot of court detail it's sort of a cheat
at HDR rather than taking actual shorter
exposures you can just combine things
from one picture okay anyways that's
sort of advanced I'm not going to talk
about it more I just want to show you
that in case you were wondering
we could also at this point increase the
saturation again but I don't want to I
don't want to overdo it on the stars so
maybe I'll just go into that and this
time I'm actually just going to take it
up right here you can always define a
preview too if you're not sure what this
is gonna do I've done this so many times
that I'm sort of aware but if you define
a preview like that and you press this
little circle then you can see a live
preview of what you're doing here and so
you can see if I bring that up too much
at this point then it gets really gross
it posterize --is the image basically
but if I just bring that up a little bit
then we can just get a little bit more
color into the picture that way okay
I'll apply that and get rid of the
preview and then I'll keep stretching
here this time when I stretch I'm going
to also move the shadow slider over just
spread up the curve a little bit go
ahead and zoom back out to see houses
looking overall pretty good
one thing you can pay attention to with
this shadow slider is you might you know
be tempted to bring it like right over
here to the edge of that curve sometimes
that works fine but um you you want to
be careful about not clipping too many
pixels to black you can see right now
very very small percentage of pixels are
actually clipping to black when I want
to do that but if I moved it like over
there then we're getting into the
territory of almost 1% of the pixels are
clipping to black which we might want to
avoid so do something like that bring
that in a little bit and I'm just gonna
keep stretching this just a little bit
more because I want to see Barnard's
loop come out like we were seeing in the
auto stretch yeah I'm gonna undo that
that was a little bit too far I think
okay let's see so what's next the next
thing that's bothering me about this
image is these strong magenta halos
they're sort of inner halos you can see
we have blue that sexual star color but
then inside of that we have this strong
magenta cast so to get rid of that and
picks insight what I like to do is just
make a star mask so we're gonna go to
process last generation star mask I'll
raise the noise threshold up just a
little bit maybe to point to bring the
scale up just a bit eighth bring large
scale down to zero
bring the smoothness down to let's say
nine let's binarize it meaning it's just
gonna make it more black and white not
in debt not shades of grey let's take
our mid-tone slider and bring that over
to 0.1 and see what kind of mask we get
from that
okay not bad
zoom in here and look at it a little bit
the one thing I don't like is it's
picked up a little bit too much noise in
the sky background maybe I raised that
noise threshold a bit too much but
instead of creating the mask again I'm
just gonna go open up histogram
transformation apply it to the star mask
and I'm going to just darken the star
mask a little bit like that and then I'm
also just going to use a clone stamp
thunder painting to just touch this up
just a little bit because I don't want
the Orion Nebula to be in this mask so
I'm just command clicking on a Mac or it
would be ctrl click I think on Windows
and I'm just gonna take out the running
man and the Ryan Nebula there and hits a
little green check to apply it okay we
have our mask ready now but before we
apply it let's go ahead and invert the
image so I'm going to go to all
processes and choose invert and what you
should see now is all of those magenta
area areas of the image turned green now
but that's also true in the nebula which
we don't want to change so now what I'm
going to do is I'm going to apply the
star mask and let's see it by clicking
show mask and you can see with the star
mask applied I still have all of those
little green areas of the stars but not
in the nebula let me turn it back off
just clicking a shell mask so there's
the nebula right there and I turn the
mask on you can see it's completely
protected because it's it's covered in
this red so I'm going to turn that back
off and now we're going to do the
process which is go down to noise
reduction and use that SC NR again and
again we want to apply it to the green
I'm gonna do it a little bit more
aggressively this time since we're doing
a targeted approach on just the star so
I'm gonna bring it up to 50 see how that
works and I'm gonna apply it a couple
times here I'm just gonna undo and redo
and see what we got here
yeah it's looking pretty good
maybe I'll apply it one more time okay
let's invert there let's remove the mask
so I'm gonna remove mask and then I'm
going to invert back so I'm gonna go to
all processes invert ah perfect okay so
that looks so much better without those
magenta halos on the image
really now it's just uh we could at this
point really just maybe try to increase
the saturation on the blue stars a
little bit so if I put my star mask back
on and I go to or is that intensity
transformations color saturation and
just take up the Blues only keeping the
greens and everything else low and apply
it
just makes those blue stars pop a little
bit if I undo redo I don't know if you
can see that I can see it on my screen
it just makes the blue stars look a
little bit more vibrant if we want to do
increase the saturation of all of the
stars we could just do that curves
transformation again and just take just
take the curves up like that yeah I like
that last thing I'm gonna go ahead and
remove the mask last thing is just to do
some final sort of adjustments to the
look of this one thing I would like to
do is I'm gonna use a different kind of
mask called a luminance mask to create
one in pix inside is quite easy you just
extract the L component with this little
button up here
and I'm gonna make this luminance mask a
little bit more dramatic by running a
curves on it just doing a slight s-curve
that and then I'll apply it just to show
you it's on there if I show the mask
there we go and then I'm going to
increase the saturation on just the
light parts of the image and I'm going
to then reverse the mask so do invert
mask reset this and decrease saturation
a little bit on the non like parts that
avenge meeting the sky background reset
again and I'm going to bring down the
sky background just a bit just like that
I'm going to invert the mask once again
so now we're working with the light area
again and I'm just going to bring up the
light area a little bit yeah and don't
be afraid to undo if you find that
something you've done just didn't look
quite right
I'm gonna actually not do that last two
steps excited son did them they didn't
look quite right it was making the the
picture a little bit too contrasty
so instead I'm gonna remove the mask
here and I'm just gonna try a classic
s-curve but making it vr-2 points down
here sort of in the shadow area and I'm
just actually just gonna check out a
preview here see if that's doing what I
want it to not quite I may try to make
it even more done here in the shadows
hmm
well this picture can't be perfect I
suppose huh actually I like that
still feels like the nebulae are not
quite as colorful as I'd like them to be
one thing we could do for that is we
could try a range mask so if we go to
process mass generation range selection
open up a preview and just move this
lower limit until basically just these
nebulae and the bright stars are the
main things selected there and then
increase the fuzziness and the
smoothness it's something like that
I'm just gonna then paint on this mass
just a little bit cut off the radius
here needs to turn up more let's try 100
just to get rid of some of this stuff
all right it's dark in the background a
little bit off his mask with curves all
right I'm gonna apply it let's take a
look at what it looks like good all
right didn't quite get the horse head in
there so if we wanted to touch it up a
little bit it could open up painting
again I'm just going to yeah that's not
good X
sorry fumbling around here a little bit
okay I need a slightly smaller softer
brush let's do 70 let's do a very soft
and let's decrease the opacity a bit -
there we go okay and I'm just going to
bring in the horse head
whatever okay good enough go back to
here let's go ahead and turn off show
mask and do what we meant to do which is
increase the saturation on the nebula so
I'm gonna go into intensity
transformations curves transformations
reset this open up saturation and apply
there we go that's what I wanted to see
here's before there's after and if i
zoom in a bit hopefully you can see that
the flame and the horse head before
looked a little washed out after they
just become a bit more vibrant right
okay um I don't know if I should stop
here or keep going there's so much you
can do and pics incite me remove that
mask
I haven't saved in a very long time so
let me just go ahead and save this so
file save as let's save it as try one
DBE CC for color correction stretch and
saturation because those are the main
things we did all right well there are
definitely other things we could try I'm
basically happy with this I'm maybe just
gonna do a final a little bit of a
curves transformation here or reset its
go to my RGB curves it's gonna pull up a
preview here and I'm just gonna sort of
darken the whole thing a little bit
basically what I'm trying to do is just
bring down the the background color
while keeping the nebula which are in
the Stars more which are more up here
they're same brightness levels which is
going to have the effect of adding
contrast to the picture let's try that
now the one downside to what I just did
is we lost the witch head a little bit
but I think I'm ok with that for what it
did to the picture let me just undo and
redo and see
hmm yeah maybe I went a little bit too
far let's try to bring it up a little
bit
yeah I like that better one other thing
I might do is just do another crop here
because I do I really don't think this
side or this corner is really adding
anything to the picture so I might just
make it a little bit square it's got a
geometry dynamic crop and I'll just draw
something out here whoops to reset it
so basically I think this this might be
a stronger composition it makes the the
picture more vertical which it's sort of
already a vertical composition rather
than it's more drawn out horizontal
let's see take a little bit off the
bottom two so here's before and after I
don't know I like both it's hard to say
but I'll leave a cropped focuses the eye
a little bit more on the interesting
parts I think ok so the final step here
out of picks insight is we're just going
to save it as a shareable format so a
lot of times what I do out of pics
inside is I save as a 16-bit TIFF
because I still find that I'd like to do
final touch-ups in Photoshop so I'll
save it as a 16-bit TIFF because that's
the best thing to bring into Photoshop
but if you're happy with it straight on
a pics insider you don't have Photoshop
then you can just save it as something
like a JPEG or a PNG I'll just bring up
the quality to 95 throws a bunch of
warnings about JPEG not you know not
being 16-bit data and losing accuracy
and all that kind of stuff that's fine
let's just go ahead and take a look at
what we made there and there we go
that's the final result out of pics
insight
I think we're pics insight excelled is
bringing out some of the fainter nebulae
like m78
we have just a tiny hint of Barnard's
loop there the witch head
I feel like Orion looks a little bit
more controlled - compared to Photoshop
or GIMP where it didn't really excel
exactly is it brought out some of the
sensor defects or problems with
something with with the calibration
maybe because I can see sort of like a
black bar right there and just sort of
the sky looks a little bit more uneven
and it might it might be my processing
was wasn't up to snuff here because we
could probably have gone further with it
but uh other than that I think it's a
pretty picture a lot of stars but you
can still clearly make out you know
Orion's belt in the main nebula I hope
you enjoyed this as always this is Nico
Carver from nebula photos.com and I just
want to thank everyone who supports me
on patreon and everyone who is
subscribed to this channel we now have
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amazing all right till next time clear
skies thanks
