okay so we're back inside and the first
thing we have to do
to actually start processing our
files
is actually get them onto the computer
organized
and i'm actually going to start with the
camera
because uh in playback mode on the
camera it's really easy
to actually understand which files are
which because
most cameras have an info button that
then gives you some metadata about the
file
in playback mode and that way
i can just quickly see not only
visually what kind of file it is so
obviously the ones with stars will be
lights and the ones that's all
uh bright like this is a flat but when
it comes to the files that are
completely black like bias and darks
it's hard to differentiate those without
the metadata
so looking in the upper left hand corner
here it tells us the shutter speed
and so a dark would have a shutter speed
that's the same as the light
two two seconds while a bias frame would
have a shutter speed
that's 1 8 000 of a second which is the
fastest
shutter speed this camera can do so what
i'm going to do now
is i'm just going to open up notepad on
my windows computer here
there's also a program called text edit
on mac
both of these are just quick note taking
applications
and i'm going to type in lights darks
bias flats because that's the order that
i took these files in
and i'm just going to take note here of
the
file names the range of each type
so we can see the first light here is
ends in 831 the file name so i'm just
going to type in 831
dash and then i'm going to press the
zoom out button
and just use my scroll wheel here
to scroll down
until we see something that doesn't look
like a light frame meaning we don't see
the milky way anymore
it'll turn probably completely black
eventually
it took a lot of light frames
there we go okay so you can see starting
with
one one three five this is a completely
black frame and because it's two seconds
i know that it's a dark so
the the last uh light frame
is one one one two
and then i guess i deleted some files
probably because the
clouds came in and then the first dark
frame
is one one
three five okay now i'll just keep
scrolling
until up there in the upper left hand
side of the screen it changes from
2 seconds to 1 8 000 of a second and
then i know this is my last dark frame
so 1 1 8 0 and my first
bias frame is one one eight one okay and
then i'll just keep scrolling
until we get to the flats
looks like i took about a hundred bias
frames
there we go
1280 is the last bias frame
and then my first flat frame is 14
37 i know that's a a huge jump there in
numbers
i deleted some things from the card just
to make this a little bit
easier so then i'll just keep scrolling
whoops and my last
flat frame is 1465.
okay so now i have everything all the
information that i need
to organize these files because i have
the file names
and the numbers here and what type of
file they are
and so now what i can do is i can just
remove the memory card
from the camera
and take my memory card reader here
and this is a nice usb 3 memory card
reader that's
nice and fast for transferring the files
to the computer it's made by kingston
and it also has slots for other type of
memory cards
if you have a camera with
cf or something else um
okay and it says blah blah blah i don't
care it opens up that in the file
explorer if you're on mac this would be
finder and uh if it if it does if your
memory card opens up in some
other program some photos application
just close out of that we don't need it
what we're going to do now with this
window open over here
and our notepad file here is we're going
to
copy the files off of the memory card
onto the computer
but before we do that let's make some
empty folders
to transfer them to so i'm going to make
a new folder on the desktop
just right click and choose new folder
i'll call this
lagoon and then inside my lagoon folder
i'm going to make
four subfolders just the same way right
click
new folder and i'm going to make one for
lights
one for darks
one for bias
and one for flats okay
now with these two windows open
here's my memory card i'm going to go in
here into my picture files
and here's my empty folders on my
desktop
i'm gonna start with lights and so
lights go from eight three one to one
one one
two so i'm gonna open up my lights
folder
over here in my memory card i'm gonna
click on the first file 831
and scroll down until i get to
one one one two there it is
and hold down shift and click and so
shift click
makes it so you can grab the whole list
of files then i'll just left click and
drag
to drag these 282 files over to my
lights folder and let go
and it copies them
okay the copying is done so now i'm
going to go back a folder just by
clicking on lagoon
and next i'll go into darks
so i'll click on the darks folder it
says the folder is empty
then i'll just copy over from 1135
to 1180. so
click once on 1135 scroll down
shift click on 1180 copy those to my
darks folder
well that's going i can look the next
it's bias 1181-1280
so open up my bias folder
click on 1181 scroll down to
1280. shift click
and click and drag 100 bias files
okay and then finally flats is
everything else here
so we'll just copy those over to the
flats folder
and then we'll be done
okay all done the only other thing i
want to say about
file organization here is
uh that if you are using deep sky
stacker
when it stacks together all of these
bias frames to make a master bias
it leaves that master bias file uh
in this folder so if you have a previous
project that you worked on and you still
have all of these folders look in your
bios folder there's a master bios
file in there then you can reuse for
project after project you don't have to
take the bias frames all over again and
restack them you can save some time just
by
reusing a master bias file so that's why
i shot a hundred bias frames just to get
a really good
master bias file and then we don't have
to actually shoot those bias frames
again
we can reuse that master bias file over
and over again
okay i'll close out of this stuff and
now let's go ahead
and open up deep sky stacker here
okay this is deep sky stacker 4.2.3 the
64-bit version the first thing i'm going
to do here is go down here to settings
and go to stacking settings
and right here where it says temporary
file
files where it says temporary files
folder
you can see that i have mine set up to
an external drive the d
drive which is just a an external hard
drive i have connected
but yours might be on the local
drive and that's fine as long as you
have plenty of hard drive space but
if you don't for some reason i would
recommend setting this up
um to where you want it to go where you
have plenty of space because these temp
files can get
really really big like since we're
stacking
hundreds and hundreds of frames these
these temp files can get up to like
60 gigabytes now they are temp files
meaning they're temporary they only are
are there when you have the program open
and then when you close the program
they're deleted from your hard drive
but still you need the space so if
you're working off a fairly
small like startup drive like an ssd you
may want to
pick a different location for this
temporary files folder like i did
okay with that said we can now open up
our picture files this means our
lights and so i'm just going to navigate
here to the desktop
and then to my lagoon folder
into my lights subfolder and i'll just
click on any of them and then press
control a to select all and click open
okay it brings them in for some reason
uh deep skystacker has this quirk where
i think it's because you could just
bring in
all of your frames all at once and it
let it try to figure out
which are your light dark and flat and
biased but i really wouldn't recommend
that because it might
mess something up so what i usually do
is i just bring in my light frames first
but none of them are checked right now
so then i go over here and just click
check all okay then it tells me i have
282
light frames okay then i can click over
here
on the left hand side under open picture
files where it says
dark files just go to my darks
folder and again click press control
a and open up all my dark files
and it tells me i have 46 of those
then i'll open up my flat files
open those 29 and finally my bias files
open okay we're not using dark flats
uh you usually only need to use dark
flats if you're shooting really really
long flats like 30 seconds or something
like that uh
if you're using a slow scope or
something like that uh
but we we shot very quick flat so where
i'm not worried about dark current noise
and we don't need to correct
the flats with dark flats anyways uh we
have all of this set up now
um we can now go on
to this red
highlighted thing down here that says
register checked pictures
okay
let's start with the main
window here under actions so we have
register
already registered pictures these are
not already registered so we can leave
that unchecked
we have automatic detection of hot
pixels it's fine to leave that checked
we have stack after registering i'm
going to go ahead and check that
i want to just do this all in one
process sometimes you break it up and
you might want to register
first and then look at the scores and do
different things with that but
let's just keep this simple and stack
after registering
i have 282 frames so i'm going to tell
it
to select the best 95 percent of
pictures and stack those so it's gonna
throw out the worst of the five
the worst five percent of the pictures
which i'm fine with
i think there's some which have maybe
some passing clouds or some where maybe
i'm
i'm reframing and the stars are are
are streaked and it deep sky stacker
will do a good job of finding those
kinds of things and throwing them out
because they won't be considered in the
best 95 percent
okay i'm going to go over here to
advanced and just make sure
that my star detection threshold is okay
i don't remember what the default is but
let's just start at 20 percent
and then press compute the number of
stars
and it found 117. if i bring that
star detection threshold down
like that you can see that it finds
slightly more stars
and if i bring it up
it will find fewer stars so at 36
percent it's only finding 59 stars which
might work probably would work but i
usually like to get over 100 stars
so i'm going to bring that back over to
17
and that gives me 147 stars
as long as you're seeing like something
between
let's say 50 and
3 000 stars it's probably gonna work
just fine
if you're seeing like 20 000 stars or
zero stars then those are outliers and i
think something is going wrong so then
you would really want to examine your
files
especially the zero stars that would
mean that
you probably didn't get focus right
because if it's not finding any stars
then then it's not going to be able to
stack your pictures
so then you're going to have to take a
look at your files
you could open them up in photoshop or
something like that ahead of time
and see what the issue is but usually
this works just fine
and you might even be able to just leave
it on the default but i always like to
check it okay and then i'm going to
click on
recommended settings and what i like to
do in here is just sort of scroll
through
and see if there is anything
that is popping up in red that usually
indicates this is something you should
address
i mean it says you are stacking 282
light frames here that's sort of in red
but
i mean where you're seeing all these
green statements
what the green indicates is that those
are settings that it
considers um already
set and that are appropriate
if you're seeing something in red
then that means something that you
haven't set or that you maybe should
pay attention to before you start the
process
but for the most part the default values
in deep sky stacker
work pretty well if we go into
stacking parameters
there's some different options in here
standard mode mosaic mode intersection
mode
you definitely don't want mosaic mode
that would mean that you get
that's for if you are basically taking a
mosaic of the night sky
we also can think of this as a panorama
something like that where you're
you're putting together a bunch of
different pictures to make a bigger
picture of the night sky
but what we want to do is actually stack
the pictures all together
to to average out the noise in the
picture
and for that you can either use standard
mode or intersection mode
basically the difference is just that
standard mode isn't going to
crop away anything it's going to leave
in the rough edges
and intersection mode will automatically
apply a crop
but i don't necessarily trust it so i
always just leave this on standard mode
and do the cropping myself
afterwards
okay you want to use all available
processors down here at the bottom don't
want to turn
on any drizzle or a lining of rgb
channels
usually
this thing you know the different
clipping modes work just fine in the
defaults
i have the lights on kappa sigma
clipping
with a cap of two and then
darks flats and bias are on median kappa
sigma clipping
i have alignment set to automatic
the intermediate files this is sort of
interesting you can either choose otif
or
fit so that if you were working with
other
astronomy programs you might choose fits
which is the more standard for astronomy
programs but
since we're going to be working mostly
with just deep sky stacker in photoshop
tiff files are just fine
this is interesting um if you are
finding that
even with your calibration frames your
darks are mostly supposed are the ones
that are really supposed to take care of
hot pixels but if you find that
you stack and you calibrate and stack
and everything and then
your result still has a lot of hot
pixels you might want to try this
cosmetic correction right here where it
can try to detect the hot pixels that
are remaining automatically and
change the value of those so they're not
as noticeable
okay we want to create an output file
the autosave.tiff is fine
so basically my point here is that i'm
just using
all of the defaults i'm on standard mode
for result
and i'm going to go ahead and click ok
and click ok again
and it gives us a final summary
of everything that
we've told it here
you can see that i did 200 i have 282
light frames at iso 1600
you can see my bias darks and flats are
also all at ios
iso 1600 because we have 282 light
frames
at two seconds each that's a total
exposure turtle integration of nine
minutes 24 seconds
and the process will temporarily use
31.2 gigabytes
on the d drive so you can imagine if we
instead had
over 500 frames this may take up
something like 60 gigabytes so you can
see these temporary files really do
add up so just make sure you have enough
space
before you start i don't think it will
actually let you start the process
if you don't have enough space
but remember if you if you want to set
that temporary drive to some other place
just go down here to settings
and you can you can set that temporary
drive wherever you wish
okay this all looks fine i'm going to go
ahead and click ok again
and now it's the waiting game basically
this
can take hours it really just depends on
how modern your computer's
processor is how many threads it has
that kind of thing
i don't believe uh deep sky stacker
has any gpu acceleration so it's really
just using your cpu
and the really again the most important
thing is uh
is just if it's a more modern more
powerful processor
this will go faster i'm just using um
a lenovo thinkpad it's a few years old
so i know this is going to take
my computer hours to finish but that's
fine
i'll sometimes you know take a break and
do something else or
leave it overnight and then pick it up
in the morning
so i'm going to fast forward or
skip this part of the video and uh we'll
see
what it looks like when it's all done
okay it did take a few hours i actually
just
waited overnight and this is the next
morning and we have a finished
picture here this has been calibrated
registered and stacked
now it doesn't look like much right now
but this is completely normal this is
actually what you want to see
you don't want it to look bright at this
point you want it to look black
with only a few white dots this is
because it's
unstretched or in a linear form still
and then we're going to do the
stretching and all of the
linear to non-linear curve work not here
in deep sky stacker which is a fairly
crude way to do it but in
another program like gimp or photoshop
or etc
so to it actually is already saved
so if you look right up here it tells
you where it's saved so it's saved in my
lights folder
as autosave.tiff the only issue with
this autosave.tiff file is that it is a
32-bit floating point file
and some programs i know gimp
and even some versions of photoshop
won't play well with that 32-bit file
so what i would recommend you do just to
make sure that you have
compatibility with the programs we'll
use next is go over here to the
processing
section on the left hand side and go
down to save
picture to file and this lets you save
off a 16-bit
tiff file 16 bits per channel which is
what we want
the default settings here are the ones
you want compression set to none and
under options
you want embed adjustments in the saved
image
but do not apply them you want that
checked
and so then i'll just save it as lagoon
dss for deep sky stacker and click save
and then we can see here on my desktop
this is what i'm going to bring in
to the next program lagoon dss.tiff
and then while we're here i'll just
mention really briefly if you do
want to reuse your master
bias frame in future projects what you
can do
is in that folder at the bottom you
should see something called master
offset iso whatever dot tiff
and this is what you would save to reuse
you don't have to reshoot bias frames
because they're technically the same
um every time as long as you shot them
correctly
okay that's it for deep sky stacker
we'll move on to the next
section which is the fun creative part
of uh
processing and really bringing this data
to life
okay i've switched over to my mac just
because that's where i happen to have
gimp installed and i've brought over
the stacked file from deep sky stacker
and so i'm just going to open up the gnu
image manipulation program i'm on
version 10.2.10 sorry
and i would recommend version 2.10
uh especially if you're doing extra
photography because it
supports 16-bit files
i think earlier versions did not
so we're just going to go ahead and do
file open
and i'm going to pick my tiff file here
from the desktop
okay and uh for some reason when it
opens
it doesn't fit to view at least on my
version of gimp here so i'm just going
to go to
view zoom and do
fit image in window there we go
so now we can see the whole image right
here
if we if you want to zoom in at any
point while processing
it's just the plus button and on most
keyboards you do have to hold down
shift and then hit the equals button to
get to
plus and then it's just the the dash or
minus key
to zoom out so shift equals or plus
to zoom in and minus to zoom out
okay and then you can always of course
use the menus up here i'm going to try
to avoid doing
many keyboard shortcuts just because
they might be a little bit different
if you're on windows mac or linux
only other thing i'll mention here is i
have
my system set up just like
gimp comes out of the box but
we're going to be using histograms a lot
so up here at the top
you'll see brushes patterns fonts
document history histogram
i'm just going to switch over to
histogram and if you don't see histogram
just go into windows
dockable dialogs and find histogram
in here right there and just open it up
and and dock it over here to the right
side because we're going to be using it
a lot
especially here at the beginning okay so
by default the histogram will be set to
value the first thing that i want you to
do is switch it to
rgb and it doesn't look like much
changed but
what we'll see is that we can then see
the red green and blue channels
separately
rather than just one histogram bump
we'll see
the three channels as separate
mountains or peaks and then the next
thing we're going to do is we're going
to duplicate this
tiff layer down here in the layers panel
so i'm just going to right click on it
and choose duplicate layer
and if you ever want to rename a layer
you can just double click
and type something else in so i'm going
to type in
first stretch
and then uh we're going to go ahead and
stretch it so we're going to do that
using the levels command
and that's under the colors menu so go
up here to the top of your screen
click on colors and go down to levels
and for a first uh stretch we can just
use um
the default channel which should be set
to value
and just take your mid tone slider and
drag it
over until you see some
uh background here in the picture uh
basically you should start seeing if you
did shoot the lagoon a little bit of the
the milky way come out
so just just stretch it until you see a
little bit of the milky way and then hit
okay
okay and now i want us to look at our
our histogram up here
because it really illustrates that we do
have a color balance issue
where the green and the blue
mountains are basically perfectly
aligned
while the red mountain is is over here
to the left
so the first thing that i want to do is
try to color balance this a little bit
because right now it's a little bit out
of whack and when you look at the
picture you can tell because it looks
sort of
teal like a blue green rather than a
more
neutral color like over here should be
just basically like a black sky and here
in the middle should be
the the brilliant uh yellowish gold of
the milky way
okay so let's um instead of using color
balance and we're going to do this with
levels
because we we're going to be stretching
and color balancing at the same time
so just go to colors levels again
this time though i want you to change
the channel from value
to red and then bring it over here a
little bit
so it's not covering up the histogram
because this is
a live preview i think that's another
change in newer versions of gimp that's
very handy
to be able to have a make an adjustment
and see a live preview over here
so we're going to take this mid-tone
slider
and drag it over a bit
and you can see the the histogram
immediately
uh changed because it's reacting to this
which has
is in preview mode and we went too far
because then now
the red it's uh you can tell obviously
in the
in the picture it looks sort of a
rubyish red and then the the red peak
here has
surpassed the blue and green peaks so
i'm going to back off a little bit
okay and at this point
um you can see that they're pretty well
aligned
we at least over here on the shadow side
of the peak
they they seem to be perfectly aligned
over here on the highlights we do have a
little bit
um uh more red
um but what i'd recommend is we'll just
leave that alone
for now because um
it may be just the red nebulae already
peeking out like the lagoon down here
and in other places so let's go ahead
and hit okay
and it looks pretty boring it looks
pretty gray but that actually
is indicating that you have a better
color balance if it
if the background and and the the whole
picture
just takes on a certain color that means
that your your colors are
are out of whack um so let's go ahead
and brighten it up a bit though so we
can see what we're doing
so i'm just going to go to levels again
and once again take this midtone slider
and drag it over
but this time i'm also going to take the
shadow slider
and drag it to the right a bit and this
will add
contrast so so far we've just been
stretching in one direction basically
just bringing it
up but the other part of stretching is
we want to basically widen out the image
add
dynamic range by
stretching out this this peak so
basically having
more shadows and more highlights and the
way to do that is to
move the shadow slider to the right and
the midtone slider to the left
and then you're adding or stretching out
the image
by making the dark parts of the image
darker and
the bright parts of the image brighter
um
and adding contrast and basically what i
do is i just use this
levels command a few times until
uh the picture looks like something that
i would want to work with
with the other tools and basically i'm
i'm there right now so
um this is looking pretty good if i zoom
in a little bit
you can see that the lagoon and the
trifid are coming out those are the main
deep sky objects i was interested in
capturing and you can see we do have
some nice detail already
and the the stars are looking pretty
good too i can see that we do have some
star
color but in this zoomed in view what
i'm going to do next is i want to add
some saturation
because um right now it looks pretty
washed out
very low color so i'm going to go to
back to that colors menu
and choose saturation and just
increase the scale here while looking
at my image okay i increased it
to 1.65 if i turn the preview off and on
that's before very gray and that's after
and you can see the the image is
is popping out a little bit more and
some of these bright um
stars though have you know really nice
color like orange and blues and reds
okay i'm gonna go ahead and apply that
and then i'm just going to do
another actually at this point instead
of doing levels i'm going to use
curves
the basic difference between levels
and curves is a levels command is
basically just like
taking a dot right here in the middle of
the curve
and pushing it straight up
and taking a dot down here at the
the bottom and pushing it straight to
the right
well with the curves command as opposed
to the levels you can place your points
anywhere so
i could take a point here
and bring it down like that take a point
right there just above it and take it up
like that and you have to be careful
with this because you can get into a
sort of
unnatural look very quickly if you if
you do
if you do something too dramatic
you can see how that looks really gross
uh like
it just it's killing a lot of detail
somehow because i've just
done something too unnatural in the
curve so i'm going to go ahead and reset
it
so be careful with curves you always
want to make pretty
subtle adjustments especially early on
like this
but it can give you a little bit more
power here
and basically what i like to do
is just add in some
contrast with a slight s curve so it's
basically just like
we want to take this shadow point
down a little bit just take a point
there and bring it down
and then take a point up here on this
side of the histogram
and bring it up a little bit
but i don't necessarily want to bring
this too far
up or i'll start clipping
highlights pretty quickly so
i'm just going to control that with a
couple more points up here
okay i'm going to go ahead and say okay
let me zoom back out and see how this
looks
it's looking really nice at least in
this half
this half is really wonky and the reason
is is because of registration artifacts
basically the idea is that uh because of
the drift of the image over time
we need to crop this away because this
is very low
uh signal high noise area that uh
is only in some of the many hundreds of
shots that we took
but but not very many and that's why it
just looks really strange
so let's go ahead and crop now
i'm just going to grab my crop tool here
over from the tool
bar it's right there and
i'm just going to crop you know by
by the look of it where i think that we
have a fairly
good signal which i think is right here
sort of in the middle but a little bit
to the right of middle and what i really
want to include
is the lagoon and i want the top of the
image
to be the the eagle so we have eagle
omega
trifid and lagoon all in one picture
okay so i'm going to try that
and i'll go ahead and zoom in a little
bit
yeah i think that's looking really good
um
and so uh we could just you know
continue doing more saturation more
curves and basically get this picture
pretty close to finished very quickly
now
i'm going to show you something a little
bit special which is
which can really add some pop to an
image like this
which is a technique for separating the
stars
from the rest of the image from the the
milky way background and the nebulae
and then enhancing the milky way and the
nebulae
without the stars and then adding the
stars back in and it just really gives
it something a little extra
and i'm going to use a free program to
do that called star net plus plus
it's not something you can add into gimp
you have to use it as a standalone
program
so since it's a standalone program we
have to
save off what we have right here is a
16-bit tiff and bring it
into the command line program of starnet
and then it will make the starless
version and then we'll bring it back in
all right there's one thing we do have
to do before we save it off as a tiff to
bring into starnet which is get rid of
this alpha channel
unfortunately we can't just delete it we
do have to actually
flatten the image so to do that we just
go to image
flatten image everything is now one
layer and over here in the channels you
should just see red green and blue and
no alpha channel
and then we can go up here to file
export as and go ahead and save it
we do file export as the default option
seems to be tiff so that's good but if
it isn't just
type in tiff right there and then i'm
going to call this lagoon
for starnet and
export to my desktop
i'm going to turn off save layers we
don't need that i just want
the a single layer click export
okay and there we go we have lagoon for
starnet right there
okay so from google i'm just going to
search for starnet plus plus like that
and the first search result here is
this sourceforge.net download site
and that's what you want to go to
and then go over here to files
and if you do have pix insight you can
get the pixel insight module
but assuming you don't have pix insight
we're going to just get the standalone
version
and so you would just go into version
1.1 here and then pick your operating
system
so if you're on windows pick windows or
win
if you're on mac pick this mac os and if
you're on linux pick the linux one
and i'll just click on that
and then it will start downloading here
okay it's finished downloading so i'm
just going to
open up those open up the zip
folder and put it on my desktop
and if you look at the readme this is
where it's going to give us
instructions on how to use it
okay and basically we just have to look
at
this little
shell file here this is a just a little
command that's given um and if we open
that up i'm just going to open it
with a text editor but
you can open it with any kind of text
editor it doesn't matter
um all we're gonna do is just change
this right here to the name of our file
so i'm gonna choose i'm gonna say
lagoon for
starnet dot tiff and then i want the
output
to just be lagoon starless
and then the last thing here is i'm just
going to change the stride number to 32
what that means is that it will take a
little bit longer to process
than with a stride of 64 but it will
give us a better result
for removing the stars especially with
wide field images like this one i'm
gonna go go ahead and save that script
close out of that okay with
that done we've edited the script uh
32-bit stride it has the right
file name we can go ahead and run the
script the way we do that is through
a command line program so i'm just going
to use
the built-in command line program on
mac which is terminal
and to run it we have to do two things
we first have to move to this directory
so i'm just going to type in
cd space to do change directory command
and then
drag this folder over so cd
space and then go to the folder
hit enter we're now inside the folder
and from there i can run
this command just by dragging it over
and hit enter again
okay and then it starts its thing
um it uh
reads the file it tells me yep it's a
16-bit file
with three channels here's the height
and the width
here's the cpu i'm using with
tensorflow
and then this is the number of tiles
that it's going to break
the file up into and then it's going to
look at each one and remove stars from
those tiles and then
recombine the image and then down here
it tells me how long it's going to take
for that
to happen a percentage as it's going
and you can see it just went from zero
to one percent
so it does take quite a while probably
at least an hour
maybe two on an image of this
size okay uh now that that's done i'm
going to go ahead and open
up the lagoon starless image
back up here into gimp and the
first thing that i'm going to do with
this starless image is just apply
a curves adjustment using colors
and the cool thing is we'll be able to
stretch it much further because we don't
have the stars to worry about
and i'm just going to apply a slight
saturation bump to it too
all right that looks good um
and then we are just going to take our
star image here
so we'll do
edit copy visible
and paste it onto this image
i'll just do paste in place and then i'm
just going to click this little
create a new layer button here
they call it pasted layer i could rename
it stars
i'm going to change the mode from normal
to
screen okay and you can see that made
the image a lot brighter we now do have
the
stars in addition to this enhanced
starless version let me go ahead and
zoom in a little bit
there we go um so now it's just really
just resetting the the black point
so i'm just going to
make a new layer
from visible just by going to layer
new from visible and
on this new visible layer i'm just going
to do
colors curves
and bring in the black point here a
little bit
and hit okay and that's it
i think this image is done and it's
really nice looking
if i zoom in here
you can see i think this lagoon and
trifid looks uh quite nice considering
this is under 10 minutes of total
integration
of course if we wanted it to not look as
noisy as it does when you zoom in
you would just want to get more total
integration so
more pictures but
for under 10 minutes untracked i think
this looks
pretty good for a nice core milky way
shot
and finally to save if you wanted to
come back
into gimp you would just want to do
file save as and save it in gimp's
default format which is xcf so i could
just call it
lagoon.xcf
and that way you have a nice master that
you can come back to
and continue editing if you change your
mind about any of your choices
and for saving to the web um usually you
want a smaller file that's compressed so
i usually use
jpeg so i'll just do export as
and switch the file ending
to jpeg jpg
and click export
and it gives me a few options i'll do
100 for the quality and click export
okay and then if i look on my desktop
here there it is
i can bring that open into preview
and view it full screen
okay and there is our final result out
of
uh gimp
if you want to see
a comparison i did um
to a modified camera check out the
photoshop version of this i'm not going
to do that for every program
but i think this came out really well i
really like
the colors and details with this gimp
process of the stock 60d
10 minute total exposure using two
second exposures with
a canon nifty 50 untracked if you have
any questions about this process
please ask them in the comments and
until next time this is Nico Carver from
nebulaphotos.com
clear skies
