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Greetings,
It snowed this morning... so
much for shooting the comet! Meanwhile... I have been experimenting with how the
heck you can get the careful color the CCD gives you to translate into the
image. Most "automatic" programs don't work... they can only guess at the proper
contrast levels and color levels... after lots of experimenting this is the
method that I think works best for me...
1. Keep everything in 16 bits as long
as possible. Most programs only combine in 8 bits, so Registar is golden. After
reducing the images I align and RGB merge in Registar. Up to now, nothing
has been done to the data.
2. Now the 16 bit data is imported into PS,
and using curves and levels carefully, the image is compressed without loosing
the endpoints. This is vital because there is a lot of information in these
areas.
3. The B&W Luminance is prepared the same
way except the images are averaged in Registar for better S/N.
4. The two LRGB components are then
aligned in Registar and brought back to PS where they become layers... this
allows duplicate layers to be added in various ways to achieve whatever end
result you want.
I have two samples uploaded to
our "secret" spot... one shows what I think is good color on M51, the bottom
image shows just how much detail there is if you keep everything 16 bits as long
as possible, although this is not very pretty to look at. I experimented with
CCDsharp on these... they are a bit posterized, but my main thing was
finding a way to get the good color into the image.
Have a good one,
Tony
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