[APML] Northern Milky Way

[Jerry Lodriguss <jerry@astropix.com>]

I've added a picture of the Northern Milky Way to my web site:

http://www.astropix.com/HTML/SHOWCASE/NMW.HTM

It's a 24mm shot of the Milky Way from Cygnus to Cassiopeia.

Two original exposures were made with a Nikkor 24mm f/2 lens working at 
f/4.5. One exposure was for 52 minutes with no filter, and one was for 45 
minutes with a soft focus filter.

The images were scanned with a Nikon LS2000 scanner at 2700 pixels per inch 
with Digital ICE applied and 2x multi-sampling at 12 bits with color 
management turned off in the NikonScan software. They were imported as 
16-bit TIFFs into Photoshop, and the LS2000 color space profile was 
assigned to the TIFF file and it was saved with the profile embedded.

The two original image scans were then registered in RegiStar in 16 bits. 
The images were opened in Photoshop and converted to 8 bits and then 
composited together with the Apply Image command using screen, mask, invert.

The composite image was then separated into the component red, green and 
blue channels in Registar, and registered again to remove the lateral 
chromatic aberrations in the corners of the image. The individual channels 
were then recombined into an RGB color image.

The black points were then set in the individual color channels in 
Levels  in Photoshop and the color of the sky background adjusted with Curves.

A brightness and color gradient were then removed in Photoshop by creating 
a soft light layer filled with 50 percent gray that was filled with a 
linear gradient to remove the brightness and color gradient in the image 
from light pollution.

The image was then re-sized to 825 x 558 pixels and sharpened with an 
Unsharp mask of 100 percent, 0.5 pixels and 0 threshold levels.

Finally, a Smart Blur with a radius of 5 pixels and a threshold of 15 was 
applied.

The image was converted to sRGB color space and saved with a JPEG quality 
setting of 9.

Jerry


The book "Photoshop for Astrophotographers" is now finished!

  Go to: http://www.astropix.com/PFA/PFA.HTM










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