 You've probably heard that on Tuesday, NASA released the first five images from the JWST. What you may not have heard is that on Wednesday, they made all the actual data available to the public. And for us amateur astrophotographers, that means we can now try our hand at processing some of the most technically impressive images ever taken. So that's what this video is all about. I'll show you how to download the FITS files from the data archive and then I'll briefly show you how I went about processing them with PICS Insight and Photoshop to see if I can best the official NASA version. So let's jump right in. You're gonna start by Googling MAST, M-A-S-T, portal. And the first link should be the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescope's portal. That's what you wanna click on. And when you click on it, it should go to a page like this. Now a lot of people are going to be using this at the same time, not just from my video, but a lot of people are of course interested in the JWST data. So it can be sort of slow, but it's still the easiest way to get at the data. So from this page, just ignore all the search boxes, immediately click on Advanced Search, this little link right here. And this will pop open a new window called the MAST Advanced Search. And there's a lot of different options but we only really need two of these boxes. First, we're gonna start with Mission. It's already open over here, but if it's not, just check it here. And in the Mission box, type in JWST and press Enter. Okay, it's now looking for all of the JWST data and it found 90,000 records. So we don't wanna search through 90,000 records. That would take way too long. So we're gonna turn on the release date column. So over here on the left-hand side where it says columns, scroll down until you see release date, check that on, then go down to release date. And we're gonna use both of these boxes in the first box, type in 2022-07-13 and you can leave the time set to this 11 o'clock, that's fine. Or actually, no, I'm gonna set it to 14 o'clock. And then in this second box, same date, 2022-7-13, and I'm gonna change the date, I mean the time to 16 o'clock because I know that all of the initial JWST images were released at 15 o'clock on 7-13. So that brings it down to 2,325 records. Now if I, let's go ahead and search. Okay, so this is a list of 2,000 options. We wanna limit this even a bit further. So we can see that most of those 2,000 rows are made up for this Galaxy cluster. I don't know why there's so many different data products, but let's just limit it to images because that's what we're interested in processing. So that's gonna be the near infrared cam and then maybe the mid-infrared instrument if you're interested in that. But I'm not gonna download anything from the mid-infrared instrument. Not that it's not beautiful images, but I'm just interested in this near-infrared cam for now. So that, now we're down to just showing 24 rows. So this is much more manageable, but there's still a lot of information in this table. So let's get rid of some of the columns we don't need. We'll go right here to edit columns and I'm gonna turn off observation type, turn off mission, turn off provenance name, turn off instrument, turn off project and turn off waveband. Okay, then I can close this edit columns window. Perfect. So we're almost there. Now we just have a list of 24 rows and we really only have to pay attention to the target name and the filter. And so if you don't know these offhand, S-Max is the galaxy cluster with the gravitational lensing, NGC3324 is near the Karina Nebula. It's not really part of the Karina Nebula like they were sort of saying. But anyways, it's the cosmic cliff image. That's the one that I'm most interested in. Here we have the NGC3132, that's a planetary nebula and then NGC320 is one of the galaxies in Stefan's quintet. So we have four different choices here. I'm, like I said, gonna go with NGC3324, which is the cosmic cliff nebula image. And we have one, two, three, four, five, six different filter choices here. And there's two different ways we can download the data. We can click on this little more actions thing and add data to a download basket. And this is a good way, I guess, to get many filters at once. And then you can also strip out the metadata files and just get the fits file if you want that way. The only downside to doing it this way is the whole website is sort of slow right now and this download basket seems especially slow in my testing. So I've just been downloading the entire data product by clicking this little floppy disk save icon. So to show you how that works, let's go ahead and click on one. It briefly opens up a new tab. Depending on your browser, you might have to make sure to allow popups on this website for it to start downloading. But then it starts downloading a zip file and it doesn't tell you how big it's going to be, but in my testing, they're all over a gigabyte of data. So you'll have to wait a little bit, maybe a few minutes per filter. So I'll just speed up this part of the recording. Okay, it's finished downloading. So let me just hide Chrome here for a second. Here is the zip file, I put it on my desktop. And if I just double click it since I'm on a Mac, it will unzip on Windows. You might have to right click and choose unzip. And there is a folder when I unzip it inside that folder. There's a manifest and another folder called JWST. There is the mid-infrared provisioning data, I guess. It's in a CSV, I don't need that. There's other metadata as a JSON file and so forth. Okay, then there's two FITS files. There's the segmented FITS file and the I2D FITS file. And the I2D is the one that we are interested in. So I'm going to go ahead and open it right up into PICS Insight. But if you are following along and you don't have PICS Insight or you don't have any software and you need to open a FITS file, there are two good free options. There is sirl.org and this is a good free option for working with FITS files. And another classic one is SAO's DS9, SAO image DS9. And this is one that a lot of professional astronomers use to look at FITS files. So you could use one of those, but like I said, I'm going to use PICS Insight just for this example. So I'll open it up here. Okay, and it opens up with tons of different stuff. We have a flat frame of some kind. We have, this shows you that this is a mosaic image, I guess, and this is some kind of noise, maybe variable read noise. I don't know, Poisson noise. I don't know what this file is. So I don't know what most of these are. I think there's something to do with the construction of this mosaic and some of the noise associated with it. Here's one where all the different sort of like brightness levels haven't been adjusted, I guess. But then if I've deleted all of those other ones, the final one is the one that just looks great right out of the batch. So that's the only one that I'm going to keep and work with for imaging. For anyone that doesn't know, PICS Insight just has this handy little ability to auto stretch an image by clicking this little button that says STF auto stretch. So this is linear, meaning not stretched, everything is, all the data is bunched up and this is just a non-linear stretch of the data. Okay, and so you can see just with this auto stretch the data looks amazing. It's really, really detailed, really, really sharp, interesting data to look at. It's not free of problems, of course. The star spikes are pretty extreme. The star cores are blown out, so they're turned black, I guess. But even those like small little cosmetic things, it's really a dream to work with this data. Now, this is just one filter. So to make a color image, we're gonna need at least a couple more. I actually downloaded all of the different filters for my version, but you don't necessarily have to do that. What's great about having all these different filter options is you can get very creative and just do it however you want, but I'm gonna go ahead and download another filter here. So I've gone back to the Mast Archive and I'm gonna click on this save icon for the 187 filter. Now, while this is downloading, let me just bring up or try to find a JWST filter documentation. There it is. Okay. So this shows you, now keep in mind, they're giving these filters these different colors, but these are actually all infrared filters, just splitting up the infrared into different band passes. But it still gives you, this actually is pretty cool because it gives you an idea of how to maybe make a full color image from all infrared filters. And the way you typically do it is exactly how they show here, which is to just map the infrared filter responses to our rainbow of visible light colors. So you're gonna take the shorter band pass filters and put those in your cooler colors like your blues, and then you're gonna put the longer band pass filters in your warmer colors like your yellows and reds and oranges. So if you're wanting sort of a little guide to how to map the filters to our vision, you can just Google JWST filters and find this little handy chart here. Okay, same deal downloaded, I unzipped it, go into the JWST folder, go into the filter name folder and find the file that ends in i2d.fits and open up that one. And you can see here as this is opening that the last file was half this size. So like I said, some are sampled up twice as big as other ones, I don't know exactly why. Same drill here, I'm just gonna close all of these like calibration images, leaving the last one. Okay, and you can see this is a shorter wavelength image, which is gonna go into our blue channel. And this is a longer wavelength image that's gonna go into our red channel. And so it's just, if you're done mono narrow band imaging, it's really the same kind of deal here, except just with all infrared images. And next up, let's do a little bit of pre-processing on these and I'm gonna show you how to register them together. So I'm going to get this displayed correctly. I'm gonna go to geometry, vertical mirror. There we go, same thing with this one, image, geometry, vertical mirror, yes. Okay, and then if you look closely, you can see there's these little black edges. So I'm just going to crop those out with dynamic crop here. Just trying to get as much of the image as I can while cropping those out. Okay, I think that looks good. So now I wanna register this filter to this one. And if I had more filters up, I would do it for all of them, but register them all to the same one. So I would register them, let's say register them all to 335, filter 335. And this is such a big image that I know star alignment is going to struggle unless I define a preview. So I'm going to click a little, create a new preview icon right up here at the top and just draw a little box over some stars and then draw the same preview box on this image. Let's just show you they're about the same there. Looks good. And then I'm going to open up star alignment, process, image registration, star alignment. I'm gonna set this image as the view, as the reference image. Now you don't wanna choose the preview, you wanna choose the actual image here in the reference image. And just make sure the working mode is register slash match images. And under star matching, you wanna make sure restrict to previews is turned on. Then I'm gonna drag the little triangle onto this image and let go. And now what it'll do is it'll look at the two previews and only match the stars inside those preview windows, but then when it comes time to actually make a new registered image, it will use the geometry of this whole image, right? Okay, so close this. Here is the new registered one. Let's stretch that and just make sure that it matches up. Yes, you can see that matches up perfectly. And so now these two images are ready to be combined basically. There's lots of different ways to combine them. I'm going to combine them using stretched images in a Photoshop. So the first thing I have to do is get all the filters downloaded, register all the different filters to this image. I can stretch them here or I could stretch them in Photoshop, but I'll stretch them here just using histogram transformation. So just to show you what that looks like with this one, I do something like that. Usually what I, my preference is when combining lots of different filters like this is don't stretch them too heavily right away. So you can see this isn't as dramatic a stretch as the auto stretch, it's a little bit more restrained and that's my preference when combining lots of different filters together. Give it sort of just a gentle stretch and then you can do more curves work and stuff after you've started combining the filters together. Okay, so I'm not going to show you that process over and over again, but again, it's just register, stretch and then save as a TIFF file to bring it over into Photoshop. So let's now zoom ahead and we'll jump over to Photoshop. Okay, so now what I've done is they're all registered to the same reference which was that 335. I've loaded all the different filters, all six filters up in as layers here in Photoshop. Each has the name of the filter and the way I've arranged them is the shorter wavelengths are on the bottom and the longer wavelengths are on top. So just to show you the different filter responses here, you can see they're all very different and that's actually one thing that I didn't really like about the official picture was that we have such different filter responses here. I just thought it was sort of a shame that the official picture was so just orange and blue because it seems like there'd be a lot of different color variety we could get out of six different filters with very different responses. The way that I'm gonna go about this is I'm gonna start down here at the bottom. I'm going to add a saturation adjustment layer and I'm gonna set it to colorize. Just a little box right there. Okay, so I'm down here at the bottom layer. I've set that to colorize and since this is a short wavelength, remember we're gonna set that to something over here in the blues. Now it doesn't really matter to me exactly where I set this right now or exactly where I put the saturation slider because I always come back in and adjust these to taste once I have everything colorized. So just sort of a general idea. I'm gonna set that one to blue. I'll turn on the next filter response. I'll set the blend mode to screen and the opacity to 50% and I'll add another saturation adjustment. This one I will clip. So I'll hold down the Alt key or Option key on Mac and just click this line between the two so it's clipping this saturation adjustment to that filter and again, I'll colorize it doing something a little bit further over into the left-hand side of the hues. So I'll do sort of a cyan, right? And we just keep going like this. So screen this one in, let's do it at 50%. Again, all of these things can change once we sort of see the whole picture and I'm really just doing the same thing over and over. So sorry for not having anything to say here exactly but it's just the same routine. You know, you screen blend the actual image, you colorize it and then move on to the next one. So screen blend, turn down the opacity a bit, colorize it, clip the colorize layer to that particular one. Okay, so now I have these all set in here. The next thing that I typically do, and you can sort of see how this just looks like a very washed out version of the NASA image. The next thing though that I typically do is I start playing around with these saturation, lightness, hue, sliders for each image and that will really help control what you see. So right, so if I turn down the lightness for instance of that layer, see how that's really affecting especially this part of the image because that was the brightest part for that layer. And the other thing you can do is in addition to just affecting these colorize layers is you can also play around with curves adjustments. You can see I'm doing that just on the 335 and it has pretty dramatic implications just playing around with a curve. So this isn't gonna be a complete processing tutorial but I just wanted to sort of give you a basic idea of how I would go about playing with this data. And then if you ever feel sort of stuck, let me actually just apply a total curve just to sort of show you where we're at. Okay, so this is just a very first pass kind of thing. I haven't really brought out many color varieties yet but really just through playing with all of this you can bring out so many color varieties. And another way to bring out the actual color varieties between the filters is to use this selective color adjustment. This will let you sort of target specific colors and accentuate them in different ways. So targeting reds and different things. One thing I'm sure I'll get comments on is, well, aren't you just really making all of this fake color? This is all fake color to begin with. The infrared is beyond the visible spectrum. It's all a deep, deep, deep red. So anything that we're doing with color here is just to emphasize the difference between the filters which we clearly saw were give us different responses. So I don't feel that anything I do with color artistically is wrong. It's just, because this is always going to be a false color image. It's really just about what is your goal in processing and my goal with this image is to bring out the color contrast so you can sort of see all of the different filter responses. Also, I think that color contrasts can give this image a feeling of depth and just make it more interesting to look at. So with that said, let me bring up my finished PSD. So you can see what that looks like. So here's my final image. If I compare it here to the official image, you can see the official image is much more saturated but also more duo tone, right? Where it's just like mostly shades of orange down here and shades of one kind of blue up here. One thing I was trying to do was get in more color. So basically have stronger red response in certain places but then also bring in some of the green. And then another thing I was trying to do was make it less filled in feeling because I really, one of my favorite things about this image was where there's holes. So when I was looking through the data, I figured out that if I can sort of emphasize some of the filters and not emphasize other ones, I can get many more of these holes where you're seeing through this dust down to this other response below. And I just think that looks really cool, especially up here to sort of see through but then also see some parts are filled in. So I think I was pretty successful in at least making something that's pretty different from the official NASA version. And in some ways I like mine better. For instance, look at the color contrast here. We get this weird shape here. Then we get this fiery little globule here. I don't know what these things are. I should look it up what these are but there's just so much in this image to investigate and try to pull out in different ways. So anyways, let me just do an overview here of my processing. So it all started like I said, the same way that I showed you before where I colorized the different filters. Then I did some just general work with curves. I did a fair amount of work with selective color. And again, the reason for that is to bring out different color contrasts by emphasizing different things. This layer is a correction layer where I corrected some of the star cores that were black. This is just a general small boost to saturation. This was another curves layer, a small S curve and then some kind of correction to the green. This is nothing I don't think. It's just a stamp from visible for some reason. And then this last layer I did a little bit of work with the stars. I de-emphasized some of the medium sized stars and just to give it a little bit of a boost to the nebula. And then I applied a little bit of sharpening which I can show you what that did. Here's without the sharpening and there's with it. Just helps the image really pop. And it worked really well in terms of this data. If I tried to apply sharpening like this to my data, it would never look that good. So that's it. I just gave you away all of my little secrets here in Photoshop. One thing I wanna point out before we end this video is that I didn't go to some of the lengths that NASA did to clean up artifacts. So for instance, if we look at NASA's blue area here, it's a little bit of a lower signal area and then look at mine. You can see mine has all of these weird horizontal and vertical lines. Now they're faint so that if unless you're zoomed in to 300% like I am now, you're probably not going to see them at all because there's just so much else going on but NASA's version is very cleaned up. I would say for my taste too cleaned up. Not that I don't think they did a great job getting rid of the artifacts, but what I mean by too cleaned up is this looks like artificially smoothed to me like a little bit too far. I can still see like there's a little bit of a horizontal line right there but just overall, this is just so smoothed out. I would have preferred to, if they left in a little bit more of the natural noise while still trying to clean up these lines but other than that, I think they did a great job. Just for my taste, it's a little bit too saturated. So that's why I went with this little bit less saturated look and of course a different color palette just by emphasizing different, all the different color filters that they used. 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