 Hey, this is Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com. Hopefully you've watched part one 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. Pix Insight 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 astrophotography, I think it's one of the better programs out there. It is available cross-platform, meaning I'm going to 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 bias, darks, flats, and lights. I showed how to take these in the part one. Let's open the program here. Pix Insight 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 try before you buy. It 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 going to 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 Insight, 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 going to 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 the 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 wanna 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 wanna look at here is the debayer settings, which is connected to a CFA image. A 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, RGGB, and this is the most common method, VNG. So I'm gonna leave it set to that. Anything else here? We're not gonna 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 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 control 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 pics insight 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 of a weird bug. I'm gonna click open. It adds all of those frames like that. They're all in this thing called binning one. It mostly applies to CCD cameras where you can bin to make bigger pixels, but you don't have to really worry about it. That's fine. We'll go on to 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 control A. That's done. Go into my darks tab, click the add darks button. Repeat this process, click, shift click, open. Interesting. Somehow I can tell that the darks are all two seconds but the lights, it's not so sure about. Maybe something weird's stuck in there. It doesn't say that for the flats either. It'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 wanna 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. Okay, 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 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, then you could know for certain which is the best light frame. I know that I had good focus after I took my first light because that was right after I adjusted the focus. So I'm just gonna use my first light here as the reference frame to register all the pictures against. But if you use subframe selector, then it can actually tell you which is your best frame statistically. And 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 too. Subframe selector. Okay, so I've set my reference image. I'm now gonna set my output directory. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to make a new folder, click new folder and call this BPP for batch pre-processing. And it will put everything that the batch pre-processing script creates into that folder. Okay, this all looks good. I'm gonna 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 pre-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 wanna see it anymore, you can just click this, got it. Don't show 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 gonna 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. One thing that I actually really like about Pixinsight, which it takes a little bit of getting used to, is if you've ever done things on the command line, 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. Pixinsight 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 tells you which pixel row it's doing it on and all that kind of stuff. This is one way in which Pixinsight is a little bit more technical, a little bit more open in what it's doing than Photoshop, which is a little bit more of a black box. But some people may find all this information a little bit overwhelming. 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. All right, that took a couple of hours. It's now done. And we can just click exit down here in the lower right. And it says, are you sure you want to exit? We'll 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 binning 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 fair amount of rotation between the frames and shift and things like that. That's what all 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, the 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 wanna 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 have an auto stretch on or off. It's that green line. So when we stretched it, you noticed that 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 modelization, automatic background extractor, and just say that we want to, under target image correction, 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 more color correction in here too. If you wanna 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 horse head and flame. And there's other features that are coming out here too. If we scroll over here, we can see here's the witch head right there. If we scroll up, we can see there's a 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, pre-processing and stacking in PICS Insight and running the automatic background extractor, to me the results are already more promising than they would be in Photoshop. So it just sort of shows you the power of this program if you're interested in it. Anyways, 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 I can't make it smaller. Let me just do this. Okay, and I'm just 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 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 gonna 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 gonna 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. The way we're gonna do that is just take this little blue triangle here at the bottom and drag that out to the workspace. And you'll just see it says process 01. 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're 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, modelization, dynamic background extraction. Since it's a dynamic 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 nebulae in this photo, like the Barnard's Loop, the Horsehead and the Witch's 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, at least one into the center, but you don't want to place too many samples because 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 up black, meaning that it's gonna 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, oops. 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 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 wanna do it is where we have these sort of bright spots. To try to minimize 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 gonna just move it over a little bit. Okay, so that's what my sample selection looks like now. The next thing is we wanna take care of these red samples because right now those wouldn't be included, so it 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 gonna 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 one. 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 two. Okay, and now every sample, except for the one in this corner turned over. So at this point, I'm actually gonna 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. This one is still resistant. So let me just see what happens if I move this up from that corner a little bit. All right, let's try bringing up the tolerance just a bit more. I'll bring it up to 2.2. Okay, and now we can see something there. Let me check a very, 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 gonna choose under target image correction, subtraction, and we'll apply that and see what happens. Okay, it comes out fairly dark here. We can look at the background. All right, so that's pretty good. If we compare that to our automatic, it was able to bring down these hotspots quite a bit. And I think with careful processing, this is gonna turn out quite well. You can always do another round if you think you can improve on that, but from my experience, usually 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 an intro to these tools. I don't really wanna go too deep into them. So basically looking between the DBE, the dynamic background extraction and this automatic background extraction, I like the DBE much better. So I'm just gonna go ahead and close out of the ABE 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'm gonna go back out to my root folder here and just call this try one underscore DBE and I'll save it as an XISF 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 FITS or TIFF. But if you're staying in PIX Insight, then you can just use XISF and that's the file format that's the best supported. I'll click save. I'll leave all these options alone. You want 32-bit floating point. That's all good, click OK. Okay, and now we've done that. So 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 gonna 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 where 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 sky background looks fairly normal, like not super bluish or weird. And then I'm gonna go up here to process and go down to background models. No, 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 zero one. 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 bluish. So let's try this again and 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. Okay. 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 as my white reference and go back to color calibration and this time choose color calibration. For my white reference, I'm gonna choose preview two and for 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 gray, but if we undo the auto stretch and then redo it, now it looks very good. 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 SCNR and remove some of the green noise from the picture. We don't wanna leave the amount at one or it will really screw up the colors but if we just bring it down to something like 0.25, let's say, so a quarter of the strength and apply that, it can just do a subtle thing where it just removes some of 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 just 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 gonna go down and do 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, different red, green and blue channels. I'm gonna 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's into the background to create what's called an S curve. This is a shallow S, as you can see. And then I'll just apply that. Two 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 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 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 gonna 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 gonna try to do is basically stretch it out over here. And I'm gonna 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 gonna go ahead and do another stretch not quite as dramatic as the last time. Okay. And I'm not gonna get into this with this 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 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 more moderate stretch in with your final result to recover a lot of core 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 gonna talk about it more. I just wanna show you that in case you were wondering. We could also, at this point, increase the saturation again, but I don't wanna 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 posterizes 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 to spread out the curve a little bit. Go ahead and zoom back out to see how this is looking overall. Pretty good. Oh, and one thing you can pay attention to with this shadow slider is you might be tempted to bring it right over here to the edge of that curve. Sometimes that works fine, but you wanna 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 do that. But if I moved it over there, then we're getting into the territory of almost 1% of the pixels are clipping to black, which we might wanna avoid. So I 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 wanna see Barnard's loop come out like we were seeing in the auto stretch. 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's the actual star color, but then inside of that, we have this strong magenta cast. So to get rid of that in Pix Insight, what I like to do is just make a star mask. So we're gonna go to process mass generation star mask. We'll raise the noise threshold up just a little bit, maybe to 0.2. Bring the scale up just a bit to eight. 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 shades of gray. 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. It's under 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 control click I think on Windows and I'm just gonna take out the running man and the Orion Nebula there and hit the 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 gonna go to all processes and choose invert. And what we should see now is all of those magenta areas of the image turned green. Now, but that's also true in the Nebula, the Nebula, which we don't want to change. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna 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 show mask. So there's the Nebula right there. When I turn the mask on, you can see it's completely protected because it's covered in this red. So I'm gonna turn that back off and now we're gonna do the process, which is go down to noise reduction and use that SCNR 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 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, perfect. Okay, so that looks so much better without those magenta halos on the image. Really now it's just, 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, where 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 and 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 wanna do increase the saturation of all of the stars, we could just do that curves transformation again and 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 Pixinsight 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 like 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-light parts of the image, meaning the sky background. Reset again. And I'm going to bring down the sky background just a bit. Just like that. I'm gonna invert the mask once again. So now we're working with the light area again. And I'm just gonna bring up the light area a little bit. 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 because I just undid them. They didn't look quite right. It was making 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 very, it makes the two 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. Let me try to make it even more down here in the shadows. Well, this picture can't be perfect, I suppose. 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, something like that. I'm just gonna then paint on this mask just a little bit. The radius here needs to turn up more. Let's try a hundred just to get rid of some of this stuff. All right, let's darken the background a little bit of this mask with curves. 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, could open up painting again. I'm just going to, that's not good. Sorry, fumbling around here a little bit. Okay, I need a slightly smaller, softer brush. Let's do 70. Let's do very soft and let's decrease the opacity a bit too. There we go. Okay, and I'm just going to bring in the horse head. Still wasn't, 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 nebulae. 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 in the horse head before looked a little washed out. After they just become a bit more vibrant, right? Okay. I don't know if I should stop here or keep going. There's so much you can do in Pixinsight. We 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, GBE CC for color correction, stretch and saturation. Cause 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, reset it, go to my RGB curves. I'm just 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 background color while keeping the nebulae, which are in the stars, which are more up here at their same brightness levels, which is gonna 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 okay with that for what it did to the picture. Let me just undo and redo and let's see. Yeah, 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 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. Let's go to geometry, dynamic crop. And I'll just draw something out here. Whoops, let's reset it. So basically I think this might be a stronger composition. It makes 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 too. So here's before and after. I don't know, I like both, it's hard to say. But I'll leave it cropped. Focuses the eye a little bit more on the interesting parts I think. Okay, so the final step here out of Pix Insight is we're just going to save it as a shareable format. So a lot of times what I do out of Pix Insight is I save as a 16-bit TIF because I still find that I like to do final touch-ups in Photoshop. So I'll save it as a 16-bit TIF because that's the best thing to bring into Photoshop. But if you're happy with it straight out of Pix Insight or 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. It throws a bunch of warnings about JPEG 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 Pix Insight. I think where Pix 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 too 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 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 be my processing wasn't up to snuff here because we could probably have gone further with it. But other than that, I think it's a pretty picture, a lot of stars, but you can still clearly make out Orion's belt in the main nebulae. Hope you enjoyed this. As always, this is Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com and I just want to thank everyone who supports me on Patreon and everyone who has subscribed to this channel. We now have over 10,000 people subscribed, which is amazing. All right, till next time, clear skies, thanks.