 Hey everyone, this is Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com. A couple months ago, I reached 30,000 subscribers here on YouTube and I made a video asking for submissions to a photo critique. So this video is the follow-up and I was overwhelmed by how many submissions I got. I had I think 95 submissions and at first what I was trying to do was just pick out a few to make a video but then the more I tried to pick, the more I realized I couldn't pick. I wanted to do critiques for everything that was sent to me so that's what I'm gonna do and just to make it a round number of 100, I asked a couple more people to send me photos and there'd be one surprise at the very end if you stick around. This is probably gonna be a long video because it's a lot of critiques to get through 100. It took me a very long time just to write up my notes so that's why it's taken me over two months now to make this but hopefully it'll be worth the wait and I think there'll be good tips of course for beginners in astrophotography but also for more experienced people because I got a number of submissions from people who are even better than me at astrophotography and so I'll be going more into the artistic side of composition and things with those critiques. Okay and so I'll be going through this in alphabetical order by the name that was sent to me and there's an index in the description with all of those names and timestamps so you can just jump to your critique if you're excited to see what I have to say about your photo and you submitted something but I also put some really brief notes about each critique in that description so maybe you could search this description and find something that you're interested in hearing about like if you only wanna see the critiques that are about composition or about tracking errors or different things like that or focus then you could just quickly find those. So without further ado, let's jump in. Okay so first up here we have Aaron. Aaron sent me this photo of M31 or the Andromeda Galaxy. We're gonna get a lot of Andromeda Galaxies partly because right after I made a call for submissions for this video I did an Andromeda video start to finish and so a lot of people I think were inspired by that but it's also just a really good deep sky object for this time of year for the Northern Hemisphere and Aaron said he took this with a Canon 700D, a 135 millimeter old manual lens and an equatorial mount that he added motors to himself. That sounds like a cool project. So just looking at this photo I can see that all the tracking and focus looks pretty good, all the stars look nice. In terms of the processing it's a little bit high contrast for my taste meaning that the blacks are really black probably almost clipped, let's see here. Yeah, generally if I'm looking at this info panel and if the RGB balance is below five out of a eight bit scale that's what I would consider clipped black. And so I generally go for a sky background more like in the 20 to 30 range on an eight bit scale and the reason for having a little bit less contrast is you get more detail. So you're actually losing out on some detail in the outer arms of the galaxy here by clipping the sky so dark. Okay, this one is Adi from India, a red zone sent me this photo of the Orion Nebula. Adi shot it untracked with a Nikon D750 and a Nikkor 300 millimeter lens. Adi said he took 360 lights at half a second each and wondered why the running man didn't come out. And I can see it from this JPEG that Adi sent that there's pretty sharp transitions here. And again, I think that part of the issue is that the sky got a little clipped but I think there's also maybe an issue here with the background removal step and it took away a bit of the Nebula. Just to see if that's the case, let me just stretch this. Yeah, so yeah, definitely something bad happened with background removal because there should be more nebulosity out here and definitely in the running man. So, Adi did send me the TIF and I did just do a quick stretch on that to show you what we could see here. And you can see in just a stretched TIF I can clearly see the running man and I can see the outer part of the Orion Nebula. Now, there is an issue here which is see how there's a bright spot here, then a dark ring and then another bright ring out here. That's really common when you don't use flats or when there's some kind of reflection from an external light pollution source. But I'm pretty sure Adi said he didn't use flats so flats would definitely help correct that. I just did a quick edit to remove those just to show Adi that the running man is indeed there as is the bottom half of the Orion Nebula. Alan sent me this photo of Andromeda from Red Zone but what I mean by Red Zone is just on a map of light pollution, sort of what color you are and Red Zone would mean pretty high light pollution levels. And this was just 25, 30 second lights tracked with a Skywatcher starred venturer which is a nice small star tracker. And Alan was wondering if I could bring out any more detail. So I tried and I really couldn't. I actually think this processing was spot on as is. So to improve it, Alan would either have to shoot more than 25, 30 second shots in terms of total integration, that's just 12 and a half minutes. And so if Alan went to 60 minutes or two hours that would definitely improve the image or travel. So if you get out of light pollution, 12 and a half minutes under a really dark sky would blow you away. So those are the two options, away from the light pollution or just put more time into it to bring down the noise. And that will also bring out more detail as you remove more noise. Okay, next up another M31, this one's from Aldrin and Aldrin asked why, he shot this at 50 millimeters, F1.8, untracked I'm thinking. And Aldrin wondered why his photo came out a little bit plurry. And there's a number of reasons that can happen. One, some lenses are just not as sharp as others. But I think the issue here is a focus issue and maybe a little bit of too long exposures issue. So you might want to have done slightly shorter exposures because the stars are a little bit egg-shaped. But I think that there's also probably a little bit of a focus issue here. So there's a number of reasons that things can get out of focus. Even if you start in focus, if there's a big temperature change, the glass elements in the lens will move around and you can lose focus. So it's a good thing to check focus every so often throughout the night because if you stack a bunch of photos together and half of them are out of focus and half are in focus, your end result will still be sort of out of focus or blurry. The other thing to note is that shooting at faster focal ratios is always good in terms of getting more signal, but it does make focusing harder because the critical zone where focus is correct becomes a lot smaller in terms of trying to get it just right. In terms of improving, it's really just checking focus more often. And then maybe when you get home, also looking through your individual subs or light frames and trying to find the ones that have the better focus and throwing out the ones that have blurry focus. Okay, Andreas shot this picture of Andromeda at 300 millimeter focal length F5.6 from a light polluted parking lot. And it looks like a good start. Andreas clearly found Andromeda right here and focus and color and the exposure length all look spot on. But what's I think really hurting Andreas here is the light pollution mixed with the slow focal ratio of F5.6. So what I would suggest is if it is a zoom lens and when you zoom out, if you can get to a faster focal ratio like F4, do that. Because then you're gonna be letting full stop more light every shot, basically twice as much light at F4. And then so if you could combine that with going to a darker site, then you're really gonna see a lot more of Andromeda than you are here. There probably also is a question of processing here. Again, this sky is clipped very black. So there might be more data here, but I'm not sure. So that's another thing is the stretch. You might see if you could actually stretch it more and to bring up more data, but being careful not to clip your blacks. Okay, this next one is by Arturus Astro. Arturus Astro is a 13 year old astrophotographer who sent me this really well done photo of the Seder region, the Nebulae in the Seder region. It was shot from a dark site with the Star Adventurer tracker, a stock Nikon DSLR and a zoom lens. And this was 300 lights at one minute each. I gotta say this is really well done. I really like the look. I just have two points for critique. One, the bright star Seder should be right there and somehow it went missing. I'm not sure what happened there. It probably Arturus Astro did remove the stars to bring out the Nebulosity and then added them back in and maybe somehow forgot to add back in Seder. But I think for the full look of this and because I know it's the Seder region so that star is important. It should be back in there. And then my second nitpick is Arturus Astro actually sent me the full tip of this and cut off an interesting reflection Nebulae over here on the right side called NGC 6914. Just to show you, this is just a really quick edit that I did. I know it's not as good as Arturus Astros because I didn't spend a lot of time on it, but just to show you that's where Seder should be. See, it's missing here. And then here's that little NGC 6914, which is a cool little blue reflection Nebulae over there. And I think it'd be a neat to bring that back into the shot too. All right, next up we have Arts and Arts Captured Andromeda for the first time. So congratulations. It's always fun to, you know, get your first deep sky object photographed. And the good things here are that Arts clearly found Andromeda, there it is right there. And the photo looks in to be in good focus with good star color. There are noise issues here though, which hamper bringing out Andromeda from the noise. So you can see this is pretty prominent sort of banding noise. And unfortunately with heavy light pollution like this was shot in, it's really hard to get around those noise issues. It just becomes much easier when you can get to a dark site. But then the other issue here is this was a hundred lights at one second each. So that's just about one minute total integration and just not enough to get beyond the noise of the sensor in this case. So there's not much more that I could do with this, but my suggestions are to try to get to a darker site any way you can and to shoot as many lights as you possibly can. Astrophotography Beginnings is a 15 year old astrophotographer who shared this Milky Way photo done with an Amagon Mini-Track Windup Star Tracker. And I think this looks great. My one note for a critique is that I would maybe try to de-emphasize the star field a little bit. There's just, this is one look, you know, it's pretty cool just to see, whoa, there's so many stars in the picture. But I like to use a program called StarNet++ to remove all the stars and then de-emphasize them a bit when you add them back in. So I just did a quick edit just to show you what that might look like. And then you just really get the core of the Milky Way really popping out a little bit and you can really see all of that dark nebulosity in the core a little bit more than you can there. So just an idea, this isn't a finished edit, it's just to show you sort of a direction if you're interested in that kind of thing. But this is really just an artistic choice. So how far you wanna go with de-emphasizing the stars? It's all up to you. Okay, this next one is from awe spear and it's a nicely framed Orion's belt and Orion's spear shot. So the most interesting part of the Orion constellation, it was done from a portal eight zone with a nearly full moon out. And it was shot untracked with a Pentax DSLR and a 135 millimeter focal length lens. And I think the processing here is pretty good. It's just a little bit clipped to black for my taste but I'm guessing that's to hide possible issues with it just to find out if that was right. I went ahead and stretched the tiff just to show you what some of the issues are here. So this extreme stuff down here at the bottom, this really bright red and blue, that's what I would expect from shooting from a very light polluted area. It's what I see in my light polluted shots too. Basically you have the city with light pollution and that has a light pollution dome. And so if you're shooting a deep sky object right above that light pollution dome at the bottom of your shots, you're gonna get these really extreme gradients like you're seeing here. The best way to avoid it is just to go somewhere darker in the first place or wait for your deep sky object to get higher in the sky away from the city's light. And then, but the stuff up here, it almost looks like banding or something but it's not banding. It's not from the camera. What this is is a stacking artifact. So, and what I mean by stacking artifact is that the way that untracked astrophotography works is you shoot a bunch of shots and then you re-center occasionally. And so the more that you re-center, the less you'll have these stacking artifacts in your shot. And so to get rid of those at 135 millimeter focal length, you would just have to re-center the shot more often. So if you were doing every hundred times, try every 30 times or something like that. So just re-center more often and then these stacking artifacts won't be as bad. Okay, Axl sent me this picture of M31, Andromeda Galaxy. I really don't have too much to say with this one other than great job because Axl said this was, Axl followed my Andromeda without tracking tutorial but did this from a red zone, meaning really heavy light pollution with a Pentax 200 millimeter F4 lens. And so this processing is really quite impressive considering eye shot with F2.8 from a green zone. So to get this much color and have this clean a shot at the end is a really good job with processing and getting those techniques down. Now you might look at this and think that it's out of focus because the stars look like a little bit blobby, but I just know from seeing enough astrophotography that there isn't a focus issue here. The stars just have a little bit of growth or don't quite look pinpoint because of the nature of the lens. So he's using an older Pentax lens, which isn't quite as sharp as my Canon lens. And so it's not a focus issue here. It's actually a lens issue. And sometimes those differences are hard to see until you get a bit more experienced. But basically the way I can tell this isn't a focus issue, but basically when I look at these dimmest stars here, they look like little pinpoints. So even though the bigger stars have this sort of chromatic aberration and sort of oddish, odd look to them, which makes you think maybe out of focus. When you look at the smallest stars, you can tell this actually is in very good focus. Okay, next up we have Bailey's image. Bailey is a 17 year old astrophotographer who shot Andromeda with a 50 millimeter lens into a light dome of a major U.S. city. And that's a hard thing to do with a wider lens is to shoot with a light pollution dome nearby because it picks all that up, of course. And I actually think it looks sort of cool in this image because it looks sort of like the light pollution dome is pointing at Andromeda. And Andromeda's the crown on top. I've actually tried to incorporate light pollution into my astrophotography at times. Here's an example of something I've tried to do with the Boston city skyline. So sometimes if you're fighting something, you can try to just embrace it rather than continue to fight it and try to make it part of your art. But the other thing with Andromeda, of course, and I think Bailey recognized this, is that if you just wait a little bit later in the season, it'll be in a different direction, it'll be higher in the sky, and you can avoid having to shoot into a light dome like this. The other thing Bailey asked about is the use of masks. And Bailey mentioned this mask wasn't very successful. I agree and disagree. I think that it was successful in probably bringing out some detail in the Andromeda galaxy here. And you can see the spiral arms and the dust lanes. And that was probably through the use of the mask. The reason it wasn't as successful is because of the sharp cutoff here to the sky background. And then it's really hard to use a mask when the sky background isn't even, when it's a gradient. And there are ways to try to remove a gradient. I show in some videos how to do that, but it really only works well if the gradient is a different color than the deep sky object. And in this case, I think that they would have been close enough that it probably would have also grabbed all that detail in Andromeda when you tried to remove the gradient. So the best thing is just to wait for a different time to shoot Andromeda so that you're not shooting directly into the light pollution. Okay, next up we have an image from an astrophotographer named Bart. And this image is of the Ro Ophiuki cloud complex around the bright star on Teres right there. And this, of course, is a brilliant image. It's a four panel mosaic from a very dark site at high elevation. And when you shoot at high elevation, that means you're shooting through less atmosphere and you can get clear images of the night sky. It was done with a Takahashi Epsilon telescope and a Nikon D810A. So some serious equipment from obviously a very skilled astrophotographer and you get a brilliant image like this. I'm just gonna zoom in just to give you an idea of how cool this is. And I think one of my favorite things about this image is that when you zoom in, you can see that, wow, there's so much detail. Like here's Messier 4. And even in the core of Messier 4, you can make out all those individual little stars. But when you zoom back out, it looks brilliant too. And this is something that's really hard to do. The way that Bart is doing it here is through the mosaic technique where this image is 12,400 pixels square. And so basically the D810A is already a highly detailed sensor. But then Bart took four panels of this region of the sky and merged them together into one seamless mosaic and then down sampled it a little bit. So you get sort of the best of both worlds. You get very high resolution imaging where you can zoom in and see all the cool details of the image, but it also captures a broader region of the sky. So you're getting more light into a single image. And so I like mosaic imaging too. This is a really, really great example of it with really nice prominent nebulae. And this is one of the most popular deep sky objects to shoot for a good reason because it's one of the only areas in our night sky where you get such vibrant yellows, pinks, reds, blues, dark nebulae, star clusters, everything all in one field. And so I don't really have any critique of this other than to just say great job Bart. I'd say this is APOD quality. Okay, next one was sent to me by an astrophotographer named Ben. And I gotta mention that Ben uses all three and open source software like K-Stars, Cyril and GIMP all on Linux operating system to do astrophotography. So it's very possible to do great work with free open source software. I don't really have much of a critique for this image. Looks pretty nice. The wall really pops, it's sort of a darker edit of this area, but I like that. The stars are probably a little bit smaller than I would do, but I think it works. I think that I found that if you go really high contrast like this, the wall is really popping out, but then most of the image is pretty dark, then the small stars work pretty well. It's a very artistic look, fresh photography, a little bit different than my style, but I like it here. And Ben achieved this look through using a clip-in HA filter on a modified Canon DSLR. Okay, next up we have Bernardo. Bernardo shot Orion with standard kit lens from a Portal 5 zone. And the main thing that I noticed with Bernardo's image other than the darks are, the black levels probably clipped a bit is that he also sent me the raw TIF and it was true and built the raw TIF and this process JPEG is that the colors looked really weird to me. So you can see sort of here, it's like this part of Orion should be the more bluish part, but in this one it's more magenta and then the central part has just gone pure white. And Bernardo mentioned that he used Deep Sky Stacker with CFA Drizzle. And I don't think that it had either enough information to do the CFA Drizzle or something weird happened with maybe assigning the wrong Bayer pattern or debayering in general didn't work because something definitely went weird with the colors here. This isn't how the colors should look. So in any case, what I would recommend with astrophotography is, you can always try things, maybe try them with a small sample of images. It can be challenging to figure out how things work without just trying them for yourself. So I think the CFA Drizzle didn't really work in this case. What I'd recommend to try to improve this image is just try Deep Sky Stacker, no drizzling. And I sort of recommend that for all beginners, don't use Drizzle in Deep Sky Stacker, just turn it off and just use the baseline default options for everything like I show in my videos and see if that improves the color. All right, so this one is quite the honor to receive for my critique because Bowen who sent this, Bowen just got NASA APOD with this photo. For anyone that doesn't know, if you go to apodapod.nasa.gov, there's a different astrophoto of the day there every day. And it's a huge honor as an amateur astrophotographer to have your photo shared there on that site. Because it's one of the oldest sites that shares astrophotography and it does it every day since the 90s. And but Bowen asked for my critique even though he probably doesn't need it since it has astrophotography's highest honor. My critique would be that I think this is definitely right on the edge of being so saturated that you're starting to lose some detail. Definitely in the North America here, there's actually a lot more color information that could have come through in this part, but instead it's basically just solid neon teal. And then over here, some of these areas I think just got so saturated that they're almost sort of like posterized and then you lose information when you go that extreme. But overall, I don't think that's the point to zoom in and really pay attention to those like small details and where saturation maybe went overboard because overall it really packs a punch. And it really highlights I think this interesting void in the center of Cygnus. Sometimes that void gets a little bit missed, but I think here really is this like negative space or in the middle and then there's like a ring of really highly saturated nebulae all around it, which looks so cool. Anyways, congrats Bowen on the APOD. It is well-deserved. I think this is an amazing starless edit of the Cygnus nebulosity. Okay, next up we have actually a comparison image from Brad. Brad compared shooting Andromeda with a zoom lens at F5, which you can see here versus shooting it with a eight inch F6 subsonian. F6 subsonian. And with the eight inch F6 subsonian, he only did 285 lights with the kit lens, Brad did 700 lights. And so you can see it was 700 and both from a light polluted area. So you can see that with the 700 lights at F5 you can start seeing some detail here, some dust lanes and core details. At F6 with shorter exposures probably with the subsonian and only 200 lights don't see much detail other than just the core. And so the reason I think this comparison is interesting is because it shows you that in astrophotography it's not the aperture of the optic, it's not that you have a really big white bucket necessarily, it's that you have the most total integration at the fastest focal ratio. That's what's gonna make your image have a higher signal to noise ratio and look impressive. And so it's the opposite in visual astronomy where really what's important is aperture. In visual astronomy there's a saying aperture is king because that's about resolving detail, especially like you wanna see a star cluster or something like that, you want high aperture so you can make out those individual stars. But for astrophotography and resolving detail you have to first clear the hurdle of noise and that's all about focal ratio and integration and light pollution. So faster focal ratio under the darkest skies you can that's gonna get you the best results. All right, Bradley captured this M31 with a telescope and an astronomy camera from a portal eight zone. Bradley was wondering how to get more color into his images and was wondering about getting narrowband filters. So narrowband filters wouldn't help with galaxy pictures so much like this one. Except for capturing nebulae within other galaxies. So some galaxies have more nebulae than others like M33 seems to be sort of chock full of them. So narrowband filters can help a little bit with that but otherwise they're not gonna help get you color in galaxy photos. But they do help with nebula photos. That's how I shoot a lot of my stuff is shoot narrowband and do false color mappings. And for that you can get really crazy with the color and get very colorful pictures. But it's sort of a different thing than what we're seeing here. For galaxy photos really the only way I've found to improve color is to get somewhere darker. Filtering usually doesn't help because galaxies are very broad spectrum objects with all the different star colors that make up the galaxy. Anyways though, this is a nice image. You don't blow out the core has really nice detail throughout. Brian sent me this photo he took of the Milky Way with a kit lens from a Bordel 6 zone. And he was wondering if the reason he wasn't happy with the amount of detail here had to do with the lens. And I'd say nope, it's not the lens, it's the light pollution. And to some degree the processing, but mostly light pollution for wide angle shots like this of the Milky Way. I've personally found that I only like results that I get from Bordel 4 or darker, meaning fairly rural site. Bordel 6 is more like suburban city transition. And you can see there's a really extreme gradient here from that city light pollution. Brian did send me the TIFF file. So here's a quick edit that I did just showing you that there is probably more detail here than Brian was able to get out of it. Like here's the Sagittarius star cloud looking pretty good. That's the mega nebula. I just did a gradient removal on this to get to this result, so this isn't necessarily finished image just to show you there is more detail with a little bit more experience with processing. Carson sent me this photo of the fireworks galaxy. It was taken with a Celestron C8 telescope and a dedicated astronomy camera. And my suggestion with this one is just to pay close attention to color balance when processing. There seemed to be something that happened here where from this point to up here has a different color balance than this point to down here, or maybe more saturation up here too. So not sure exactly what happened, but if I were to try to fix this, let me just add a color balance layer here and then I'll just draw a gradient on that color balance layer, something like that. And then add more blue to the bottom half. So here's before, there's after. So see how sort of sits better now because these outer arms are the same color as these lower arms. Or if you like the color of the lower half better, we could reverse this gradient. I'm gonna do an invert and take out some of that blue in the upper half. Okay, you get the idea. Hey, Cedric submitted an Andromeda photo and Cedric mentioned he used a Dolby camera raw for noise reduction. And from this scale, it looks fine, but if we zoom in, that looks like way too much noise reduction. You're losing a lot of detail by trying to smooth out all the noise. And so there's two ways to get around this. One is to mask the galaxy when you're doing the noise reduction. So then the noise reduction is only gonna hit the sky background, which is what a lot of people do. Other is just to use less noise reduction and reduce noise the old fashioned way by stacking more images. The other thing I'd say about this is somehow you zapped some of the color I think here in Andromeda. It looks a little bit too black and white. And that might have been from the noise reduction because if you use the color noise reduction also in a Dolby camera raw, that will also zap your colors. Chris sent me this Andromeda photo and Chris was wondering if the Andromeda looked too blue and I would say yes. In your final photo here Andromeda does look a little bit too blue. Chris sent me some of his in-between shots too while processing. And if I go back to this earlier one, midway through processing, Andromeda looks much closer to a good color balance here before doing the star removal and adding it back in. So I would try to get back to something like this. The other thing I will say, and we can look at either this one zoomed in or this one, I think it's a little bit clearer on this one is that you do have a focus issue here. When stars are in focus, the brightest part of the star is the center. And when they're out of focus, they take on this sort of donut shape where if you look at a bright star here, it's gonna really zoom in on this one. You can see that it's sort of a donut. The brighter part of the star is actually out here and the middle is dimmer. And so that's a clear indication of an out of focus star. When the star gets into focus, the core is the brightest part and then the halo gradually fades out. And so work on focus. But otherwise, I think you're off to a good start here. Okay, this image of the California nebula is brought to us by astrophotographer Crazy Panda. And I really like this image. You can see even some of the dust and tourists over here on the left hand side. I really prefer a vertical framing like this for a vertical object. It just makes sense to me. It really highlights sort of like the length of the object better than putting it in a rectangular frame. And the color looks good to me. I think that especially when you're trying to bring out detail in an object that is all red, it's better to go with less saturation so you can really see all of these little folds in the nebula. My only critique is that it maybe is just starting to be a bit over sharpened overall. What I mean by that is then you get sort of this pasted on look to the nebula onto the star field. And that's sort of when I can tell like, oh, the sharpening or high dynamic contrast is just like a little bit too much. I prefer with nebula to have more of that soft looks that it really has this feel like it's being pushed by the stellar winds rather than something separate from the rest of space. So that's when my one critique is like trying to avoid that more sort of like the nebula being separate from the rest of the picture, but you want it to feel a little bit more integrated. Okay, Dan sent me this as an example of what can happen when re-centering is off. So yeah, I think this is a good point with untracked is I maybe have given some rule of thumbs in my videos, but you really have to be careful about not letting it go too long without re-centering because you can get into this kind of situation where you have really dramatic stacking artifacts and then if you haven't perfectly centered up your object each time, you're gonna have issues. And I also think this is a reason to go a bit wide for images when going on track because then even if you do have a bit of this stacking artifacts from not re-centering often enough, you can still crop in and not have to deal with the artifacts like this. I think this image might still be somewhat salvageable, maybe not. Yeah, there's a pretty harsh transition right there. So I'm not sure, but thanks Dan for sending this in, showing some possible issue. Again, the way to get around this is just to make sure every time you take pictures that whatever you're trying to shoot is right in the center and that you re-center often. Okay, a different Dan, Dan J sent me this photo of the Lagoon Nebula. I think this is pretty cool. I like how colorful it is and all the detail. I think some of it is pushed a little bit too hard for my taste, especially like these darker parts are just getting a little bit, see if I zoom in here, you can see how noisy it is. So they're getting brought up a little bit too much for the level of noise that you have. But I think that's something that's sometimes weird in an extra image is you might have plenty of signal in one part of the image, but not enough in another part. So you might need 20 times more data to make this look okay. But while this looks okay after just a few images and that's common with Nebulae that have a bright core but then their outer parts are really hard to bring up without looking noisy. All right, next up we have David's Andromeda photo here. And this was following my Andromeda without a Star Tracker video, but David was shooting from an orange zone while I was shooting from like a green or blue zone. And David also mentioned he only took up 250 sub exposures or lights at one second each while I took about a thousand. But David was wondering why he couldn't match the kind of detail I was getting in the video. And I think it's two things. One is 250 versus a thousand lights you're gonna be dealing with a lot more noise which will be harder to deal with in processing but mostly just probably inexperience in processing and it's hard to follow along with a YouTube video where I go through a bunch of different steps when you're new to all of this. So it's really just practice I think. To me, this image mostly looks just too much like too much saturation, too much contrast meaning the black level is clipped, the core is blown out so there's just too much contrast in both directions. David did send me his unstretched tiff so I just went through it here using my tutorial that I have online using the same steps and got this out of it. So I first stretched the image then made a starless version, used some masks to highlight the galaxy details that I could and make it a little bit more saturated. If I zoom in, you can see, now there's a lot of noise color noise in here, but that's to be expected 250 lights from a brighter sky, but still looks pretty good. Then I just added back in the stars with a screen blend mode and just applied curves to bring down the black point and a color balance to get rid of the sort of greenish look to it. And I could do more with it, but that gives you an idea of just sort of a neutral quick edit, but with a little bit more experience in processing I tend to go, try to go simple and soft in my processing. So I don't want to go to any extreme. With a galaxy, you want to see it sort of has a sort of a glow and it naturally blends in to the sky. And part of that is just keeping the sky level at a higher level than we have here. So gives you an idea, I'm sorry that with these critiques I'm not able to go into a lot of depth into what I'm doing, but gives you some ideas for how to improve, hopefully. Okay, next up we have Detrick, another Andromeda. And Detrick just wanted my advice on how to improve. This was again from an orange zone, just like the last one. This was shot with a Nikon D810 and shot at 300 millimeter F 22. Okay, if that isn't a typo, F 22 is your problem here. That means your lens is basically stopped down to as small an aperture as it can go. And that you don't want that for astrophotography. You want your aperture is wide open as possible, which would mean F two. So maybe this is a typo and it's actually 300 millimeters at F two. If that's the case, then ignore all of this, but if that is the problem, and I think it may be, I don't know, this seems very noisy and that's easy to solve. Just open up your lens, F four or F 2.8, something like that, that's gonna be your sweet spot for untracked astrophotography, F four or wider. And next up, we have Don R. Don R sent me this part of the North America nebula. This part right down here is called the Cygnus wall region. And I sort of like the unusual framing. I feel the Cygnus wall is a little bit too cut off down here, but sort of interesting to highlight the dark nebula part of the North America. Sort of like that. By centering it, you're really highlighting it. This was shot with two minute lights and it looks like tracking on Don's mount didn't quite support two minute lights. You can see there's a tracking problem because all the stars are stretched in the same direction. They're all sort of lines going left to right with a little bit of a downward angle. So that looks like a tracking problem. The ways to get around that are, they're sort of three ways. One just takes shorter lights and usually if you do shorter light frames, so instead of two minutes, one minute that will minimize that issue. Or another way is to somehow get a better polar alignment and usually with a better polar alignment tracking issues will be minimized. And then the third way is to add an auto guiding system. So it corrects any problems with the tracking in real time as you're shooting. Okay, here's one from Dylan and Dylan writes, this is his first ever shot of the Milky Way. Wow, I mean, then you have some natural talent because I think this is a great composition. You have, maybe you're already a great photographer but this is just your first attempted astrophotography. In any case, I think this composition really works well. You have these interesting foreground with the flowers down here leading the eye into this spot here and then up into the Milky Way. It's a really nice frame. It has some natural vignetting. The Milky Way is nice and detailed with some nice color. My only critique is actually related to the color. It's a little bit blue in the middle of the photo only. And then that blue seems to go away up here in the upper part of the sky. And also the Milky Way seems to sort of disappear up here too. I mean, I know that this is the core so it's gonna be a lot brighter but I'd expect to see a bit more of the Milky Way up here. I don't know if you put like a processing vignette up here. Any case, I think the way to get rid of this blue is either through color balance or just through taking flats. Let me just try a color balance here just to see if I like it better. Okay, so here's with the blue, here's without. Personally, I like it better without the blue but I know a lot of night scaper's like a blue sky with the golden Milky Way. It's not my thing but it's each their own. I think this is amazing considering it's your first try at Milky Way. All right, Eduardo sent me a photo of the Milky Way too. He took about 10 shots at five seconds each so just under a minute total. And I'd suggest two things here. One is, you know, always more integration is better so if you could do times 10, you know, 10 minutes of shots that would be a lot better than one minute in terms of the noise level. And then two, try not to apply so much contrast in processing. So I talked about this in other critiques too but like when your sky shouldn't be this dark and the brightest part of your pictures don't need to be this bright. So less contrast will actually give you a more detailed, interesting astrophotograph. Okay, next up we have Edwin and Edwin sent me a photo of the Eagle Nebula. This part here of the Eagle Nebula is the Pillars of Creation, popularized by Jeff Hester's narrow band processing of the Hubble Space Telescope's shot of the Pillars. So it's a really awesome deep sky object. And I like this, I think the pinkish red is right on and it has some nice depth but somehow with the editing Edwin you got a little bit of what I call posturization where you see how it's like this is all one tone rather than, and then it's a harsh jump to this next tone and another harsh jump to this tone rather than a gradient of tones in here. And that posturization is sort of all over the processing here. So I'm not sure how that happened. It might have been from a noise reduction step or it might have been from going to 8-bit, like saving it as a JPEG and then editing more on the JPEG, which you don't wanna do, like if you're gonna do any processing, it really should be on a 16-bit file, either a TIF or a Photoshop document, that kind of thing. Edwin did send the unprocessed TIF. So let's just take a quick stretch here to see what it looks like to level out the channels a little bit. Okay, so after just a really quick stretch, this is what I have. I'd say this is fairly natural color. I could add some saturation here just to show you. There we go. So this is what I'd say is pretty natural color, just balancing the color channels. And I don't have any of that posturization in the nebula that you seem to have here. So something went amiss because it's not in your raw data. Your stars do look a little bit out of focus. Again, I think I've said this in a different edit, but I'll just say it again. The way to see if a star is out of focus once you have it on the computer here is if it looks dimmer in the center than it does on the edge, that's sort of like a little donut, then your star is out of focus. Infocus star would be brighter in the core and then dimmer in the halo. So the center of the star would be the brightest thing. Well, these are sort of the opposite meaning they're out of focus. And that's also hurting detail a little bit in the nebula. Other than that though, it's looking good. Just work on focus and you'll be well on your way. Well, and then also just whatever happened with the processing here to introduce this weird look. I gave you a couple ideas earlier maybe how to avoid that. Okay, Inez sent me this photo done with a Sony mirrorless camera and a 50 millimeter lens at F 1.8. So I'm not sure if this was intentional but I actually love this framing with M31 down there and M33 are two closest big galalactic neighbors in the same shot. So that's M33, the Triangulum Galaxy. This is M31 and Dramatica. And so I think this shot is really well done technically. It looks like everything's in focus and picked the right, you know, sub-exposure length so the stars aren't trailed. Inez asked about ISO and going to a higher ISO for untracked shots like this. And I'd say that's perfectly all right to do. It's fine to go to a higher ISO and that'll often help. The danger really is picking an ISO with untracked shots that's too low because with ISOs that are too low often you'll get a big read noise hit with every shot. So anything that's past that point on the curve when you're comparing read noise and ISO anything higher than that is fine. I'm trying to think, oh, then the only other thing I'd say about your photograph here is it just, again, black level is too dark. If I examine it here, yeah, it's the 0, 0, 0. So that means it's completely clipped to black. It should be somewhere around like 20, 20, 20 in terms of the RGB value. And so what happens then is the galaxy looks sort of pasted on rather than part of space because the black level is too black. Okay, next up we have Gabe and Gabe sent me this really cool shot of the Cygnus constellation or the top half of Cygnus and all the interesting nebulae within including the Seder butterfly, North America and Pelican and the Veil complex down here. And this is just a really nice shot. Shot it with the Sigma Art lens with the Nikon DSLR the Sigma Art 105, which is a lens I've definitely had my eye on because it looks amazing. And it did a really nice job on the star field here and the colors. My one criticism is that Gabe mentioned he used star reduction techniques to get this effect of the nebulae really popping out like that. And my issue with star reduction is it looks really nice here and I don't think that it looks bad when you're zoomed out but when you zoom in, which is something like I would wanna do looking at this picture just to sort of see some of the detail that Gabe has been able to pull out. When you zoom really far in, what you see is these little lines and basically what's happened here is that when you reduce stars with a normal star reduction technique it can connect dim stars together basically and then you get these little wormy things instead of stars. And these little wormy or you might think of it as sort of like a snake skin kind of pattern all over something that I definitely had a lot of you can see it's worse over here in the brighter part. This is something that I ran into a lot in my first few years of processing and it's now something I try to avoid. Partly I just don't do star reduction anymore. What I do instead is basically a star de-emphasis and the way to do a star de-emphasis I've found that works really well is just to completely remove the stars from the image with StarNet++ which is this software I've shown in recent videos then you have a starless image you can make the nebulae pop as much as you want and really work on them and make them nice and bright and then you add the star field back in and just by doing that you automatically are de-emphasizing the stars because you've been able to bring out the nebulae without bringing up the star level and you can control it basically however you want like you can stretch the stars layer to a certain extent versus the nebulae layer and just through stretching them differently you can basically emphasize or de-emphasize the star field however you want. So that's how I do it now. I don't do any star reduction and then you can avoid getting those little wormy snake skin kind of artifacts. Other than that I really like this. Oh, one other thing is Gabe talked about composition and let me just draw right on the picture here. So I think what really works well in this composition is that you have something interesting down here in the lower left and so the eye for me in a picture often sort of goes up from the lower left and so that it's good that you have the veil down there and then you have this sort of all these dark nebula leading you up to this side of the picture and you have some balance basically through sort of this triangle of these three brighter part brighter nebulae but then you also have this balance of the bright blue star to neb up here with this dimmer yellow star down there making a line like that. The one issue with the picture and to me it's not really an issue but someone might consider it is that you're very, very unbalanced in terms of this side of the picture is really, really bright and has a lot going on while this side of the picture is quite dark and over here basically featureless you just have a star field and so it does have this sort of balance issue where it feels sort of heavy on this side but to me because you have this strong dark nebula separating the two sides I think it does work as a composition it might work even better if you had gotten this dark nebula region to go even more at a diagonal because right now it's sort of not quite straight up and down and not quite a diagonal so I think if you could have rotated the camera a little bit so that you had this still up here but then but somehow gotten this down here maybe that'd be better. I'm also thinking maybe this would just look better with a slight crop in like that. I'm not sure if I like that better but anyways, just I like talking about composition so since Gabe mentioned it I thought I'd talk about it a little bit. All right, Gabriel shot this Orion nebula photo without a tracker with a Nikon DSLR and a camera lens. This was from a Bordel 89 zone so like a city sky, 150 lights at 1.3 seconds each and considering those conditions I think this is really good. Let me just stretch it a little bit more. Let's just see if I see anything out here, not really. So I mean, I think that you're not gonna get the outer part of the Orion nebula untracked from a city sky unless you went to like, I don't know, real extremes like thousands of pictures, really to get more of the nebula you really have to probably get to a slightly darker sky than a city sky, even just like a suburban sky you could bring out a lot more but I think this is about what is possible from a city sky untracked but when I first got a shot like this I was just amazed that you could do this just with a camera and a lens on a tripod. So good job, Gabriel. And if you can get somewhere darker you'll now have this experience and you'll be well on your way to capturing even more of the Orion nebula and the running man nebula up here. Okay, next up we have Gareth. Gareth sent me a Milky Way shot here done with a Canon 5D Mark III a 14 millimeter wide angle lens from a dark site but Gareth said he struggled a bit with processing and I can see that there is a big dark spot right here and so I wasn't sure what that was about but Gareth sent me a lot of his raw files so I could try to look into them and so here is the stacked file and then I just applied a stretch to it and you can see that we have basically like a reverse vignetting issue where there's this hot spot in the middle that's not a hot spot, it's a dark spot basically and so I could try to go further with the stretch here but it's gonna be an issue because this is really just going to hamper us and even if I try to correct it here in post the data is already sort of cooked in a way that it's gonna be hard to do anything about that so I looked at just one of Gareth's lights and it looked perfect, like this looks amazing as a single light so stacking 200 of these like he did should result in a really good photo but the issue was Gareth's flats so here's an example of Gareth's flat and what happened here was whatever Gareth was shooting had this really bright spot here in the middle and then too much fall off when you're shooting flats you want the flat to have an even source of light that completely fills the frame so that you're just getting the natural vignetting of the lens, what's happening here is that we have basically an uneven flat and so when you apply an uneven flat it overcorrects and you get this kind of issue so in this case what I'd recommend Gareth do is just stack the lights by themselves or stack the lights plus the darks and leave out the flats in the bias and that will result in a much better picture and not having the flats in this particular case isn't gonna matter too much because the image looks clean I don't see any like dust spots or anything and so other than dust spots the main thing that flats corrects for is vignetting but in this case the vignetting would be almost all out here in the corners and the corners are all have trees in them so when we stack all of these images together we would cut that part of the image out anyways so vignetting is not gonna be an issue so again I would just ditch these flats they didn't work cause they were taken wrong I'm not sure how but they need to work on your technique there a little bit but the lights are still golden so you can take all these lights stack them together and you won't have this issue of the dark spot in the middle and then it'll be much easier to process the Milky Way okay Garrett sent me this picture of Andromeda done with a Canon DSLR, a zoom lens and a Star Tracker and it looks like focus was pretty good and tracking went well too the stars don't look streaked at all and you have some good detail here on Andromeda the dust lanes are coming out nicely basically to improve this shot I would either just try to add a bit more color if possible especially maybe in the galaxy itself it's coming out a little bit especially when you have a wide field like this often you have to add more color to what's supposed to be interesting so that it sort of pops out from the image so you could either add more color or crop in a little bit or just pick a slightly different composition so you're probably wide enough here that you actually could get M31 and M33 in the same shot M33 would be down here it's a little bit out of frame right now but that'd be sort of cool to get both galaxies in the same shot okay Jerry sent me this photo of Cassiopeia I personally really like constellation shots if you're brand new to astrophotography and you're looking for something to shoot without a tracker try a constellation it's always fun this looks to be in good focus and the stars look good the one thing I'd say about it is that it's unclear as a composition where I'm supposed to look exactly so the way to help with that is to either make the picture brighter or something like that or just change the composition up slightly I think right now it's just a little too dark so it's sort of just like one big black rectangle with all the little white stars another way to make a constellation shot sort of pop is to get a cheap diffusion filter and just put that on your lens for some of the shots and then what will happen is the bright stars will get these big colorful halos and when you stack those into the rest of the pictures so I would do some with the diffusion filter some without and then you stack them all together and you'll get a bit you'll see the constellation a little bit better there's also natural ways to get sort of those halos which is to shoot on nights with thin high altitude clouds but that's more of a gamble just to try to find those nights that are perfect conditions for doing that let me just try stretching this a bit more so I mean this is stretched probably a little too much but now you can make out cast the appeal a little bit better and you can see down here in the lower right we have Andromeda Galaxy and down here we have the double cluster okay high on sent me this photo of Orion the constellation you can see the belt stars there and the Ryan Nebula down here it was shot with a Canon DSLR and lens on tract and high on was wondering about why topaz denoise resulted in waves of color noise so let's see if we can I'm not quite seeing it but zoom in okay I'm not sure if that's gonna come across in the video so let me just boost this up a little bit so there's the flame and you can see sort of throughout the background here we have this sort of lumpy color noise which high on called waves of color noise which is a good description of it and so the reason that topaz did that is that topaz is denoise I assume talking about the AI version it doesn't know it's it's artificial intelligence but it doesn't and I put that in quotes it doesn't know what in the space photo what is noise and what's a nebula I have found that it only works somewhat well with the shots that I've taken that have like 20 to 30 hours of total integration for an untracked shot with like a lot of color noise I would never use that tool so that's my answer I guess for people out who watch my channel I wouldn't get topaz denoise AI if you haven't already unless you're really experienced and really know what you're doing with it I don't think it's a general tool it's a very specialized tool for people who've been doing this hobby a long time and maybe want some final kind of denoising on their already stretched image but in general I would avoid it it only really works if your noise is super uniform and pretty easy to denoise if you have more random color noise like this it's gonna end up in just this sort of blurred wavy look which isn't very pleasant and actually will be harder to deal with now in processing and Photoshop but other than that I think this is looks really good I love how the belt stars look and the colors look spot on throughout the only note in terms of composition is I think it would look a little better if everything was just moved a bit this way so the stars, let me try to just actually do a crop here basically if it was more like this where this star Alnitok was along this rule of thirds conjunction right there and then it was rotated just a little bit like that so that Orion and their running man were right there so just a framing like this I think would have been a little bit better than this one because this one in my eye gets a little bit lost in terms of where to look even though you have the obvious belt stars in Orion they're just a little bit oddly placed in the frame okay Harish sent me this photo of the heart nebula with an 80 millimeter refractor and a ZWO camera and the details and I think the color both look good in this my main critique though about it is that it's pretty splotchy meaning there's a lot of bright areas that shouldn't be bright and some areas that are too dark so I think what happened here is Harish he used pics insight and I think that Harish maybe misused background extraction tools to get this kind of splotchy look so I would just maybe start with automatic background extraction see what that does if it looks like this and it looks bad then just then try very deliberately placed dynamic background extraction just using a few samples on places where you know there's no nebula or star or anything it's just sky and see if that works better and if all else fails you can go here into Photoshop and grab your burn tool and just bring down the parts of the image that are appearing too dark I mean too bright or too dark but that's really sort of like a hacky last resort I really think that the background extraction is what you have to work on Okay, Harish sent me this photo of the Scorpius region shot with a Canon DSLR a 50 millimeter lens in a heavily light polluted area Harish mentioned this is just 33 lights at four seconds each with no calibration frames and Harish is wondering about the splotchy color noise so this is the processed image let me go ahead and open up the TIF which looks roughly the same but let's try stretching it Okay, so now I can see the splotchy color noise that Harish is talking about and really you gotta take calibration frames one that wouldn't help a lot especially flats here two, you know, the heavy light pollution plus only 33 lights is gonna make it so that you just have a pretty noisy image and then that just makes processing really difficult if not impossible to bring out at least nebulae and things like that so, you know, light pollution makes everything harder but not doing calibration frames and only taking 33 lights it's gonna be hard to get much out of this pretty sure this is Messier four right here so this is maybe the Ro Ophiyuki region right there and this I think might be the Ontario's yellow nebulae right there yeah, so to improve either take more lights take the calibration frames keep trying in a light polluted area to really do something like this object I would probably go to a dark side though because I wouldn't attempt the Scorpius region from a light polluted area it's just everything there is too dim if you want objects to try from a light polluted area I would definitely try Orion maybe Andromeda those are like the really bright deep sky objects Yannis used a Skywatcher EQ35 mount which is a mount I really wanna try because it's about the same price as the Celestron AVX but I am a big Skywatcher fan so I really wanna try that out Yannis also used an SV bony ultra high contrast filter on a Canon T1i and I think this came out really well my critique like on many photos I've been sent is that it's too high contrast the sky background is clipped you can see if I pull up the info panel here and hover over it zero zero zero means that there is no information in the sky it's completely clipped to black and that's why Orion has this very sort of cut off look to it where it almost looks sort of rectangular rather than wispy out into the sky and also why the running man nebula isn't showing up is because the dimmer parts are just being clipped away to black here Yannis did send me his TIF so I did a quick edit myself and you can see all I did here was just following my own Orion nebula tutorial I did a background removal and some just general curves and things to bring it out and you can see the bottom half of Orion and this part over here is pretty noisy but I think when you zoom out that noise level is fine it doesn't hurt it and there's just certain details in here that are lost in Yannis' edit that I was able to bring out a little bit I especially like how the running man nebula came out up there oh, I guess I should just mention so what is my sky background here? It's like in the 30s, even 40s don't be afraid to keep your sky background up a little bit and then you're going to see more details and the nebulae will look more natural flowing into the sky rather than more cut off unless this is just really the style you're going for throughout these critiques I'm just giving my preference and how I would do it but there is no one right way to do extra photography too okay, Itai shared this photo of the dumbbell nebula and the star field around it it was shot from a light polluted area with a small star tracker a Canon T2i, an SV bony clip-in filter and a Canon zoom lens and Itai wrote that they wanted to share this to encourage people that have to shoot with light pollution and minimal gear to keep trying because your results can be quite good with practice and processing which I agree with that message completely and Itai obviously put in a lot of time to get good at processing and it shows here the one thing that I would say is that it's a pretty I saw the TIF file and that was even wider than this but then even this crop to me feels a little bit wide and there's just not much of interest in this star field especially since the stars aren't particularly colorful I mean, with the SV bony CLS filter and the light pollution it's harder to get colorful stars, I get that but even from a light polluted area you might try without the clip-in filter on the same field I know that's more work to get more color in the stars but there's also I think processing choices here and I tried processing it myself just to see what I would come up with and here's my edit so I don't know if these star colors are real since Itai was using a CLS filter but I was able to just get a little bit more color into the stars which I think makes it a little bit more interesting I also did a closer in edit and just because I personally don't like just like a little nebula in the center I did a little bit of a crop here that I find more interesting just putting it I found that if you just take a shot like this and maybe go four by five, something like that and then just take the planetary nebula and put it up here along this top third line it can just add a little bit of an artistic flair to the shot other than that, I think in my edit I was just trying to bring out the red in the dumbbell a little bit so I was semi successful at that I think by trying to bring out the red mine is probably noisier than Itai's here yeah you can see that's nicely processed and mine is a bit of a noisy mess compared to that but it was just a quick process to try to sort of show the direction that I would go with this photo only other thing I'd say is yeah, just work on star color because I think that when you have a big field like this and a small DSO you really want the stars to be colorful to make the image more interesting so if I just compare try to make them about the same scale here there's yours, there's mine you can see just that I have a lot more variety in the star color well, these are mostly sort of clipped to white and a little bit more blobby so just try to work on the stars a little bit and I think it can be even a little bit better but I actually like how your dumbbell is processed better than mine here, mine's too noisy I think because I was using quick masks that weren't very good okay, all right, Jaded had shared a nice photo of the Milky Way here but with some pretty dramatic color shifts from blue up here to a bit more natural but a bit magenta down here and Jaded had asked about how to avoid over processing a shot that's a really good question I think that that's something that's been coming up a lot in these critiques is maybe going too far with contrast or too far with saturation which are both examples of over processing and so while it's a great question I don't think that over processing is actually the issue here the issue here is just light pollution and because here's the Tiff and this is like heavy light pollution dome and so trying to take, bring out the Milky Way and have natural color when you have this much light pollution basically impossible this is a really great effort at it probably better than I could do so I wish I had a magic bullet but to try to fix Milky Way shots with a huge light pollution gradient in posts in Photoshop but I don't so my solution if you even wanna call it that is just if you're gonna shoot the Milky Way try to find some place where you can do it where you're not shooting into light pollution so even if you're in a light polluted area if you can find a place where the Milky Way is like over a body of water or something like that and you're not actually shooting into a place where lights are shining up to the sky you're gonna get better results. Okay, Jacob sent this Milky Way photo done with a Canon DSLR and the Nifty 50 lens good choice, Jacob mentioned that his color balance came out a bit pink and while he thinks it does give it a unique look he was wondering how to get more natural color and a natural look and so sometimes the issue like in that last one is light pollution but it doesn't look like that's the case in this one because I can see a lot of detail in the Milky Way and the Lagoon and Trifid and all the stuff here are coming out well so I think it's really just a matter of processing in this case so I did open up the TIF and here's what I was able to come up with it's not perfect, it's just a quick try but I'll just explain what I did quickly basically I followed my own Lagoon and Trifid Nebula workflow so I started by just stretching and while stretching I was paying attention to the color channels here and trying to balance them out a bit and so this is sort of midway through and so what I would do next on this stretch is try to even these out a bit more you can see how the blue is a little bit offset and the red is offset in this direction so I'd try to even them out and also make the three color channels the same width that's the more important thing it's just trying to make them about the same width they don't have to be the exact same shape I'll just show you what the histogram looks like here so you can see these aren't the same shape and you don't necessarily have to expect them to be but they are stretched out to about the same width meaning the shadow area and the highlight area is hitting the same spot and so once you get to something like this and at this point I more use my eye than looking at the histogram you can see we have some good star color the Milky Way looks pretty natural in the middle of the shot but it has some weird color cast stuff going on over here and down here so to fix those what I did was I added color balance layers here adjustment layers there's before you can see there's a heavy blue cast over there and then here's with the color balance layer turned on and I don't want that color balance layer to affect the whole shot so what I did was I applied a layer mask to it I'll show you what that looks like and I just used the gradient tool to draw in with the gradient tool where I wanted that color shift to happen the same thing down in this corner you see that there is a green tint to this corner so I just drew in a gradient mask down in that corner and in this corner and then switched the green magenta shift on this one and on this one it was the blue yellow it was sort of all of them but basically warming up that corner away from the cyan green blue and towards the red magenta yellow and this isn't perfect yet it's still a little bit greenish so I might just do just another overall shift away from green, something like that let me just turn these off and on to see if I like it yeah I sort of like that the other thing that I didn't touch yet is the stars since this is with the nifty 50 lens have a little bit of chromatic aberration a little bit of fringing that I might try to clean up a little bit but other than that I think this is looking good oh and I'll just note here that Jacob didn't send me this little foreground element but when you have one of those you usually do all your Milky Way stuff and then you add that in at the end just as its own layer so we could easily add that in here to just sort of ground out the Milky Way picture James shared this 13 hour shot of the crescent nebula done with narrowband filters and this kind of processing is right up my alley I love this is called bi-color processing where it sort of looks like natural color but because you're using narrowband filters it really makes the nebulae pop but you still are basically assigning hydrogen to red and oxygen to blue and so then you get that really high contrast shift between the blue and the red which really works for objects like this one especially the crescent where the O3 shell is so vibrantly blue in O3 and then you get all this interesting stuff in HA to both in the crescent and out here and you know this actually has a lot of O3 signal away from the crescent as well which I think looks really nice here oh and I gotta mention this object that came out well too this is the the soap bubble nebula it was discovered by an amateur astrophotographer named Dave Jarasovic who lived in San Diego at the time and picked it up in one of his shots and he was the discoverer of this cool little nebula right here pretty dim but came out well in this 13 hour integration and you know what I don't really have anything negative to say about this shot I think it looks really nice I like how the bright stars are really poppin and the background nebulosity is also really brought out to make the whole frame interesting rather than just having interesting right in the middle you have interesting stuff going out going on in the whole frame and it has a nice sort of directional flow too so good job James okay Jossa sent me this photo of the wizard nebula and I like the composition a lot for me the wizard looks best in a vertical like this and I also think it looks best when it has plenty of room to breathe and you can sort of seal the dark nebulae around it and I think the stars look good here too from this scale my complaint though or suggestion about this image is about the stars and it's when you zoom in I don't like the look of these stars I think that this is star reduction the way I'm thinking that is because you can see that the stars get sort of this connected look like it looks sort of like snake skin and that's a telltale sign for me that I'm using like star reduction techniques and I've basically gone to the point where I don't use star reduction like that at all because I think that it really hurts the image quality when you zoom in like that leaving those artifacts so what I do now is I just remove the stars from the image you know bring out the nebulae how I want then you can stretch the star image and the starless image differently and when you put them back together you have complete control over how much you're emphasizing the star field versus the nebulae so that's what I'd recommend I think that when you zoom out like this they end up looking about the same but when you zoom in the starless workflow looks a lot better than the star reduction workflow okay next up we have Jason Jason sent me this picture of the lagoon and trifid nebulae and the Milky Way around it and this shot has you know now a common problem if you've been listening to the video which is that it's clipped meaning that you can see it here in the histograms or if we open the info panel you can see that the sky is registering at 0000 which means that it's clipped to black and then we lose out on a lot of interesting detail in the Milky Way and everything else in the picture isn't as dynamic because it's just so dark so this is the JPEG so if I just tried stretching the JPEG you can see that that doesn't really improve it that's another thing just to note is never save as JPEG and then try to reopen and continue editing it because you're not going to get anywhere once you've saved as JPEG then reduce to an 8-bit scale meaning just 255 levels of intensity and when you try to stretch it it's just not going to really work so Jason did share the TIF with me and then here's my processing on the same data and so I'll just step through what I did here it is the same process that I show in my Lagoon to finish video but I'll just quickly talk about it so start with a stretch this is just a basic stretch when you're stretching you want to try to line up the color channels and make them about the same width with Milky Way shots you know the red channel especially is going to be a little bit wider probably than the green and blue because there's so many red and yellow stars so don't worry about that but just try to sort of line them up as best you can because then you're going to have a more natural color and then what I do next is I remove the stars and continue processing it with curves to bring out the dark lanes in the core of the Milky Way and then we add the stars back in as a screen blend mode and then just apply a curves to reset the black point and if there aren't any little lingering color balance issues you can hit those with additional adjustment layers and masks so the only one I really noticed in this image was that up here in the upper left it looked a little green so I just made a little mask there with a gradient and brought it down just with a little shift away from the green ok that's it really nice data here from Jason and the issue with Jason's processing was just too dark just needed to be stretched more and then you can also follow the starless technique to bring up more detail especially in the dark nebulae in the Milky Way ok next we have Jean-François and this is an image of Andromeda by Jean-François and this was the first time he attempted astrophotography by following my Orion tutorial and it's a great first attempt the stars look pretty good and colorful I would just maybe when you sent this in you hadn't seen my Andromeda tutorial but that one might be give you even better results because I think that you might have more data out here in the outer arms of Andromeda I can still, I can see just like a little bit of an outline there so maybe following the Andromeda tutorial where I remove the stars and maybe really brighten out the galaxy will help bring out those outer arms this is sort of just the core and a little bit around the core we do get a dust line there which is cool but I think you could bring it out a little bit more in processing alright Jeff sent me this really nice example of a night scape type shot and when we say night scape it means that you have something interesting in the foreground it's usually lit up with a little bit of light painting meaning just taking a flashlight or something and putting it over the foreground when you're shooting the Milky Way or something else it could be the obvious kind of night scapery of the summer Milky Way with the Milky Way core which is so brilliant but you can also shoot winter Milky Way or all kinds of things with a foreground looks like you also have a meteor shower going on maybe there's like all these little streaks in the sky that's my guess and you have a planet out here composition looks nice only thing I might change is just that you have a pretty big area of the image that is just black and so I don't know if you didn't light paint that part of the foreground or this is a conscious editing choice to make that part of the image black but it might be a little bit more interesting to have just a little bit of interest down here alright Jerry captured Andromeda Galaxy has a nice diagonal composition and I think the cropping is good too includes the satellite galaxies and nice detail the sky background is pretty dark but not so dark that we don't get some nice fall off from the galaxy into space and the star color looks good my only point of suggestion here is that the core looks like it got blown out so you see how there's like a ring it's like white then a ring of magenta and so that's but we do see some core details here the easiest way to fix this kind of thing is just sort of like a fake HDR where you take throughout the process of stretching it you keep duplicating and you take a lower stretch one where you haven't stretched it so much and you take the core out of that and you just basically copy and paste it on top and blend it in and you can get rid of this blown out core that way so again just as you're going as you're stretching save one of those ones where you have a lower stretch and then later on in the process once you get to this step just take that one of those lower stretches and paste it in here and blend it in a little bit and it'll look a lot better alright next up we have Jim Jim sent me this photo of the Elephant Trunk Nebula it was done with an Altair tri-band filter an 80 millimeter telescope and a stock Nikon DSLR all on a lightweight tracking mount and Jim also sent me his stacked TIFF straight from DSS so I took a stab at processing it and I thought it might just be useful to talk about the differences here between my edit and Jim's edit just to show some different choices and how they affect the final picture so first of all this is really great data I had a lot of fun processing it one thing that I tried to do since Jim mentioned he was using a tri-band filter when stretching it was to bring out some of the O3 signal so generally H-alpha is the red part of the signal and O3 is the more blue part so I tried to sort of find some of that blue in the picture if it was there and bring it out and so after I stretched it a pretty aggressive stretch I made a starless image and then played around a little bit with the color balance to try to bring out that blue I don't know how much of it is actual signal but I think some of it is because I've shot this object before and what I remember is there is more blue right around the elephant trunk and behind it than in the upper part of the big nebula so I think that there is some actual signal here after stretching and removing the stars making it nice and moody like this to my taste I think what I did was I applied some selective darkening around the edge here because there wasn't really anything out past the nebula that was interesting at least in the starless layer so I just sort of selectively with a mask just went around and darkened that part and then I added back in the stars when I did that I noticed that this part of the picture down here was a little bit too bright and needed a little bit more contrast added to it so what I did here was in this layer I just did a little bit of dodging and burning which isn't really a technique I've shown much before but this goes back to sort of like a dark room technique there's a dodge and burn tool right here in Photoshop and it's been in there from the very beginning of Photoshop basically all it does is it's like just selectively darkening or brightening parts of the picture and you can choose to highlight you can choose to burn or dodge the shadows, midtones and highlights and you can set how much you want to burn or dodge they used to do this with chemicals but now you can just do it digitally so anyways from here to there I just burned the midtones a little bit to bring them down and to sort of balance out the picture and then I thought it was a little bit too moody, a little bit too dark so then I just added a curves to bring out the nebula and darken the background a little bit and then this final layer I think I just applied a little bit of noise reduction I probably could have gone a little bit more on the noise reduction because it's still a bit noisy but generally I don't do a lot of noise reduction because I think that it often obscures detail. This is something I just want to talk about a little bit in comparing it to Jim's processing here is that both through choices and stretching so you know how much contrast you're applying but also how much noise reduction you're applying that's where it's it's very easy to start losing some detail in the image so if we compare this to this you can see that there's actually a lot of structure here that we sort of lose in this one mostly due to the blurring effect of noise reduction so you always have to just be really careful when applying it I know some people like that really sort of smooth look and honestly the only way to really accurately get that smooth look is to get to a really dark side and just get lots of hours of integration because trying to do it in post processing is never really going to be the answer I should say here that this is all my personal preferences so some people may like to make that choice they might like to lose detail to get a smoother picture but I'd rather have more detail see more of the nebula and more of these dark structures throughout the frame but have a noisier picture Joe has only been doing astrophotography for one month but already has a really nice picture here of the heart nebula and I have to say this is a lot better than I was after one month with similar gear Joe took this with a modified Canon T3i a 300mm lens telephoto lens and a star tracker and the only thing that confused me a little bit about this photo when I took a look at the TIF is that the data was shot with one of those dual narrowband filters because there wasn't much color information other than red and a little bit of blue and white which is typical with those kinds of dual narrowband filters but Joe hadn't mentioned using one but I still suspect that is what's going on here because otherwise I'd expect to see a little bit more of the other colors in the data I'm not going to show my processing because honestly it's not any better than Joe's and I don't really have anything to say about it you know this is about as much that could be brought out given the limitations of the noise level in the picture and there also seemed to maybe be like a flats issue because there were some interesting hot spots and things that Joe seemed to clean up here but in any case it's a really nice picture of the heart nebula and very impressive that Joe's only been at this for one month and already has come up with this OK, Jumper sent me this photo of the Andromeda Galaxy Jumper only stacked 15 photos with a Nikon DSLR and lens Jumper was using a 70-300mm zoom lens and used it at 300mm focal length f5.6 with 2 second exposures Jumper mentioned they had trouble with stacking in Deep Sky Stacker which is the part of the reason they only used 15 and ended up stacking in Photoshop rather than Deep Sky Stacker and so right away when I saw 300mm 2 seconds for untracked I knew that was too long because I recently shot Andromeda and at 200mm using the NPF rule the longest I could expose for was 1 second on a similar crop sensor DSLR and so knowing that that is a little bit too long what we can expect to see is that instead of the stars being round they will turn into little lines and then that is exactly what we see see how all the stars are little lines going up like this the reason this one isn't is this isn't actually a star this is a satellite galaxy right there but all the stars which are pinpoint sources are all these little straight lines so the reason this wouldn't stack in Deep Sky Stacker is because when Deep Sky Stacker is trying to stack it is looking for these little round objects so when it instead finds lines it has no idea that those are stars and so then what it will do is it will try to match on hot pixels and noise and things that aren't stars and you will never be able to stack your photos so this is why if shooting a contract I really recommend if you want to stack your photos to use the NPF rule rather than like the rule of 500 or anything else because sometimes this is hard to see just on the back of the DSLR so it's better just to use a rule for figuring out exposure and if you don't use the rule then you're not going to be able to stack your photos and then you can't calibrate you can't do all the other things that comes with Deep Sky Stacker and you're just happy with the results so my advice with this photo is to start again try using the NPF rule 300mm f5.6 is a difficult starting place for untracked so I would recommend since it's a zoom lens going down to 135mm at f4.5 maybe shooting in Dramada and then everything will be much better use the NPF rule shoot at 135mm and take then at least 500 shots with the calibration frames and try all of that before buying anything new Jumper I think mentioned looking at different kinds of gear but I'd keep that untracked but trying it again with a little better technique and see what you get. Okay, next up we have Juul Juul sent me a photo of Dramada done at 300mm f5.6 just like the last one we saw from a very light polluted area they say and Juul wondered if I might be able to bring out more of the outer arms of the galaxy they did send the TIFF file and I think just looking at the JPEG this was again because it was shot at 300mm I'm not sure what this exposure time was but it was shot like a little bit too long not quite as bad as the last one but you can see that the stars are starting to streak but I guess it did register because they were able to send me a stacked TIFF file and there is some nice star color in here even though it was shot from a heavily light polluted area I did try processing it and here's what I could bring out and so you can see compared to this I was able to bring out a lot more of the galaxy but because it's heavy light pollution that comes at the cost of heavy noise so when you bring up very dim signal you're also bringing up whatever the light pollution brought which is really a noisy kind of signal that you don't really want you're trying to subtract but then the noise is still there because the sky, the light pollution signal of the galaxy are mingled together so it's hard to remove one without just ending up with a much noisier picture so it's really usually this is the trade-off you can bring it up but if you're under heavy light pollution bringing up the signal is also going to bring up the noise okay here's something a little different Kelsey sent me this nicely framed shot of the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae Canon 60D on an Alt-As mount so that's cool but an Alt-As mount is usually used for visual because it's you don't have to align it to Polaris since it's easier to set up and get going the reason it's not as good as sometimes an equatorial mount for astrophotography is because you're limited to shorter exposures due to something called field rotation but Kelsey obviously has it working well for this shot so my main suggestion here is to be careful with a little bit of over-processing there's obviously a star reduction going on here which I think was went a little bit too far because all the stars became a little bit too uniformly small so it looks a little bit odd and then I think that noise reduction or sharpening which often go hand in hand was also a little bit overdone and the reason I say that is if we zoom in see some of these some of this sort of like blockiness and sort of weird stuff going on here that's usually from over use of noise reduction, star reduction or sharpening tools. So you just have to be careful with them. I always zoom in and pay careful attention to what it's actually doing to the structure of the nebula and so Kelsey did send me the unstretched TIF and so I can show you what I did with the same data. There's my edit so you can see I kept the the stars and the Milky Way field more present in my edit. I also didn't do my usual star net deal here just because it didn't really need it. I think this was done from a nice, you know, condition the starting point. So all I really did was I started with a stretch and then I just added some different curves and saturation and color balance until I liked how it looked and I did a little bit more of a crop just because I thought that the interesting part of the field were the two nebulae. The last thing I would maybe do here just because I'm used to seeing them this way in the night sky is just turn this 90 degrees like that you know this is a really just a personal preference thing but both because I'm used to seeing them that way it feels more natural but I also think that it feels more natural that way just because I don't know something about the frame when I see a frame and you have something interesting in the top right corner I always feel like that looks better than having the interesting bit in the top left corner I don't know why I know we read left to right so maybe it's something about your eyes scan across the picture and then where they go to rest is the right side of the frame at least that's how my sort of scan works so when I look across the picture and then this is where I end up and to me the triphid is what came out well the Lagoonan triphid but the triphid is really the most interesting part of this picture because it has the blue and the red and so that's sort of where I would put the most interesting feature in the photo is that upper right okay Ken sent me a photo of Andromeda done with a Celestron C.H. Schmidt Casagrain telescope and a Canon R.A. mirrorless camera he's shooting from a Bordel 8 location so that's like a city sky and I have to say I think this came out really good considering those conditions you know using an an F-10 telescope sort of a slower telescope from heavy light pollution is difficult and so I think this considering those conditions is really really nice I can tell that the way that Ken processed it he kept it low noise by not doing a huge stretch and then by not doing a huge stretch you also get all the benefit of all the core detail if you zoom in so I actually think that this look is quite good it's just it's not how I would usually process a picture but for some people keeping it more realistic more detailed by not stretching as much is often a good choice but Ken did ask about is there a way to bring out more color in this image because it almost looks black and white this is Photoshop that he sent me he tried bringing up the color and maybe he just didn't like the colors that he saw or I'm not sure why he went back to this one but I tried and you know through the process that I show in my Andromeda video where you remove the stars and then really just boost up the colors with you're not also boosting the colors in the sky background I was able to get this which I think looks okay it's definitely more punchy than this image or this processing but by making it more punchy you do lose a little bit of core detail like I can see dust lanes all the way into the galactic center in this image which of course get blown out in this image but then by adding this more contrast I'm also able to see more detail so it's a tradeoff to me this even zoomed in is not even though this is a much heavier stretch the noise is still acceptable to me so I think it looks okay and so the way that I got more color into the image is just heavier processing using masks, using star net all that kind of stuff okay, Madi sent me an Andromeda shot with a DSLR and zoom lens processed with free software packages serial and the GNU image manipulation program and I'd say this is nicely processed especially considering this is only 115 light frames at 2 seconds each this is about a total of 3.5 minutes integration and this just I really don't see anything in processing that I would change necessarily it's really just in acquisition my suggestion is for untracked try to get about 10 minutes so that would mean about 3 times as many light frames as you did here then you can just go a bit further when you have more control over bringing down the noise through adding more integration then you can do a little bit more in the processing often noise is what's keeping people back from reaching a new level of detail or color or whatever it is alright, next up we have Monkirat sent me this photo of the Veil Nebula complex done with a DSLR and lens on a tracker and this is a very difficult object in my opinion to do with a DSLR so I'm impressed by this Monkirat mentioned using star reduction and that's my main suggestion here is the star reduction it worked more in the areas that are just sort of like empty sky and then didn't really work in the areas around the Nebulae you can sort of see like all of a sudden right there and here in the Fleming Pickering Triangle and down here in the Eastern Veil you suddenly have many more stars than you have in other parts of the picture so star reduction is really tricky I don't really use it anymore for that reason instead what I do which I've mentioned a number of times here is I use StarNet++ to remove the stars boost the Nebulae and the stars back in is a screen layer or sometimes a lighten layer and I think that what you'll find that way is you can really fine-tune the star's appearance and their emphasis on the picture and so you keep all the stars all the stars look more natural and you don't run into this sort of weird look of the way that the stars are getting here because I think that you captured the Nebulae really well it's just the stars that are giving me pause the other thing I'd say is this is pushed maybe just a little bit too far for the actual data that you have just because I can see a lot of noise even zoomed out so the way that I sort of treat noise is you know present the photo how you want it presented like zoomed out so you see the whole thing and if the noise is still really visible then maybe you've pushed the image a little bit too far I'm not someone who goes all the way into 100% and if you see any noise thinks that it's a too noisy an image I look at it more holistically but here I can still see some streaks of noise even zoomed out so I think it's a little bit pushed Manu B sent me a photo of Andromeda done untracked with a DSLR and lens from moderate light pollution this is 200 light frames at f2.8 ISO 3200 Manu B was wondering about the quality of the data given the settings and the conditions and I think considering the light pollution moderate like said orange yellow zone and the fact that this is only 200 light frames untracked this is really good it's well processed there seems to be like a little bit you could do maybe more with the processing just I noticed that down here the sky is quite dark and then here there seems to be a hot spot so let me just show you a really quick way to fix that if you grab the burn tool this tool down here and then just set it to the shadows and set the exposure thing to something you know pretty low like under 10% to start and then just do a big soft brush and then just you know click a few times in here this is only this isn't going to affect the stars because the stars are highlights but you can really you know balance out a picture this way if you see something that's just sort of like a weird hot spot in your picture just take a burn brush and set it to shadows and then you can sort of balance it out so I'll show you before and after here so this is before you can see there's a big bright hot spot there and then this is after I burned it to bring down those values overall I think that the background is maybe a little bit too dark but because you know it's not too dark right around the galaxy I don't find it too offensive so yeah I think it's working pretty well you got some nice color okay Martin sent me a photo of the elephant trunk nebula 1396 and this is a sort of difficult object because it's very H.A. dominated but you see pictures of it where it's been done in Hubble palette or something where you see these bright blues so then you think oh I can do that with the DSLR but it's actually really difficult because those oxygen signals are really really dim but Martin was doing this with the enhance filter and so you know there I do see some color variety in here you know the elephant trunk itself is sort of popping out against a dimmer blue background though the one thing that immediately jumped out to me is that I prefer this object flipped 180 I know there's no up in space but I don't know I just I like how it looks better with this with the elephant trunk going up rather than down like it is here Martin did send me the unstretched tiff and I did process it so let's just see what I did versus Martin's processing here so here's my processing one thing I did was I did a brighter look because there actually was just so much detail in this picture that I wanted to try to bring out and so to bring out that level of detail especially all these dark nebulae I had to make the whole picture quite a bit brighter and then the other thing I did was I tried to maximize the amount of color information in the picture while Martin's edit is a little bit more two-tone so red and blue while I tried to get a little bit more of like the transition from blues to red or you know and mine's a little bit warmer too you know if you if you decided later oh I don't really like this warmer look I want a cooler look because this was shot with an L enhance there there isn't much color information in the stars so that actually gives you a little bit more creativity because you don't have to worry about getting the star color wrong if you change your mind about you know the color you can just add a color balance adjustment layer here and say you know I want to make the whole picture a little bit cooler look something like that here's before after and that works fine because you know there isn't much information in the stars the one thing that I would I am noticing about my edit here that I would fix is that this the when I did that color balance layer it really highlighted to me that I didn't neutralize the sky background color I prefer a more neutral you know dark gray or black sky background not this sort of mix of colors so I would probably mask that and neutralize it a little bit but anyways to to do this more colorful look where I feel that the nebulae is a little bit less processed and it just sort of flows from one color to the other I end up with a noisier image so if I zoom in here on on martins you can see that there is less noise in his edit but there's also obvious processing artifacts to me so you can see how in his edit the nebulosity this red nebulosity gets really broken up here and it looks sort of artificial while in mine even though it's noisier it doesn't have that look it looks more just like a grainy film photo but there's actually more real detail while in this one it gets a little bit broken up from being a bit over processed I think it takes a while to understand to actually see that difference and I don't know if it's even going to come across in the video the other thing I'd say which I think I've said before in this video is that my rule of thumb for noise reduction is I like to look at the whole picture in context and if it looks okay like that which I think this picture does then I don't see the point in applying more noise reduction what would happen is when you zoom in you might notice noise reduction artifacts and so I'd rather have a noisier image but one that has more detail than one that is more broken up because of the noise reduction when you actually zoom in on it ok, Maurizio sent me a wide angle photo done with a Canon 2000D and kit lens at 18mm focal length centered on the constellation Perseus and Maurizio mentioned not finishing the processing here because of issues with deep sky stacker not recognizing the files and the top corners looking weird and smudged and he was wondering if I thought it was an issue with the flats correction being off so I can't tell too much from the JPEG here I did send the unstretched TIF so I just did a quick stretch of that this is literally just a stretch to see it and the first thing that really pops out and I think the biggest issue here is that something went wrong in pre-processing I don't know if you ended up using deep sky stacker but whatever you use to pre-process this image what's called the Bayer algorithm picked the wrong Bayer pattern so it must have been an issue with it not recognizing the files and I'm not sure what you did to make it recognize them but what ended up happening was it didn't know how to debayer the image and then that's why it looks so odd it looks just sort of like all magenta and green when you should have more natural color here what I recommend and this is for anyone I get this question a lot is if you have a newer camera with a file format that doesn't work in deep sky stacker or whatever program you're using download a free adobe program called Adobe DNG Converter and you use it's a batch program so you can load up all your raw files into it and convert them into DNG format and you get all the same benefits of raw so it doesn't do anything bad to your photos but now you can use them in anything deep sky stacker will understand your files even though you've shot them with a much newer camera that the files aren't supported yet if you convert them to DNG it's perfect it will work it will work alright if you're still having this issue with the colors even after you've converted to DNG make sure that all your settings in deep sky stacker are the default and if you see some kind of setting that says like Bayer pattern type the Bayer pattern for the 2000D is RGGB RGGB if it's for some reason set to something else then you would get a weird effect like this but the other question was do I have a flats issue because the corners look weird it looks like you do because the corners shouldn't be brighter like this so the reason that you'll get corners that are brighter after you apply flats is if the flats are over correcting and usually the reason for that is you shot the flats too bright so just remember you don't need to go any further than normal midway exposure like normal or meter just put it at zero and so yeah usually the reason you get brighter corners like this is if the flats have over corrected the image the other thing that you mentioned was the edges of the picture being smudged and what's going on there is see this this is actually the lens so it's nothing you can do this is really common with kit lenses is you'll have really nice good sharp performance in the middle of the picture I think that's the double cluster right there but you'll have nice sharp performance in the middle of the picture all these stars look really good but then out towards the edge in the corners it gets really bad and smudgy and blurry and the stars start to look like little comets and that's just what a kit lens or a cheaper lens will do so the way around it is just pick an object, center it up and then just crop to the middle of your frame you don't include that part in the final picture if it looks bad let's see anything else I wanted to mention here no other than that I think you have a nice start here it's just maybe using Adobe DNG converter making sure your Bayer pattern is set correctly and then just crop into whatever you want to shoot put it in the center of the frame and then in your processing you can just crop away the weird corners and then honestly you don't even have to worry that much about the flats being weird because if I just cropped this picture into the middle then the edge stuff wouldn't even matter ok, Michael is looking for a straight critique of his Andromeda image done with a Nikon DSLR and a zoom lens of 3.8 from a Bordel 6 area so I think that this is nicely done in terms of capture and the detail looks good the main things that I noticed for a critique is that the color balance of this image looks strange to me it looks sort of brown and too much yellow so like if I literally just take a color balance layer and apply like a ton of blue to it that already looks somewhat better especially in the galaxy a little bit but of course because this is a JPEG we're by doing that I'm just immediately losing detail but if you did that to the TIF I think it would look a lot better but don't do that until you first fix your gradient here and so I have in a number of videos I show how to fix light pollution gradients in Photoshop basically you make a copy of this use dust and scratches filter to remove everything but the sky background and then you apply image and you subtract that sky background model from the image and you can get a much more even background and then the rest of the processing will be easier after that so do that look at my like a Ryan videos for how to do that and then yeah just work on the color making it a little less yellowish brown and I think it'll look a lot better after that he sent me a Milky Way photo shot with a Canon full frame camera and a Sigma 14mm lens and Michael mentioned wanting to find a balance with how far he pushed this image in post but generally leans more towards the stylized look which is fine I think that's great that you recognize that you know I think the first step in getting better at processing is sort of just recognizing what you're doing and not just blindly going at it like Michael obviously knows this is a more stylized look for the Milky Way which I totally agree with this is pretty stylized and so if that's your look then and you're happy with it then you can just go forward with that for me this level of saturation is fine but I wouldn't have gone so far with the contrast so what I mean by that is the brightest parts of the picture are too bright and the darkest parts of the picture are too dark for my taste and so if you went less with the contrast I think that you would then see a lot more detail actually especially as you get out to like these parts of the picture there's like especially right there that's the row Ophiuki area of the Milky Way and if you brightened the sky you would actually see more detail there because the dark Nebula lanes going out here would pop more so by adding this much contrast you're actually losing some detail okay Miguel sent me this narrow band image of the Veil Nebula shot with some nice gear including a ZWO mono dedicated camera Astronomic filters a Skywatcher Esprit 120 and a Skywatcher EQ6R mount and so I think this looks to be a straight SHO mix where you assign hydrogen alpha to green and then an oxygen to blue and sulfur to red is my guess here but then what you end up getting usually is a pretty green dominant image and some don't like that look I'm fine with it if you do want to go to a more like golden show look what you do is you just apply a not that one you apply a selective color adjustment and then you can take your greens and remove some of the cyan and take your scions and remove some of the yellow then take your yellows and remove some of the scions and that's just sort of a start on a JPEG but you get the idea I've just gone from sort of a green golden look and if I kept going with this like adding more magentas to the yellows you can I think sometimes playing around with selective color get a little bit more color variety into your image so see here it's sort of just dominated by green but even playing on a JPEG I get a little bit more variety by playing around with those sliders so it's worth a shot if you're interested the other thing I'd say about this image is that it looks to be a little bit over sharpened or since Miguel mentioned processing and picks insight my guess is that he used a process called LHE which stands for local histogram equalization and to my mind that's a very dangerous tool in extra processing to really use it one of the reasons I find it dangerous is because it's really easy to over do it so if you did use something like that or some kind of sharpening I would just recommend using whatever you did at like 30% strength compared to what you did here it just it looks a little bit overcooked for my taste I think you probably also used star reduction because and then you use star reduction with a mask that wasn't very good because I can see that the stars are a lot brighter in the nebula than they are outside of the nebula so again I've said this a number of times now what I recommend is if you're going to do stuff with stars use star nut plus plus workflow nowadays rather than just a straight star reduction because I find that people when they try to use star reduction there are ways to do it and be quite successful but most people don't quite get it quite right and this is an example where it's not quite right because the stars are much brighter in there than they are out here and so with star net I think that you have a much easier way of getting it of you know changing the appearance of the stars but it works better in my opinion with less artifacts now you might still have some artifacts after you do star net but I find them easier to clean up than something like this where you just have a different appearance of the stars in the nebula than outside of it I'm not sure how I would approach those kinds of artifacts compared to a star net artifact which you can usually just like if it's a weird halo or something you just can clone stamp it out so I hope that helps Miguel good job ok MiraSlaw sent me a photo of the Bodes and Cigar galaxies also known as M81 and M82 that they shot with a Newtonian telescope a Canon DSLR and a CLS filter from a yellow green zone the detail in this and the collimation for a Newtonian telescope looks spot on all the stars look good the sharpness level and the galaxy looks perfect to me so I think this processing is quite nice I don't really have any complaints about the processing and I like the framing too I'm not a fan of when astro imagers when they have a galaxy grouping like this just make it like straight across in the frame I'd always prefer placing them on a diagonal like MiraSlaw did here and this is my favorite kind of diagonal where the diagonal goes from the bottom left corner to the top right corner the one suggestion I have is I'm guessing the reason you shot with the CLS filter is to bring out this red outgassing on the cigar and some of the red nebulae in bodes and so that's cool I think that that really worked well but my issue with the CLS is it really hurt your color response otherwise especially in the cigar galaxy which should have a little bit more of a blueish tone I think in the central part here and also in the bodes which should I think be a little bit more blue than it is in the CLS I'm pretty sure even though it's mostly cutting out the green blueish green in galaxies is actually the green is part of that because galaxies are broadband so the CLS hurts the color on galaxies quite a bit and in the stars which are mostly just sort of a bit muted here so what I'd recommend especially since you're in a yellow green zone that light pollution is not too bad is you could shoot some exposures with the CLS and then do half without it and I think you'll be happy with how much more color you can color variety you can get into shots like this one alright Mustafa sent me this picture of the elephant trunk nebula or IC1396 it was shot with just a DSLR over four nights to get enough data which doesn't surprise me this is really hard nebula I've found with DSLR but Mustafa did a nice job here especially like how much the dark nebula pop and I like the framing too like it's like it's using you know I actually don't think that a lot of people would make this picture square just cropping out this part over here but I actually think that giving that little bit of breathing room over there and offsetting the elephant trunk a little bit from center actually makes this picture a lot more dynamic I think while the dark nebula look really good I think that in an effort to try to really bring out the color especially the O3 maybe you win a little bit overboard and it becomes a little bit just too much sort of two-toned like a really sort of solid red and a really solid blue but not much of an in-between and so I don't have the raw data on this one so I'm not sure how much I could have done differently but I just think that there's like a little bit of a chance for more of a transition color in here from the red to the blue and then I think that would also help maybe bring out the elephant trunk a little bit which down here looks quite good but up here just gets a little bit minimal because the blue is becoming so dominant okay Nadir sent me a couple photos I'm just going to sort of count this as one though because I have the same critique of both they're both technically quite good good star color good star shape and so when you have all the technical stuff done then you really have to think more about the planning and framing of your shot and so that's the focus of my critique here is I think that both of these could be improved with different framing which and the framing for a deep sky astrophoto starts with the planning phase which often for me at least you should be doing before you even get out onto the field and so then you sort of have a plan in place and you can execute it once you're actually outside so for the cocoon nebula here what I think would have been better is to get rid of some of not all but some of this empty space over here because to me this half the picture is pretty boring and I also don't really like pictures like this where the object is just perfectly centered but for no particular reason like it doesn't look like I don't know that there was this was given a lot of thought as to why this is just right in the center with not much around it except for this corner where you have all the interesting dark nebula okay let me clean this up so two things you could have done here one is just sort of move everything over because there's obviously more dark nebula over here so why not include more of it instead of just this empty star field over here the other thing you could do is just after the fact change the framing through cropping so I'm going to show you the crop I would do here so I think even just that even just switching it to vertical makes it stronger but then what I would do from there is I would make this a 4 by 5 and basically put the cocoon just a little bit off from this intersection and then get this part coming down into this third line right here like that and I think that's a much more interesting photo it sort of has this weird organic sort of tree like shape this way alright so that's a composition note this one the composition note is a little bit different because in this one I thought there was just too much empty space around the cocoon nebula so I cropped it down like that with this one I think that this is a really common thing to do with the veil is like try to just fit it into the frame like this but I never like that I think that it feels awkward to have such an important part of the picture right up against the edge here and here with just a big sort of empty space with not as much going on in the middle sometimes you can make the void you know interesting but in this case I just don't think it quite works because nothing sort of I just look into the middle and it's just it's a little bit boring and then when I look out under the edges those nebulatus feel like sort of uncomfortably close to the edge so what I probably would have done with this one is just not get this part of the veil if you're framing is this tight or if you wanted to you could have made it into a two panel mosaic and expand it out but let's say you wanted to do this in one shot what I would have done is probably gone this way with it and furthermore like that so you have more breathing room you get the full extent of the Fleming Pickering Triangle down here and then put this central feature that bright star on the witches broom like right along a central third line and it could just be a much more interesting full frame still full of nebulosity but just with a bit more breathing room instead of that sort of tight crop in on the complex alright that's hopefully that was helpful here again the technically I think these shots are really good alright Nick sent me this Milky Way photo and now what is incredible about this photo isn't the final image quality necessarily it's the fact that this was done on a cell phone a Google Pixel 2 with just the default camera and lens and that's amazing to me I've tried my hand a little bit at cell phone much photography I got this Huawei phone specifically because I wanted to try some stuff and I didn't get as far as this so this is really impressive Nick stacked together 500 shots to do this and then added the tree line from a single shot after to composite it in and the way that Nick got something that's good with a cell phone is practice so he sent me a collage on how he got better results by practicing with his Google Pixel and Nick also mentioned that he didn't want to spend a bunch of money on proper equipment because he gets bored with hobbies quickly but he wanted to try this and so I think that's an excellent point a lot of people already have smartphones so why not try astrophotography with them before deciding to buy a bunch of other things and so I think that's exactly the right attitude what I try to push on my channel is just start with what you have and nowadays I'm really excited that that might even be cell phones is you know you can start with a cell phone like this so good job Nick okay Niko not me but another Niko sent me two versions of Andromeda this one and this one and I actually like this one it's the blurred top and bottom that makes it sort of look like tilt shift a bit better just because I think it's quite a cool look and a lot of people were upset that a tilt shift Andromeda won the insight astronomer photographer of the year award thing but I thought it was really neat that guy who's another Niko I think a Nikolas maybe I can't remember what his full name is but he he shot it with an actual tilt shift 3D printed device that he made for his telescope but this you know this looks pretty convincing too Niko asked about the blown out core and his Andromeda shots and yeah that's definitely the first thing that I noticed especially in this one that could be improved and there's a pretty easy way to do that with Photoshop it's just that what you want to do is when you're stretching you know I when I showed stretching in my videos you're doing it iteratively so multiple stretches so all you do is at some point while you're stretching early on just pay attention to the core and as soon as it gets a little bit bright before it looks like this all blown out duplicate your layer and then keep stretching on that duplicated layer and then that layer with the lesser stretch you can just call that core and save it for later and then you would just keep processing your picture here and you would get all of this outer detail here and then you know all this stuff and when you're happy with this then you would take that layer that you saved that's the core details and just put it on top and make a layer mask so that only the core is showing and that will look probably pretty fake at first but then what you do is you just take a soft brush like the one I'm using here and on the layer mask you just you just brush in around here gradually until it's blended in with the picture below with this picture and so when you blend in that core eventually you can get to a look where it looks pretty seamless and so I call this sort of like the poor man's HDR effect where in traditional HDR you would actually take shorter exposures and mix those in to get that core detail but the truth is especially with untracked astrophotography you don't need to take the shorter exposures they have the shorter exposures so all you have to do is just use a lesser stretched version and blend it in with the version where you've stretched it more ok Nikola sent me this wide field shot of the constellation Cygnus Cygnus is my favorite constellation I have a tattoo of it here on my arm and so any photograph of Cygnus is a great photo in my book Nikola mentioned having trouble bringing out the nebula in such a busy star field yep that's always a problem with shots like these and if you've been watching this whole video you're probably going to guess my solution which is star net plus plus so you apply star net plus plus to a photo like this it removes all the stars and then you can pump up the nebula and the milky way here and then add the stars back in and just by doing that screen blend mode just by doing that you immediately will get a different balance between the nebula and the stars and the stars will be de-emphasized compared to the nebula for an idea of how to do that with a milky way like a wide angle milky way shot like this check out my lagoon and triphid start to finish and you get some ideas for what that process looks like alright Oscar is relatively new to astrophotography but already has a capable mount and telescope and this is the first photo he took that he really liked and I can see why it's nice and colorful and looks like the stars are nice and round, collimation looks good so everything technically looks good on this one and Oscar mentioned he uses pics insight so that's why I switched over to pics insight here and Oscar sent me the unstretched tiff file so let's just take a quick look at it here in pics insight you can just click this little radioactive button up here to apply the auto stretch which is just a temporary view of the data it's still actually not stretched yet so I can just turn that off and on with these buttons and the first thing we notice here is there's gradient, this part of the picture is brighter than this part we also have a typical color balance issue so I can fix both of those in one go with a process called automatic background extractor the way it works is you just tell it how much you want it to interpolate so I'm going to turn the function down to 2 and then I'm going to tell it to subtract the background and apply it and what it does is it creates a background model just like in Photoshop we would do this with dust and scratches filter in pics insight it's more automatic and it also does a better job there we go very clean background model looks just like that but without all the nebula and stars so I can throw that away I can throw this away and now we can look at what we have without the background nice so I can see that I'm guessing the reason Oscar made this part of the picture so dark is because there does seem to be an issue maybe with the flats correction here it looks too bright and there seems to be sort of like a circular vignette reverse vignette or something going on so one thing we could do is we could try to continue correcting that with background but this time I'm going to use the dynamic one which lets me just set some samples here so I'll just set a few samples out in the corners and I put one in the center here you don't want to hit nebulosity or stars when you're placing these and you don't want to place too many right I'm going to subtract the model here you can see that in the model let me put it in 24-bit mode we do get that sort of reverse vignette look so let's see how well it did on the picture not bad it probably improved it just a little bit I'm not going to process this any further but I just want to show you that there is a lot more data here to be had than this one and the trick isn't just not to use so much contrast when you're processing now Oscar's picture does have more of the trapezium details so what we could do to get those back is just do a sort of a lower stretch this is just the auto stretch and a higher stretch and combine the two together next up we have Paul Paul sent me this shot of the Orion constellation done with a Canon 600D and a Canon 50mm lens and the 50mm being the the nifty 50 which I've shown in some of my videos and Paul asked why his outer stars like the ones in the corners are more blurry than the ones in the center and unfortunately that just comes down to the lens and there isn't much you can do about it the Canon nifty 50 is really nice in that it's only $100 for a fast prime lens but low cost comes with the downsides of pretty wonky stars away from center I have the exact same thing happening with my shots I'll just show you let me zoom in here so you can see the stars in the center are pretty round and the halos around the stars are pretty uniform and then if we go out here more towards the corners the stars take on this sort of almost like cross like pattern well in any case they don't look as round anymore and that's not a tracking error that's just because oh here's a better example and this is what you will really see a lot they have to call it coma I'm not sure if that's really the right term but it's basically a difference to the star rather than a round look and it gets worse and worse the further you get out and out towards the very corner here you also get sort of like a blurring effect like it doesn't look sharp anymore and that's something you'll see in cheaper lenses too but you can either just crop that part of the picture out if it really bothers you or just accept that that's part of wide field astrophotography with lenses it just unless you get something like a sigma art which is over a thousand dollars you're going to see that in most lenses so the fact that the Canon Nifty 50 is only a hundred dollars and it has some of that but it's not terrible it's pretty normal it's a really good value still my only critique for this photo is there are two things I think it could use a little bit more saturation and I like to see it 180 degrees from this I'm just going to flip it 180 you know that just looks more natural to me because when I'm looking up at Orion here in the northern hemisphere it's either early on in the season it's like horizontal and then in the middle of the winter I've never seen it that way around I think maybe in the southern hemisphere they would but up here you see it this way and that's why it's Orion the Hunter with the sword this is the sword and this is the belt so if you haven't flipped 180 then the sword would be above the belt which doesn't quite work anyways good job Paul this is a good picture with the Canon Nifty 50 okay next up we have Paul M. Paul sent me this photo of the Andromeda Galaxy and Paul described in his email going from shooting with just a tripod to shooting with a small star tracker and all the difficulties involved with making that jump and this is something I'm going to be talking about more in future videos definitely probably even in my next video the advantage to adding tracking is of course longer exposures meaning fewer exposures to stack and lower noise because you're getting more signal not actually lower noise but a better signal to noise ratio because you're getting more signal so the ratio of signal to noise goes way way up when you have longer exposures the disadvantages are the complexity of learning and mastering things that go along with a tracking mount like polar alignment, balance even pointing the camera where it needs to go is harder on a tracker than it would be just on a tripod so people have been in the hobby a long time often forget how difficult these things are when they were just starting out they do get easier but it takes a long time I think to get to master those topics so this is definitely something I want to spend more time on in future videos for people that have bought trackers like Paul so thanks for sending this in my only suggestions my only suggestion is that I think the whole image could be a little bit brighter and when you make the whole image brighter you could work on making the outer arms of the galaxy have that sort of blueish tone that they have this is just a JPEG so I can't really show exactly what it would look like but even if I just do a curve like that I think that's an improvement there's before there's after so again I tell people this all time but don't worry about your sky background being perfectly black it really doesn't have to be you can raise up the whole level of the picture and see a lot more okay Paul N sent me a photo of the Orion and Running Man Nebulae shot with a William Optics red cat telescope which is a nice compact little refractor done on a sky watcher star adventurer, star tracker and a Nikon DSLR and Paul also sent me an unstretched TIFF file so we'll look at what I did to that in a second but just looking at this my first guess is that there is actually a lot more detail in this photo in the dark parts that Paul processing it clip to black just maybe didn't realize that some of what was there was actual signal because when you're new to the hobby a lot of times you can't tell is this dust or is this noise that kind of thing but in Orion there's a lot of dust around the Orion and Running Man Nebulae so if you like the look you can bring it out even if I just stretch the JPEG a bit you can see that there is more there but by processing a 16 bit TIFF I can probably bring out a lot more so let's take a look and the one other thing I'll say before we jump over to it is that I understand a lot of times this is a balancing act you might actually have on purpose clipped the sky to that black to get rid of the dust because you don't have enough integration to make the dust look good so if you're someone who really doesn't like having a lot of noise in their pictures a lot of times the way to handle noise is just don't stretch it as far I'm someone who probably stretches everything maybe too much according to some a lot because I like to see as much detail as I can in my photos so that's my that's what I did with Paul and his photo here is I tried to maximize the amount of actual detail I could bring out by bringing out all of this brown dust around Orion and the Running Man but I also didn't crop as much so by doing that I got this little bit of Barnard's loop down here in the corner too which I think is sort of interesting I don't know it might be distracting just to have that little bit of red down there so I might crop it away too but really all I was just trying to show is how much more detail is in the dust and let's look at the noise level yeah it's pretty noisy if you zoom in but if you zoom back out I think it looks pretty cool so if I was doing like an edit for Instagram or something where people are going to be viewing this on their phone to me at full frame this is a lot more interesting than this if I was doing an edit where I wanted to crop in more then yeah this noise is probably too much to do much cropping but it reveals a lot more like here's NGC 1999 and there's just a lot of cool stuff I always love this little finger of dust down here right below Orion and I like the bridge of stuff going on in between the Running Man and Orion one other thing is I didn't pay much attention in this edit to controlling the trapezium the core of the Ryan Nebula so there are definitely ways to bring that back in with a technique of doing a lower stretch and then adding it back into your final edit so that detail could definitely be recovered but this is just to show you what's lurking in the background so Paul W sent me this photo of the North America and Pelican Nebulae in Cygnus it was shot with a Sony mirrorless camera and lens on a neat wind-up mechanical Star Tracker the Omagon Minitrack LX3 I have one of these and I have yet to use it but I really want to it's good for like with this you probably wouldn't even want to put a telephoto lens on it because it's not that accurate for tracking but with a nice wide-angle lens it works really I think it works really well as you can see here it works well Paul didn't end up using calibration frames and stacked in sequater followed by adjustments in Photoshop Paul was wondering about a better workflow I'm sure sequater does a fine job at stacking so really my only suggestion for a better workflow would be to use calibration frames because I think they do help it's sometimes hard to see how they help until you get pretty far into the edit and then you realize oh I'm seeing some weird stuff here maybe if I'd use flats it wouldn't be there and a lot of times that's true you start aggressively stretching something and you see hot pixels and darks would have taken care of those or things like that so it's maybe not immediately evident what calibration frames do but in the end I think they do help a lot and I'm not I haven't used sequater yet even though it's on my list but I don't know if it uses calibration frames or not I know that it does a good job with stacking wide field stuff though other than that I feel like it looks like a little bit dark in the corners I mean I know this corner the bottom right hand corner actually is dark because there's a big bunch of dark nebulae there I'm not sure about this corner it looks a little bit too dark maybe and I think that it's a little bit too high contrast so if you just didn't make the darks as dark and make the brights as bright it would look a little bit better it looks like just based on this photoshop layers that you didn't try starless so that's another thing you could try to make the nebulae pop a little bit is try star net plus plus to bring down the emphasis of the star field so that's a few things but otherwise I think it looks really good and is a good example of what you can do with that mechanical star tracker okay next up we have Petter Petter sent me a photo of the western veil and Fleming Pickering triangle and my first thought about this is that the nebulosity looks really good you can see a lot of detail and all the little strands of the veil maybe just the color balance could be improved a little bit it looks like overall just a little bit too of a cyan for me let me just see if I just take a color balance layer and move it a little bit away from the cyan if you did something like that just taking away a bit of cyan and the overall color balance but then balanced out the black point which you could do with just a curve let me just try it there we go yeah I think I like that better let me see it's before after it just feels like a little bit more naturalistic to me that feels like a little bit just too much green cyan color okay Captain Peter sent me a photo of the Milky Way done at 28mm focal length and Peter mentioned having trouble with focusing the bottom of mask was useless at 28mm and yeah I agree I find bottom of masks even when I design them on a 3D printer pretty much useless at anything under 40mm and what I mean by that is that it's just really hard once you get below 40mm focal length to see the pattern anymore even on bright stars so what you end up doing is having to take long test exposures and even then it's not perfect and then you have to sort of guess which direction to go in and then take another test exposure it just takes a really long time so what I typically do with wide field is I've just gotten good at knowing what the star looks like when it gets to that smallest point now the hard thing with lenses is because of chromatic aberration a lot of times when you actually get the star in focus there's a red ring around it so just be aware of that there's all kinds of weird things with focusing lenses on stars so it is a difficult topic anyways the focus here looks good so whatever captain Peter did I think worked I think my suggestion is all just about the processing here and I think that this looks almost unprocessed what I mean by that is so dark that it looks like I can just see the brightest stars when I should be seeing more of the Milky Way but I can see when I zoom in that you did capture some nice nebulae here like the lagoon and triphid and things like that and the omega and the eagle but I just can barely see them because the picture is too dark so just stretch it more just keep going with the stretches until you see more of the picture and don't be so worried about the black level until the end because if you add in too much contrast and try to make it too dark right away then you sort of you'll never reveal stuff later on and since captain Peter just sent me a a jpeg I can't I'm not going to be able to raise that black level because it's already clipped to black so I can't do much with it but I really am guessing that there actually is a lot more in the raw data to bring out okay Phil sent me a photo of Andromeda done with a Celestron next star Newtonian telescope on an alt as motorized mount with a Sony full frame mirrorless camera and Phil shot 20 second exposures to do this and then stacked a bunch of them together and the longer exposure length than we would have untracked is due to the tracking of Phil's alt as mount but then the reason to limit it to 20 seconds is because with an alt as well you can't go much longer than that due to field rotation so even in a single shot you'll start seeing that the center would be you have circular round stars but then in the corners you'd start seeing field rotation and it depends on focal length and a bunch of different factors but it's a reason that with an alt as mount you have to limit yourself to sub exposures or lights that are usually well under a minute but you can still get beautiful results as Phil demonstrated here in a lot more detail than you could get without a tracking mount because you can put a telescope on an alt as mount of course Phil asked about the quality of the stars in the corners and I'm guessing this was shot without a coma corrector because the stars look really nice in the center but then away from center so the fact that the stars look really nice in the center suggests that the tracking was all great but away from center we get these sort of comet shaped stars and notice that they're all going away from the center so they're not all going in the same direction they're all sort of pointed in towards the center so each corner is different but pretty similar in that they're all pointing in towards the center of the frame and that suggests coma and the way to fix it is what's called a coma corrector that is specifically for reflectors so you just add this little two elements or three elements or sometimes four elements of glass in a little basically it's just a little extra lens that you put into your focuser and then you attach your camera to that and that's supposed to fix the coma on the edges of the frame in this shot unless I zoom in it doesn't bother me but it is something that you can fix with this extra little thing the one downside to a coma corrector is a lot of times they are just as expensive as the Newtonian telescope itself because Newtonians are pretty simple telescopes so they're cheap to make and build you can usually get them for well under $500 but then the coma corrector is often three to $500 so they're not cheap anyways in terms of a suggestion for this processing in terms of detail looks really good my only suggestion is the color there's like a weird color shift from this corner up to this corner so down here you have a lot of green and then a blue that I actually really like right there that looks like a very natural blue for Andromeda and then up here you have so much red that the blue has turned more into like a purple and so that shift from green to magenta or green to red is what I find a little distracting so let me show you how you could fix that pretty easily here in Photoshop so I'm going to start by trying to fix this color cast up here and so let me show you how I would fix that I would move towards green so away from magenta towards green and a bit away from yellow towards blue and we get this so there's before, there's after and then we still have too much green down here so I would add another color balance layer to try to correct that and now this main part of the galaxy is looking pretty good but we still just have a little bit too much green in the very very bottom corner so then I would just add one more to take care of that so here's before and here's after and see how it just gets rid of this like a little annoying distracting part in that corner and the whole thing feels more cohesive and I should mention with each of these color balance layers that I did I'm using a mask just a gradient mask to control which part of the picture I want it to apply to so all you do is you just you make a color balance adjustment layer you grab your gradient tool and you draw the gradient right on the layer mask so that it applies only to the part that you want okay but next up we have Prometheus who sent me a photo of the Lagoon Nebula shot with a Nikon DSLR and a lens at 500mm focal length f5.6 untracked and this is just 14 lights at one second each but with calibration files and let's take a look so I rather like this shot even though I think it could be improved you can definitely get a lot more nebulosity by taking more lights, more than just 14 at one second each which just makes it a 14 second total integration but the reason I like this shot is that actually this reminds me of how the Lagoon and Trifid look through binoculars where all of a sudden when you look through visually at all when you look at the Lagoon visually you really see this cluster of stars right here and then you see some faint nebulosity in the core but not much else and I think that is cool that it really looks in this photo how it looks like visually but if you wanted to improve it as an astrophoto more generally and especially with the wider appearance here my suggestion would be to take more light frames so 14 is just way too few you know I go for so that's 14 second total integration with untracked I aim for a 10 minute integration but anything any increase is good because every 4 times increase in your total number of light frames or total integration time will roughly have the noise and by having the noise every time you can have the noise you can really bring out more signal and see more in the picture so going from 14 to even 100 lights would be a huge improvement in terms of the signal to noise ratio and then you could bring out a lot more interesting detail which right now is drowned out by the noise in the picture and I'd also play around with different focal lengths maybe lower focal lengths to get longer exposures because 500mm untracked is a bit extreme especially if at lower focal lengths you can use a wider aperture meaning a lower f number so lower than f 5.6 like f4 would be an improvement too okay next up we have Reg Reg sent me a photo of the Fleming Pickering Triangle which is part of the larger Veil Nebula complex and Reg noted that it's his first shot with a mono camera and considering that it looks really really good much better than my first attempt which was on the Jellyfish Nebula my one suggestion was to maybe just try something a little bit different with these reds to me they just look a little bit oversaturated which is maybe hurting detail just a little bit so for instance if the red in here let me zoom in a little bit if the reds in here were not this saturated background and so let me just see this is a JPEG so I'm not sure if this is going to work but let me just try backing off the saturation here maybe you can sort of see it would help if I had the actual file but then that way you also I think if you back off the saturation a bit we'll get this I always like it in the Veil the oxygen and the hydrogen are sort of overlapping and they turn white and I think that adds some interest too which it becomes more pronounced when you back off the saturation I can't really show it that well with just the JPEG but the idea is just to be careful with oversaturating reds because I think when you do that you can start to lose some of the the intricate shadow detail all right Ross sent me a photo of M78 this one right here the boogeyman nebula down here one of my favorites and part of Barnard's loop bisecting the two so this is of course a great framing when I've seen before but can't beat it for these two objects it looks so cool just to have like M78 boogeyman on the other and Barnard's bisecting the frame looks great Ross mentioned he was excited because this was the first time he used a new camera to him called the Altair Hypercam 26C based on a really powerful new 16-bit sensor that everyone's excited about Ross mentioned he didn't use calibration frames this time and so I think it would be better with calibration frames for instance I can see some issues so like right here see there's a dark spot let me try to bring it out a little bit with more contrast so see right there there's like a big spot that's darker than the surrounding area that's an example of something that could be corrected with flats because it looks like either a dust spot or maybe just a little smudge on the lens and there are a couple of those in the shot that could be corrected with flats I also think this picture could benefit from just a little bit of a reset to the black point just something like that but I think that's very monitor specific so it's hard sometimes to know what will look good on a phone versus a monitor but I think just like a little bit of a bringing in the black point just a tad something like that just makes it a little bit feel more like evened out other than that I love the colors it looks really good I think that of course with a little bit more integration it could be a bit less noisy but looks really looks like a really promising start ok next up we have Rossi and Marco I'm going to count this as two critiques since it's two people and they sent me two photos they shot M31 Andromeda Galaxy and M33 the Triangulum Galaxy are two closest galactic neighbors in the Magellanic Clouds and these were shot with a William Optics Redcat telescope a Nikon DSLR on a Skywatcher Star Adventurer with guiding auto guiding and controlled all through a ZWO ASI Air which is a small little Raspberry Pi computer that then you operate through Wi-Fi you can use a smart phone to operate it the processing on both of these is pretty good I especially like the Triangulum here that looks really nice on M31 I think it's just pushed a little bit too hard meaning too much contrast especially in the highlights it's just too bright so I would just I know this is a JPEG but I would just back off quite a bit to get more detail something more like that I think would look better the other thing I noticed is these both look really good at full frame I don't see any issues when I'm zoomed out and looking at the whole picture but when I zoom in I see that there's actually a pretty significant tracking issue here on both pictures and tracking issues well yeah they affect the look of the stars when you zoom in also blurring detail in your deep sky object so they're really something you do want to try to figure out and fix in this case I don't know what is the reason for the tracking issue because the more complex your setup gets the more that can go wrong and so it could be the guiding it could be the polar alignment it could be a number of things that didn't work out here so to diagnose it what you have to do is you have to go back to basics and get rid of everything and then just start step by step and see if you can figure out what is causing the tracking issue so could be polar alignment could be balance could be a lot of things so the way to do it methodically is get rid of the auto guiding setup first and just focus on getting a really really good polar alignment well I should say if one way to get a good polar alignment would be to use your auto guiding setup and something called sharp cap pro to do the polar alignment so in that case you might want to keep it on there for at least that step but then just don't turn on guiding so just try a really good polar alignment to try shorter exposures like 20 to 30 seconds and then just gradually step that up until you hit the limit with unguided and then just maybe just try unguided at 250 millimeters I think that with a sturdy tripod good balance the star adventurer should handle that just fine and in most cases I found you don't really need the super long exposures on something like a star adventurer so guiding often isn't strictly necessary but if you do figure out you know how to get good round stars unguided then you could try adding guiding back in and see if you can get that working but I would say when you're still having these star trailing issues keep it simple at first and then start adding in more components until you have everything figured out ok Russ sent me a single 8 second photo of the night sky the Milky Way shot with a Canon DSLR and lens and Russ was wondering about getting more depth into his shot and so typically when astrophotographers talk about depth they're referring to literally like how deep it is in terms of integration because the longer integration total integration you have usually you can see deeper signal and fainter signal so like little intricate details and nebulae often don't reveal themselves until you have a longer integration because you've brought down the noise so usually that's what I think of in terms of depth I'm not sure if that's what Russ meant but the only way to increase integration time without a tracking device is to shoot more exposures of the same thing and stack them together so that would be my first suggestion is just do exactly what you did here because you do have round stars it looks like and so you can just use these exact same settings but just take more pictures and then stack them together with a free program like sequader, deep sky stacker or serial and then you can follow one of my tutorials to do more with the picture and bring out more detail that you'll have because you've stacked more pictures together which brings down the noise alright hope that helps other than that I think it's cool I like the interesting framing with the trees I especially like that there's like this little extra tree up here which makes it feel more complete somehow okay Ryan sent me a photo of Andromeda done with a DSLR and lens on a star adventure star tracker and Ryan mentioned the stars are trailed due to polar alignment being off and let's check it out yeah a slight trailing there the reason you know this is trailing again is that the stars are going in the same they're trailing in the same direction which suggests it's not an optics issue but a star trailing issue they're all going sort of up and down in terms of the shape they're not quite lines yet these are sort of just on the edge between oval stars and lined trailed stars you know so I'd say polar alignment was a little bit off probably not too bad but definitely off and Ryan diagnosed this himself he said they're trailed due to polar alignment so thanks for sending in a good example of this now you might be wondering does it matter because like if we zoom back out I can't see it but it really is only if we zoom in that I can see that the stars are trailed the reason this matters beyond just the stars not being round is that anytime you're off in terms of tracking due to miss polar alignment or whatever it is then any detail in the photo is going to be smeared in that direction so actually in the deep sky object here even though we might not be able to tell the details in it are actually smeared in that exact same way that the star details are smeared so you don't get as quite a sharp as a photo because of that error so it's always good to try to track down these issues and fix them if you can okay Ryan sent me a photo of Andromeda done with camera and lens and was hoping to see my processing of the same photo to see what I could bring out so that sounds fun Ryan sent me the unstretched tiff and then I took a whack at it here's what I came up with you know just a slightly different crop than Ryan's for some reason this spoke to me having Andromeda a little bit out of center centered left to right a little bit out of center top to bottom not sure why basically what I did was I just did a stretch got this there's obviously a pretty normal sky gradient here where the bottom part of the picture is brighter than the top that's normal because city lights fade out as they get higher into the sky so you have a light dome to deal with I just did a standard background removal to get rid of that which you can do in Photoshop just by duplicating the picture applying a dust and scratches filter to blur it out so you just have the sky background and then subtracting it from the picture so I just did that and then I just did a curves adjustment to bring back down the black point and that's all I did looks pretty good so I think that compared to Ryans I got the galaxy to be a little bit more filled in if we compare the two there's mine there's Ryans but by stretching it a little bit more I could easily just stretch this one to get the same kind of effect by stretching it a little bit more you do bring up the noise level as well but I think in a wide field photo like this you're not going to be paying too much attention to detail it's more about seeing Andromeda Galaxy in this context of a huge star field which looks so cool so I would always present it more zoomed out like this and in that case the noise doesn't bother me Ryan W sent me a stacked untracked photo of Andromeda and Ryan felt it looked like there was some detail missing in the lower part in this part right here of the galaxy yeah it does look like that I'm not sure why that happened I will actually have a guess which is that the sky background here is very dark almost completely black let's check it out with the info panel yeah so there we go it looks like the sky is clipped to black and whenever you clip the sky background to black then you're going to run into this kind of issue where you will accidentally have taken away detail that you shouldn't have taken away because a lot of times with faint detail in a space photo it's just a little bit above the sky background and so you have to keep that sky background at a higher level well above the black point in order to not clip details accidentally and so that's probably what happened here it's easy to do even in just the stretches with levels if you've seen my tutorials to accidentally do that that's one reason I do like Pix Insights histogram transformation tool because it tells you how many pixels you're clipping numerically as you're moving those sliders around which is pretty handy okay Sanjay sent me a photo of the dumbbell nebula nice to get something a little different that's cool this was done with a sky watcher eq35 pro which is a mount I really want to try it's about I think it's about the same price as this Lestron AVX but I've been hearing that it might be better than that mount so something I want to try in the future under a thousand dollar equatorial mount but I think redesigned eq3 for imaging for people that are interested anyways this was shot with a 120mm focal length acromatic refractor and a Nikon DSLR my first thought about it is that it's a little bit dark and I'm not sure about the crop if that's how what I would pick but it's an interesting crop I like that it's different colors look good so probably I would just make it a little punchier a little brighter like that that might be enough that might be all I do but Sanjay did send me the unstretched TIF file so I did my own process on this so we can compare so there's my process looking at it now I might just take down the black level just a little bit let's see here yeah actually I like that better so one minor fix there but this is what I would suggest I like seeing planetary nebulae a little bit if you've captured a larger star field why not see it in the larger star field it looks sort of cool and then it sort of is a reminder that this is the death of a star just like all these other ones and I like the color that I've achieved here a little bit better than Sanjay's what I did was I wanted to really bring out the red here in the dumbbell so I did a little bit of work with hue saturation and curves to try to just bring it out a little bit with a mask just a simple mask like that on the dumbbell one thing I did notice when I was editing this is that it looked like there was an issue with maybe some of your lights and this I've seen before where it's like if some of your lights had looks like what happened was like the tripod got touched or someone was moving around it and the ground shifted a little bit and what happens is you have maybe just one or two lights the stars that are a little bit jumpy and they have this little doohickey I don't know what to call it this little thing and then if you include those in the stack they might show up like this so to get rid of that this little artifact on a bunch of stars on the bright stars you would just want to look through all of your pictures all your lights would be 40 stack and then it should get rid of that little artifact alright but anyways nice picture I'm pleasantly surprised by how cool this looks considering it's a echromatic refractor which are typically not recommended for astrophotography but I think I want to try one because this looks really nice typically the knock against them is that you have a little bit more of a halo on the blue stars but I actually think that that looks really cool in this picture it makes it unique it looks nice to me ok Surgey sent me a Milky Way photo from a light polluted area which you can tell from the photo this is 400 lights at 3 seconds each and Surgey asked if there is anything he can do about the light pollution mentions having just bought a tracker but hasn't had the chance to use it yet so this is sort of a bad news, good news the bad news is that Milky Way even with the tracker I find very difficult with heavy light pollution because so it's always going to be difficult I think the problem is that the Milky Way is really dim and diffuse and large and so you shoot it with a wide angle lens but when you shoot something with a wide angle lens then you're going to also be taking in this huge light pollution gradient and often where I'm located the Milky Way is low in the sky so you're always shooting into some kind of light pollution dome and then you just get this huge gradient and the problem isn't really the brightness of the light pollution it's more that gradients are really hard to deal with especially when you're trying to subtract them from this diffuse galaxy that's basically the same color in a lot of cases as the light pollution so near impossible to get to do better than you've done here even with the tracker now the good news is with your tracker you should be able to go use telephoto lenses and point more towards the zenith away from these light pollution domes and find deep sky objects that are away from the gradient and then you're going to get so much better results especially with that tracker so you could do like 30 second exposures on a galaxy or nebula and even with light pollution I think you'll be really happy with what you get when you stack those pictures together so keep it up sergi just save the Milky Way for when you can get to a darker site okay next up we have Sid Sid sent me a photo of Andromeda done with a Nikon DSLR and a lens at f6.3 300mm focal length on a sky watch or star adventurer taking 30 shots at 4 minutes each stacked and my first thought is that this is probably on the upper edge of what I'd expect from that tracker in particular I have that one and I wouldn't attempt 4 minutes at 300mm focal length that's probably pushing its tracking ability and so basically the rule of thumb is the higher you go in focal length on that kind of tracker the shorter you want your lights to be and so 4 minutes seems too long and I don't think really necessary like you could probably just do more 30 second shots or 1 minute shots and get the same or better results like typically when I'm on a tracker I do 30 seconds to 1 minute shots and at 200mm focal length or 135mm focal length and while each light frame will look dimmer than maybe what you're used to doing this I think that your end results will get a bit crisper I know that f6.3 is slow so maybe that's why you're attempted to do the longer light but if it's a zoom lens I would go to a lower focal length and maybe that will allow you to do a wider aperture and get a little crispier result because I see that these stars are a little bit eggy they're going I think mostly up and down sort of egg shaped there might have also been a slight focus issue but I think that it's mostly a tracking issue okay other than that I think the processing looks good obviously 34 minute shots means you had a lot more integration so you got a very clean looking result which and the other thing I should say I keep talking about contrast and to me the contrast here even though the sky is quite dark doesn't bother me because obviously that the integration was higher so with less noise to deal with you can actually push the contrast more I know there's a lot of advice I've been giving to say don't push the contrast don't push the contrast but one reason for that I think is because we've been dealing with shots that have other issues including noise and in that case pushing the contrast so hard to cover up the noise isn't the right choice but when you have a bit more to work with you can push the integrate you can push the contrast a little bit and get a and still have a nice result here okay Simon sent me this photo of the Milky Way with a foreground of trees and asked me specifically to talk about the composition and so I'd say it's decent it's interesting for me what really grounds the composition and basically saves it is this bright planet right here and because then it's sort of it gives it a balance basically I think of it as let me just grab my brush here so this gives it sort of this anchor point where I see sort of then a triangle shape like this because this down here is so bright and then of course we have the Milky Way which goes down there and then this gives us an anchor over on this side of the picture without that I think if this was gone I think it would look sort of weird but that that basically saves the composition I don't know how Simon achieved this bright look on the trees and my guess is that this is a composite where this was shot with moonlight or natural daylight and then put in with the Milky Way maybe from the same vantage point because it doesn't look like you could achieve quite this look just naturally but what I would recommend is to make these trees not so bright and make more of the Milky Way the star because right now they're sort of stealing attention away from the Milky Way so let me just try this on the JPEG a little bit so I'm just going to draw a curve okay so that's a pretty subtle difference but it's already sort of improving the picture for me it feels a little bit more balanced but then what I would do is I would try to bring out the Milky Way more as well okay so this is this is of course just very quick on a JPEG but I think you see the difference here so in this one the lighting is really hitting the trees and in my edit the lighting would be more on the Milky Way which so because your eye is always going to be drawn to what is brightest so if the Milky Way is brighter than the trees and that's the point of the picture it should be it should be where your eye goes so it's sort of a composition thing but it's more just a balance of the exposure levels across the picture which I think is a tricky thing to get right in these night scape type shots it's something I want to get better at I just don't have a huge amount of experience but I really do enjoy seeing them so thanks for sending this in Simon okay Stefan sent me a few different shots and so I'm going to take a look at a couple that he sent he's shooting with a Celestron C6 which is a long focal length telescope by my standards at least it's a Schmidt cast-a-grain scope on an alt-as mount Stefan mentioned he does have the polar wedge which makes the alt-as mount sort of into an equatorial mount not quite but it like it helps I think but he's still limited to 10 second shots before he notices star trailing and I can't really help you there Stefan I think I would be limited to 10 second shots too I don't have much experience making something like that work I'm sure that it's really difficult though because you're had something like over a thousand millimeters focal length on an alt-as mount that's not really designed for imaging or it's not designed for deep sky imaging at least and so I'm sure it's hard one thing that occurred to me is if you've ever tried instead of doing prime focus on your telescope just piggybacking your DSLR and a lens on the alt-as mount because that way you should be able to get like 30 second shots that would look really cool and be at a at a faster focal ratio with a lens so something to think about I think that you know you can definitely buy adapters that will help you mount your DSLR to your telescope as in a piggyback function meaning like on top of the telescope rather than attached to it in prime focus anyways let's look at the shots here so this one this first one is M33 which is the Triangulum Galaxy and M33 is deceptively hard it's pretty big in the sky but it's actually pretty low surface brightness which you can I think see in this shot it's not really popping too much probably in processing you could still bring it out a bit more I know this is just the JPEG but even with just the JPEG here you can see there actually is a lot more detail in the galaxy arms that are getting hidden a bit by how dark this shot was processed now I know that if I do that it brings out all these registration artifacts so what I would probably do if this was my image is I would just crop way in on the galaxy like that and just process it that way to get rid of all those registration stuff and then just keep processing but at a higher stretch like this okay another one he sent in again this has these registration artifacts but here I would just crop in a little bit to get rid of those maybe keep this bright star up there this is the dumbbell nebula if you have any kind of telescope I've even shot this on a Dubsonian mount go out and look at this nebula try shooting it because it's really nice photographically I love that it's a bright green planetary nebula it's pretty big for a telescope and so my one thing I would suggest here is it came out quite green but the whole image looks a little green to me so I wonder if we might be able to color balance a little bit see if I start color balancing a little bit towards the magenta you can see the dumbbell part a little bit better the red parts and the sort of dumbbell shape in the middle so I would just process it just a slight bit different I know I'm getting some weird stuff on the edges here because this is a jpeg but here's before it's like the whole image is a little green and then just processing it with a slightly different color balance you get a little bit more of that red HA pop on the planetary and the stars look a little bit more natural to me without the green color cast I'm just looking here in the middle ignore the magenta on the edges all right Steph is a 15 year old astrophotographer who sent me this image of the veil nebula done with a refractor long refractor and equatorial mount it was shot on a nearly full moon with DSLR and so that definitely gives you some tough stuff to process around because the full moon is probably creating some sky gradients that are harder to process with but I think this looks pretty good especially the nebula itself Steph did send the unstretched tiff and so when I stretched it the first thing I noticed is that it looks like if Steph did use flats I'm not sure if they worked very well here there seems to be some kind of flats issue because this isn't a very flat field and I think good flats would help correct this a bit with this extreme vignetting in the corners and then a bright spot in the middle but there's probably also it's combined with the moon issues the moon gradient so I'm not sure which is affecting the picture more but it made it a little bit harder to process because we have this pretty bright circular gradient right where the veil is which makes it difficult to bring out detail without while subtracting a gradient so here's the best I could do it's a bit different than Steph's processing let me rotate this so we get the same orientation so I went for maybe like a softer look I was really trying to bring out the reds but I think maybe I went a bit overboard bringing out the reds because then we're losing some of that bright o3 which looks so great in this one I do think that the stars look a little bit better in my version I did use my star net technique I shouldn't say my star net technique but the star net technique where you start with a starless version after you've stretched and then you can play around with that without worrying about messing up the stars and then you add the stars back in and you can control how those look through curves and different things and then I just did a little bit extra work on the nebula there so I think using the starless version and then adding the stars back in gives me a little bit more control over the stars they don't get so bright and a little bit bloated like they are here okay so I guess my two tips are try star net plus plus maybe you can try to bring out the hl fall a little bit more than I did here but I think a perfect version of this would be in terms of the nebula would be somewhere in between with the 03 this bright but bringing out the HA as much as I did here if that was possible just to sort of hit that balance that would look best okay Swantantra sent me a photo of Andromeda that was shot untracked with a Canon DSLR and the Canon Nifty 50 lens lens I've used a fair amount for astrophotography it's a great lens considering it's a hundred dollars and I'd say for the Canon Nifty 50 on Andromeda this is very impressive I've shot Andromeda with the Canon Nifty 50 and my results were not this good and I should mention untracked so just setting up a camera on a tripod so probably this is the maximum amount of detail I would expect to get out of the 50 millimeter lens I can see the dust lanes you know I can see all the dust lanes in Andromeda which is really impressive the stars look good really this looks quite good you sent me a few versions my favorite was version 1 I'll just open up version 2 so people can see it looks like in this version 2 you tried to reduce the number of stars but to me it looks a little unnatural I like the I like the more star filled version my only suggestion is maybe you know I like this cropped version you know really cropped in on Andromeda but since you shot it with a 50 millimeter lens it might look cool to also have a version more wide to see Andromeda in this really large context of a star field but good job I think this is really excellent considering the equipment that you used to get more detail on an object like Andromeda you would really need to increase the focal length because I think you've you've maxed out what you can do with that particular lens okay Tawan sent me this photo of Andromeda I really like this the framing is unusual to do it vertically like this but I think it really works well and then it looks like Tawan added these star spikes in post processing is my guess just because they seem really perfect when I zoom in I think they actually look cool it makes it a little bit more you know artistic flair I think it really does add something cool though to this shot a way to get them in camera is to just tape carefully tape fishing line to your the front of your lens or telescope my one suggestion is that it looks like you have a little bit of unevenness in the sky background so like it looks brighter here sort of this part of the picture then the rest of it and so one sort of hacky way to deal with that that I can just show on the JPEG here is to grab your burn tool and set it to shadows mode and then just pick a nice big round brush and then just I just have the exposure set to 9% and then it's only going to it's not going to make the stars any dimmer because I have it set to shadows and the stars are obviously highlights so I can just sort of click around right on the picture and it will bring the shadow level the sky background right down to match this so just to show you before and after here here's before you can see it's bright all throughout there and here's after I did some burning sent me a photo of Andromeda done with a sky watcher star adventure 12 lights at two and a half minutes each looks pretty good zoomed out just to maybe a little bit monotone I'd try to bring in a bit more color when I zoom in I did notice that the stars seem to be all doubled like two stars everywhere where there should be one and this is a common thing probably what happened was one of one or more probably just one of your exposures got bumped like the tripod got bumped and so then you get two stars in an exposure rather than one because like if it was bumped halfway through the exposure then they would get equal time and so like what you basically just have this appearance of two stars rather than one in a single exposure if I'm right about that you should be able to just look through your stack of 12 lights and find the one that has the doubled up exposure and remove it before stacking and then you won't have this appearance in the final shot that's my guess it could be something else to work on the color issue though a tutting did send me the tiff the unstretched tiff so I did I took a whack at it I came up with this it's not perfect I feel like it's like a little bit too purple still not sure maybe I could keep working on that let's see what would be purple if I did a color balance and took away a little magenta or a little red is that better maybe actually I think that's better but now just needs a little bit more saturation yeah I think that's looking good anyways so I would just try adding in a little bit more color like I did here and work on the double stars issue and other than that looks really good KV is in the letter V sent me a photo of the lagoon and trifid nebula in the Milky Way and I opened this up and thought this looks familiar and it actually is because this is my own data that I've released for free to go along with my lagoon and trifid untracked video so V processed it and sent it in and since I know the limits of my data that I shot here really well with a Rokinon lens I gotta say this looks really good or was this with a maybe this was with the nifty 50 I can't remember now but with just a pretty basic lens I think it was with the nifty 50 which is why we have so much sort of ringing around the stars of these bright halos anyways this looks really good my only suggestion is that it looks just a little bit too green still especially like out towards the edges here so I would just maybe just try to apply a bit more magenta now I just applied a bit more magenta and that got rid of the greens but then maybe that made the center part a little bit too magenta so you can try to bring that in a little bit more selectively through the layer mask but I think that did improve it okay William sent me a photo of the butterfly also known as the satyr butterfly because it's we're not seeing it in this shot because it's really close in but the bright star satyr which is part of Cygnus is right out of frame here and in general throughout this video you've seen I've always been telling people that they're applying too much contrast to their astrophotos because a lot of times contrast will hide detail because you've added too much but in this case I think William shows how to do the high contrast look and write and it really is a nice punchy look and the way to do a high contrast look correctly is you just have to collect lots and lots of high quality data so then when you stretch it really aggressively like this it holds up which it clearly does here like I can zoom in and this looks really nice throughout if you didn't have lots of high quality data to stack then when you tried to apply this really high contrast look you'll end up with just something where yeah you're hiding the noise but then you're also hiding the detail because there's just not enough signal to do this kind of thing other thing I'd say about this is that the stars are really really small and when I zoom out I can barely notice them like if I zoomed out this far I'd say this is a starless edit so it's sort of like to me this is like in between a starless edit and a normal edit which for this particular picture I think works really well it doesn't work for every picture but for this one I think it looks really cool and quite artistic ok so next up we have Willie who sent me in a picture of the fish head nebula and I feel like I'm often telling people too much contrast too much saturation that kind of thing but in this case I think it looks not processed enough like the colors just look a little bit washed out and so I would prefer an edit with with more saturation other than that I think this is a beautiful field obviously technically it's quite good and to me this is a great composition for this object I like that it's like going down into the frame with this interesting dark bridge right here which sort of to me connects with this bright star right on that side so I think it's it's a really natural looking composition maybe just not quite enough going on over here it's my only complaint about the composition but other than that I think this looks really good Willie did send me his raw file so I'm going to just show you what I would do with it this is just a different edit with more saturation basically yeah so you could just take this and just pump up the saturation and get this and I think to me that looks a little bit more pleasing but it's really a personal taste thing I could see how even here you could argue that we are losing some detail that you can see here with less saturation so to get the ultimate in detail you could I think black and white photos you can actually see always more detail in Nebulae than you can in color photos there are color details but typically I find that most of the detail is easier for our brains to process it process the detail in black and white so it feels like we might be losing some detail when we add more saturation so that's always the balance maybe best be best to go somewhere in between what I just did with this one and this one okay Yan Xiang sent me this photo of Andromeda taken with a Nikon mirrorless camera and a good lens without tracking and I think the first thing I noticed when I opened this up was that somehow it looks like this third over here of Andromeda is missing I can still sort of make up the dust lanes but the bright parts of the picture the bright parts of Andromeda just seem to have disappeared over here so I'm not sure what happened in processing that made that happen but I'm guessing that it is a processing mistake and not something else other than that I think this looks pretty good the stars are quite round and colorful for untracked so I think that what needs work is just the processing of the photo and Yan Xiang sent me the TIFF file so I did a quick edit and there's my edit of the same data it is clear that whatever happened over here was a processing mistake because I was able to bring out Andromeda and did a little bit of a brighter more colorful edit the data was really nice to work with good job I think that the gear you have and your technique are definitely winners just work a little bit on the processing you can follow along with my Andromeda tutorial which is what I used to do here if you stuck around with me for this entire video congrats we're at the end I decided that I didn't want to be left out of the fun for so for the 100th critique final and the final critique I decided I'm going to critique and edit one of my own early astrophotos this was taken in the spring of 2016 meaning that I only had I think in March the lens that I had only had my astrotrack tracking system for two months was still was shooting with an unmodified Canon 5D Mark III and my 200mm lens that I still use today but I had a clip-in CLS filter even though I took this at a dark site I was using a CLS filter which in retrospect doesn't make any sense and I think added to a bunch of issues I remember at the time this was my favorite picture I'd ever taken and I thought it was amazing and I thought I just could not believe how good it was today I think it's still a cool shot but I just it makes me cringe a little bit because I just think about how much better it could be you know for one thing the processing is a mess here if you zoom in the stars are all there's this effect from star reduction that looks really bad it's way too high contrast the darks are way too dark which is something I've been talking about over and over again and but it's really just that star reduction technique on probably data that wasn't in the best of focus to begin with really creates artifacts all throughout the picture so it looks when you zoom in it's just like looks like there's this like someone just shaked some salts on top of the picture looks okay you know way zoomed out it's like an interesting composition I think I still love this composition actually I like how the witch head is like diagonal looking up at Rigel and then you can just it has this really strong diagonal where you continue up just looking at where the witch head is looking and you get Rigel right in the middle and this interesting little part of Barnard's Loop I think HA Nebulosity up there and then what I really like about the composition is that there's no boring corner even down here you have this really interesting bit of color and nebulosity so anyways I still had my original data so I went back to it and to see if I could get anything better out of it today that's what I this is what I came up with so let me actually make these the same size here so here's the original there's my new processing and honestly I don't think it's that much better I think that most of my issues with this shot were the CLS filter being out of focus and that when you're out of focus you're using a filter so that's going to add halos probably and then you try to work on an object that's in a heavy star field it's just a recipe for disaster and I couldn't get this looking how I wanted without adding a lot of residual noise so if I zoom in on the two this is my old noise I just call it crunchy noise and then this is my new noise and it's a little bit softer but neither are to my taste now so I think that it was an interesting challenge to try to reprocess data from 2016 but if I shot this now and the data came back like this I wouldn't keep it I wouldn't share it so I am sharing something here that I did that I'm not happy with but the last thing I'll say is that doing this exercise of going back to my 2016 data and trying to reprocess it just made me really eager to do this exact same shot again in 2020 to see how much I've improved and that's one of the really fun things about photography is that because the same stuff is up there year after year you can go back to the same exact composition on the sky even with the same gear and to see how much you've improved year to year and you'll be amazed if you stick with the hobby how much you improve to wrap up I think this was fun I hope that people get something out of it I certainly did you know just to go through this much astrophotography and think about what people could do to improve what I think about the picture it really helped me clarify some things that I've been thinking about astrophotography I know this is going to be a long video because I've been recording for a very long time over multiple days you've probably seen my clothes change but hopefully it was all worth it in the end until next time this has been Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com you can find me here on youtube and other social media I also have a patreon which is a way to support this channel financially and I really appreciate everyone who is my patron over on patreon you're about to see all of their names in the credits and if you're interested in supporting me it's just patreon.com slash nebulaphotos alright clear skies music music music music music music