 Good evening our Sun is going to die The good news is it's going to be a few billion years before that happens and when our Sun does die It's thought that our Sun will become what's called a planetary nebula one of the most beautiful objects in the night sky You can think of a planetary nebula as the corpse of a star After its run out of its fuel and there's this envelope of gas left from the star expanding into a red giant And if the star has enough mass what's left of that star stellar core Will energize that envelope of gas making it visible as a planetary nebula for about 20,000 years before that core becomes a white dwarf and now the really cool thing is we can get a Preview of that what the Sun's death will look like by just pointing a camera and a telephoto lens to the right spot In the night sky and taking a photo looking for a little teal green circle in a sea of stars This is a fully processed photo I took last night of a planetary nebula called the dumb bell nebula using this setup right here just a telephoto lens a Stock DSLR camera a remote shutter and a tripod and in this video I'll show you exactly how I did it from start to finish Hello, my name is Nico Carver and this channel is all about astrophotography meaning taking photos of anything in the night sky and Tonight, I'm gonna show you every step of how to capture and process a photo of the dumb bell nebula all with Normal photography gear stuff that you may already have or at least have access to I always encourage people to try astrophotography with the gear they already have before going out and buying any Astro specific gear like a star tracker or a telescope, you know Not that there's anything wrong with those items But I just think there's a lot of cool stuff that we can capture with just a normal camera and Lens on a fixed tripod especially with this method that I'm going to be showing in this video of taking several hundred photos and Stacking them together into one photo to increase the signal-to-noise ratio Which lets us stretch the photo much brighter and see more detail in colors And don't worry all of this is going to be explained in the video as we go through the process step by step The first thing is you got to get to know your camera a bit and put it in the right settings for Astrophotography So if you have a camera go ahead and pause the video go get your camera as we're going to be walking through this right now and You can follow along for this video I'm going to be using a Canon rebel T7 also known as the Canon EOS 1500d first the shooting mode needs to be set to manual This DSLR has a dial for that right here And I just twist it until the little mark lines up with M for manual with this particular lens here I'm using this is the Canon 200 millimeter f 2.8 So that means wide open it's at f 2.8 Which is how I'm going to be using it tonight to let in the most light There are reasons you may want to stop down a lens to control certain aberrations But for starting out with this method I'd suggest shooting wide open whatever that means for your lens You know the smallest f number for the exposure settings tonight I'm going to be using ISO 6400 and 1.3 seconds for the shutter speed you can just put these values in yourself for now And then I'll talk about adjusting them after we take our first test picture of the nebula There are a few more settings we have to go through First up for white balance I'd suggest turning off auto and switching it to daylight white balance which will be more accurate when we're taking preview pictures of the night sky For the drive mode We first have to think about how we're going to take the pictures if your camera supports an interval timer In the menu or you know with a hack like magic lantern or something like that You can just use that mode and it should work well If you're using an external intervalometer something that looks like this or maybe an app to control the camera Then the drive mode should be set to single shooting If you're using a simple and cheap shutter release like I'm going to use tonight Then you'll want to set the drive mode to continuous shooting that way when we lock the shutter release The camera will just keep taking photos until we stop it Okay, we're almost done here We just need to go into the menu now and make sure of a few things Most important is that the quality setting is set to raw You can do raw plus a jpeg if you want but I never do because we're not actually going to be using the jpegs in Processing so it would just be if you want to preview So I just set it to raw if there are any settings for noise reduction Turn those off as we're going to be creating our own calibration files for handling the noise And if there are any stabilization features either in the camera or on the lens turn those off, too Try to find an option for auto rotate and turn that off, too I found that it can cause issues with some software and Lastly for the first part of the night We want the LCD screen brightness up all the way so we can see when we're focusing So if you have an option for that in the menu go ahead and turn up the screen brightness After we found our deep-sky object and focus then you can turn the brightness back down to save Battery and our eyes But please be aware that if you're sharing a space with visual astronomers You're gonna want to take extra precautions to make sure you aren't ruining their experience and dark adaptation with your bright screen The last two things to check are that your battery is fully charged And I would also suggest having extra batteries that are also fully charged And then that you have an SD card with plenty of room on it The last thing to consider with the gear here is that if you live in an area that is pretty humid You may want to either rubber band a chemical hand warmer to the lens or Invest in one of those USB Powered lens warmers like this something that can happen in humid environments is do forming on your lens Especially when it's pointed up at the night sky and if this does happen all your images are going to be blurry So it's best to prevent that from happening in the first place If it's a humid night by heating the lens a little bit warmer than the air temperature the next thing we're gonna do before we start shooting is formulate our plan of attack for the night and The main things we need to figure out are where are we going to shoot like literally the physical location? What deep-sky object are we gonna photograph and how do we find that deep-sky object in the night sky? The where you shoot from is very important Unfortunately many places on earth suffer from heavy light pollution and any improvements to sky darkness is good I'm gonna recommend two websites for finding dark places near you One is light pollution map info. I live Just outside of Boston, so it's very bad light pollution But if I drive just a couple hours in any direction, I can get somewhere Substantially darker now the trick is to find a place that is dark But also has wide open places like a field or a parking lot and that you're also allowed to be at overnight So a good website for finding those spots is astrospots.com and the advantage here is you can read user reports I've written a few and I think this is a really neat idea So I hope more people contribute to this website You can also ask any local astronomy clubs for ideas and sometimes they will have private fields for club members or just ideas of where to go As for the what we're gonna be going after the Dumbbell Nebula or Messier 27 The Messier catalog is the first catalog of deep-sky objects in the Northern Hemisphere and because it was made from Paris by Charles Messier. It's mostly bright objects So it's a great catalog to use for finding things that will be relatively easy to Spot and photograph as a beginner. The Dumbbell along with the Ring Nebula are two of the brightest Planetary Nebulae in the night sky and its vibrant teal green color is the result of very strong Emission of oxygen that has been lit up by ultraviolet radiation and then lastly how how do we find the Dumbbell Nebula? I recommend downloading a free Planetarium app on your phone like Stellarium Which when you hold up your phone to the night sky will show you where you are pointed So that's very handy for finding Cygnus and our object So the first thing to look for is the head of the swan of Cygnus. There's a bright star Elberio, it's a double star from there We head down into Volpecula and try to use the patterns of other bright stars in the area to help us find Messier 27 While in these videos, I focus on the practical how-to of astrophotography I think everyone, me included, can get even more out of the hobby by understanding the physics behind these beautiful Phenomena, which is why I'm happy to have this video sponsored by Brilliant Brilliant is a hands-on website for learning science and math in a really fun way And there is a great course that I've been working through on astrophysics with a whole series of interactive lessons on The life cycles of stars that I think would be a great compliment to this video If you want to go deep and really understand more about how cool this whole topic is So head to Brilliant.org Slash Nebula photos to get started for free with Brilliant's interactive lessons the first 200 to sign up for free through my link will also get 20% off an annual membership if later you decide to sign up With the planning done. We're now ready to shoot So I've set up my camera and tripod here before we try to find our deep sky object Messier 27 Let's first focus the lens on a bright star. So we're going to put the camera into manual focus There's often a physical switch on the lens to do this and then you're going to take your focus ring and You're going to put keep turning it all the way to the infinity symbol If you don't have a marking like that then just turn the focus ring counterclockwise all the way Then point the camera to a nice bright star turn on live view This time of year Vega is a is a bright star you could use and with that bright star centered find The zoom in button and press that a couple times. It just uses as much digital zoom as possible Then we're going to slowly move the focus ring clockwise The other direction and you should see the star first get smaller and then get bigger again And what we're trying to find by slowly turning this focus ring back and forth is that point on the focus ring Where the star is smallest a lot of time when you find that two things are going to happen One is on a bright star you're going to see a little ring of magenta or red around the star and Two you're going to see lots of smaller stars appear all of a sudden like they'll be mostly invisible but then right when you reach proper focus you should see a bunch of little stars snap into place and This is hard to show on video So I'm going to show this effect here with Jupiter and its moons because those are very bright So see how when I get into focus the moon suddenly appear as a little row of dots right there That same thing is going to happen with dimmer stars The other thing I want you to get into the habit of doing is after you think you have good focus Go to playback mode press the play button on your camera and zoom in as far as you possibly can on a test shot If you're properly focused you should see tons of little stars like this if you only see a few stars And they look sort of like doughnuts where the edge is brighter than the center Then you haven't found perfect focus yet So keep trying until your stars look more pinpoint like this image on the right and again It is normal for brighter stars to have some magenta or red fringe a ring around them That's called chromatic aberration, and it's something that affects many lenses. Don't worry about it We can remove it in post-processing Okay, now that we're focused. Let's find Messier 27 This one isn't nearly as easy to find as Orion or the Pleiades or some of the other Objects I've made videos on because it's a lot smaller and it's not near any bright stars So take your time try not to get frustrated The good news is once you are pointed at it once it's in your field of view It does stick out really well in a quick preview photo due to the greenish color So we're going to start by finding Cygnus in the sky again. It sort of looks like this giant cross Then we can start by finding the neb and satyr on this side of Cygnus on live view And then moving in this direction until we find Elberio with Elberio centered on live view We want to move it to the top of the sensor and take a photo Then we're going to pick another bright star and again I'll pick this one. We'll move that to the type of live view. We're gonna take another photo We keep going like this until we find this little green spot. That's what we're after and isn't that amazing That's a snapshot of a dying star Trillions of miles away So now that we found it let's make sure our exposure settings will work The key here is finding a balance of getting enough light and getting fairly round stars If we if we set the exposure too long our stars will trail That means they'll turn into little lines And that's also going to blur out any details in the nebula But if our exposure is too short then we're not going to get any of those details anyway because it'll be too dim And lost in the camera noise So what I recommend is put your camera lens wide open as we talked about before the smallest f number for this lens That's 2.8 set your isota 6400 started something like one second shutter speed and take a test photo See if your stars look round when you zoom all the way in with playback mode if they do Raise the shutter speed try 1.3 seconds. Take another photo. Check it If they still look fairly round go to 1.6 seconds. Check it Let's say at 1.6 seconds You're now definitely seeing when you zoom all the way in that the stars aren't looking very round They're looking elongated then go back to 1.3 seconds So if that still looks good, then you've found the best setting Now for tonight's example, I'd usually shoot one second exposures at 200 millimeters But I purposefully went up to 1.3 seconds because I want to show you how to potentially fix just a little bit of star elongation in photoshop if you happen to run into it Okay, so that's it for getting our shot set up now We're ready to just start taking photos with my little remote shutter here. All I have to do is press down And forward to lock it and as you can hear the camera starts clicking away Now due to earth's rotation every couple minutes. We're going to want to re-center the nebula in frame So I'm going to take maybe 50 shots or so Stop the shutter Re-center the nebula and this isn't nearly as hard as finding it the first time. It still should be in frame We're just re-centering it once it's re-centered We start again and the more shots you take the better in terms of Noise I'd say a good starting point is around 500 shots. So that's what I'm going to try to do tonight Okay, now that we have 500 shots of the nebula. We aren't quite done with taking photos because we can still take calibration frames These are optional if you really want to skip them feel free But I've always found that they do help and I think it's a good habit to learn If you plan to do more deep sky astrophotography We'll start by taking darks and darks are simple All we do is cover the lens with the lens cap and take around 30 more shots with all the same settings that we just used for the lights Meaning the shots of the nebula and we want our lights and our darks to match exactly in settings But the important thing with darks Since they're capturing what we call thermal noise is that we do them at the same temperature As the lights, which is why I always do them first right after I take my lights. I do my darks Okay, with those done. Let's do flat frames. These are a little trickier What we need for these is some kind of even flat light source And so if you have a tablet that works very well, I'm using an old First gen iPad here Anything though you can put on top of the lens hood to shine an even white light that fills the frame will work Then what we do is we keep ISO and aperture the same and just change the shutter speed Until this little exposure level indicator is showing that we have an even exposure meaning it's at zero Or just above an even exposure is fine, too But you don't want to under expose these Once you've found, you know that good exposure level take about five shots And if they all look like this have a like a nice even look to them Then you're good to go and go ahead and take 30 If you happen to see dark bands running through your flats Then you've likely caught the flicker of the screen or the rolling shutter in your camera That just means you need to take longer exposures to fix that When you take a longer exposure that banding blurs out And you can do that either take a longer exposure either by turning down the brightness of the screen Or using some kind of diffusion like paper or t-shirts I found once the exposure of the flat is At least one twentieth of a second or longer you're unlikely to run into that banding issue Okay, last type of calibration frame is the bias frame. This one's very easy We just put the lens cap back on Keep all the settings the same except the shutter speed change your shutter speed as fast as it will go For this camera that is one four thousands of a second And then take about 50 bias frames And that's it. So here's a quick summary of the calibration frames If you forget later just remember to come back to this point in the video pause it and you can read through these The last step is I'd suggest going back into playback and noting down the file numbers of where you started taking the different types of calibration frames And noting that down because this is going to make it a lot easier to organize your files when we copy them to the computer So for instance, I can see I stopped taking my lights the photos of the nebula Here and then my first dark frame is image five four four nine So i'll write that down dark start at five four four nine Then i'll scroll through and find the start of my bias And my flats and write those numbers down too And then at this time I also want to make sure to delete any files that were test shots So I don't accidentally use test shots when we go to stack Okay, we're now inside and on the computer and the first thing that we're going to do is Insert the sd card and do a card reader or attach the camera with the usb cable And the reason we're going to do this of course is To copy the files uh off of the sd card onto the computer so we can Stack them and process them and The first thing to keep in mind when doing this is that you need a fair amount of space More than the space just to hold the files that we're transferring because the stacking process itself creates lots of temporary files So for instance here on my computer If I look at the main c drive you can see I only have 59 gigabytes of space left That's probably not going to be enough So i'm going to put them on This drive which has 194 gigabytes so that should be enough So i'll make a new folder here and call this m 27 for messier 27 And inside that folder i'm going to make four more folders lights darks flats And biases like that And I would just get in the habit of naming your folders exactly like this all lowercase With these names it doesn't matter in deep sky stacker, which is what i'm going to show first But it will matter in c roll, which is this is the second part to this series So actually let me explain that um in this video that you're watching right now I'm going to next go into deep sky stacker, which is a windows only program And then adobe photoshop But if you don't Have windows if you have mac or if you don't want to pay for photoshop there's going to be Alternative endings to this video with other software including completely free software that's cross-platform like zero So check the description for links to the alternative endings if you're not a windows user or a photoshop user Okay with that said let's go ahead and do the copying Okay, and the way that I know which files are which is because I wrote it down From looking through the files on the camera There are other ways to do it using you know windows explorer or dobby bridge or light room, but I've always just gotten in the habit of marking, you know In a notebook Where's the start of the bias frames? Where's the start of the darks? Where's the start of the flats and so on? And that works pretty well Makes copying and sorting a lot faster Okay, everything is transferred over so I can go ahead and eject my sd card And we can move on to the stacking process, which is actually more than just stacking It's also registering or aligning the photos based on the star patterns and calibrating them If you did shoot darks flats and bias frames. Those are calibration frames Okay, so we're going to use deep sky stacker in this video I have it right here. It is a free program when you download it it comes with Deep sky stacker, but it also comes with another program called deep sky deep sky stacker live Which is for live stacking, but we just want the normal one So it should look just like my screen here And the first thing that we're going to do Is on the over here on the left hand side are all the different actions And we're going to start at the top of that action list open picture files and we put this on volume d in the m27 folder And so we're going to start by loading in all of our lights So I can just click on one and then press control a to select all and click open and It loads them down here for some reason. It doesn't check them So I'm going to go ahead and click check all right here on the left hand side And now it says I have 565 Lightframes checked and ready to go So I shot a few more than 500 but pretty close to the the goal of 500 And then we'll just do the same thing. We'll load our dark Files by going into the darks folder again control a Open it loads 31 darks Let's load in our flat files Same thing control a open 35 flat frames And let's load in bias Or it says offset slash bias. That's two words for the same Concept, okay, and I have 58 bias frames And we don't need dark flat frames for this style of calibration. So we'll just leave that at zero Next thing we're going to do is Go into register checked pictures. So over here on the left hand side Scroll down until you get to this red link register checked pictures and We can leave all of this Alone automatic detection of hot pixels is fine Stack after registering is fine. Now. I'm going to have leave this at select the best 95 of pictures and stack them So it's going to throw out five percent that it decides are Not as good as the other ones if you Want if you think all of your data is good you can leave that at 100 percent or if you think You have a lot of bad frames. You might want to lower that percentage. So that's up to you. I'm going to use 95 percent and then click on advanced and I want you to Set this star detection threshold to 20 percent and click compute the number of detected stars Okay, and if it's Somewhere between a hundred and a thousand stars You're done. You can leave that alone Now if you are if you go to 20 percent and you click that button and it says zero stars Try first lowering the star detection threshold And it should find more stars. You can see for me. It just found 1,878 If you lower it all the way down to 1 percent or 2 percent I guess 2 percent is the lowest And it's still Not finding stars or it's only finding like five stars That suggests there's something wrong with your data. You're probably out of focus Or your stars are very trailed. They're not round if it's not able to find stars So in that case what you'd want to do is open up some of these raw files into photoshop and try to figure out what's going on Is is it trailing? Is it out of focus? What what's the problem? And maybe it only affects some of your data and not all Anyways, I'm going to set this back to 20 percent And that's good. Okay Okay, next thing that we want to do is click into this stacking parameters I prefer the standard mode. Uh, so that's what should be set I do not want to Enable any of these options drizzle or aligning I do want to use all available processors that will speed up the stacking considerably Here in lights, uh, the light tab I want median kappa sigma clipping That means that it's going to take an average But it's also going to clip out outliers So if you had a plane fly through one of your frames or a satellite, which are both common It's not going to use those bright pixels when it's doing the stacking process of averaging All of the different frames together So that's good Most of these other things you can just leave Alone, so we want them all the stacking mode of median is fine on all of these We can use automatic alignment If you are unsure about this just leave intermediate files as tiffs Okay, and this last tab here output is very important We do want to create an output file. We auto save dot tiff is find And we're going to create the output file in the folder of the reference frame So that just means it's going to go back into the lights folder. That's also fine And we're down here though where it says temporary files folder now I already said that my c drive didn't have a lot of space So i'm going to want to change this temporary files folder To my d drive which had a lot more space Because you don't want to sort of get halfway through the process and then realize you don't have enough space to finish it So i'm going to use my m 27 folder on new volume d Okay, that's it for them and that's all we have to do we can now click okay And okay again And start playing the waiting game because what it's going to do now is Create calibration master files So right now is creating the bias master then it'll create a dark master a flat master It'll calibrate all of your light frames with those master calibration files It will then align all of your lights by using the stars the star patterns to figure out How to align them so they're all positioned Correctly and then it will stack them all all into one finished Tiff file But then we're not done because that tiff file is not actually post processed So once this is all finished here in deep sky stacker We're going to take the result and bring it into Photoshop In terms of how long this process takes with 500 light frames and all the calibration frames It really depends on the speed of your computer You can see mine is chugging along pretty fast because i'm on a fast computer right now But uh, if you're on a you know a lower powered laptop or something like that it will take a lot longer possibly Several hours. Um, so when I used to do this on a laptop, I would often wait Overnight and then just check on it in the morning and it would usually be done by morning But that's sort of the the links we go to for Astro image processing. It's a it's a fun hobby, but there's there's a lot of Waiting involved you might need to learn some patience to to do this hobby sometimes So I'm going to let this go and then cut to when it's finished Okay, a deep sky stacker has finished stacking And if this is your first time using the program you might think what is this so it looks worse than a single frame Well, this is normal. What's going on here is this is what it's called a linear space So, um, it's not yet stretched We're going to do the stretching ourselves in photoshop so Don't be alarmed if your picture is completely black at this point or black with a few white speckles of stars like mine is here That's a normal result. We can just uh go into the lights folder And at the bottom there should be an autosave dot tiff file That is exactly what we can use in photoshop It is a 32 bit Tiff file so that doesn't work in all programs So i'm going to show you if you if you run into any issues Using this 32 bit tiff file, which is probably the better one Here's how to get around that you go over here on the left hand side and choose save picture to file And you can save it as a 16 bit tiff which will work in just about any program picture editing program and These default settings Compression set to none. That's important and options Embed adjustments in the saved image, but do not apply them Those are the two things you want set And so i'm just going to call this m 27 I'll save it to my desktop Tiff 16 bits per channel. Okay, let's save Great And now let's open that in photoshop. Okay, and here we go. So we have it in photoshop The first thing that i'm going to do is Duplicate this background layer just by right clicking and choosing duplicate layer And i'll call it first stretch And then i'm going to open up the Image adjustments Levels when you go into a photoshop menu It does show you the keyboard shortcut the keyboard shortcut for levels is control l on windows or command l on mac And that's handy to know Because we're going to be coming back to this a few times And the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm just going to take this little Triangle in the middle here. This is your mid tone slider And i'm going to bring it over towards the information And you can see as soon as i did that a lot more stars became visible but also here in the center There's our dumbbell nebula Okay, and then that's all i'm going to do i'm just going to hit okay But we're going to do an iterative stretching process. So we're going to open that back up control l And you can see the mid tone slider got reset to the middle But now the data has been brought over from the left hand edge a little bit And we can just do the same thing again. We can bring that mid tone slider over And click okay Now at this point, let's look at the whole image You can see there's some artifacts down here and maybe a little bit of a gradient like a red glow at the bottom That's fine though What i want to do is i want to look at a histogram So if you don't have a little histogram icon over here to click on Just go to window and turn on your histogram And it should pop open like this and What i want to note here is that The left hand edge of the red green and blue channels should be pretty much aligned for a Well balanced photo and right now they're not the red channel is out a little bit and um So yeah, we just want to Color balance this a little bit So we're going to keep this histogram window open If you don't see the three different channels like this just go into the menu for the histogram this little three Lines here at the top and change it to all channels view and then you should see all three channels like this Okay, so i'm going to press control l again And this time i'm going to open the red channel And i'm going to drag this shadows slider over a little bit And the cool thing is i can see it adjusting here live And that's good then i'm going to take the blue channel And i'm going to take the mid-tone slider and bring that over a little bit To the left And then take the shadow slider and move it a little bit to the right And i'm just trying to get all of these sort of lined up like this now um You can see this little A sliver of green right there that i believe is the dumbbell nebula So there is no need to try to get rid of that because we we want that little sliver of green because those are probably those pixels right there and then You can see over here. There's a little sliver of magenta That's this artifact down here So we also don't have to try to get rid of that because we're going to crop that out Okay, um now i'm going to go back to just the rgb mode in the histogram And i'm just going to do a little bit more stretching now You can see at this point it feels like the picture is getting a little bit too bright But that's okay because we can also adjust the shadow level So this is the shadow slider and i can bring that over It's it's a little bit hard to tell with this image, but there's There's a natural edge where We're getting a lot more artifacts Because of the stacking process of re-centering You know since we didn't have a tracker And so i think they start around here and here and definitely here These aren't just natural gradients that can actually see that there's more noise down here and over here So and most of this you know out here isn't really that interesting anyways So i'm just going to crop these this image down You can use a ratio like 16 by 9 is a nice ratio Because it's it will fill a monitor Or you don't you don't have to use a ratio you can just go Uh Free with it like this And i'm gonna try to get this little open cluster here. I definitely want those two bright stars over there And i'm going to center Uh the dumbbell nebula. Okay. I think something like that looks nice And so i'll just press enter or return to Crop the image if you wanted just a very basic process of your data You could call it done here, right? I mean One thing i'll note is that we didn't do any kind of Gradient reduction or light pollution removal or anything like that That's because we shot this from a fairly dark sky Wind sickness was right overhead. So there's no reason to do any kind of gradient removal That's that's really nice because that can get sort of annoying and it can also make your data Your photo look worse actually Um But there are some things that we can do here One of them is remember that I said The stars are going to be a little bit elongated and i'm going to show you how in photoshop to fix that So you can see that the stars are a little bit egg shaped Going in this direction down and a little bit to the right. They're a little bit elongated It's actually more apparent with the smaller stars. I think Um And so let's fix that the way we're going to do it is we'll take our first stretch layer and duplicate it So i'll just right click choose duplicate layer and i'll call this star fix And with the star fix layer selected I'm going to Select it all so Control a selects everything And copy everything To my clipboard control c Then i'm going to add a layer mask That's this button down here. It's a little white square with a black circle in it in the layers panel And i'm going to go ahead and enter into that layer mask hold down alt or option on mac and click on the layer mask And then press control v And what this just did is it pasted the image itself as the mask Which is a very handy way to do this But it became black and white because all masks are grayscale. They're not they they don't have any color information and We want to alter this mask a little bit The way we're going to do that is again bring up our levels control l And We're going to darken this until Actually, i'm going to use both the mid tones and the shadow slider so that we just get a very binary mask It's it's just either black or white and what i'm looking for here Is that Even the little stars whoop too much Are included in the mask And that the background Is not included. So we're using that this shadow slider to clip The background and the noise in the background Okay I think that looks good Then i want to mask out the nebula And i'm going to do this by actually going back to the image here And then clicking on the mask And taking a brush And i'm just gonna i'm just going to use a hard brush A little bit smaller than 50 pixels a little bit smaller still i'm just using the left bracket key to change the size And i'm just going to paint over the nebula in black Like that Then i'm going to switch to white And paint back in the stars So those are included in the mask Okay, let's look at that see how it looks alt click Perfect. Well, actually there's still just a little bit of stuff here a little bit of nebulosity. Let's get rid of that Just cleaning it up Okay, perfect Okay, so now what do we do here's the here's the secrets to fixing this elongation We're going to change the blend mode of this star fix layer to darken And nothing seems to happen, right But that's because we these are perfectly aligned still now What the secret thing here is that we all we do is we use our arrow keys to nudge the position of this layer So we need to be in the move tool The top tool in the toolbar make sure you have the image selected not the mask And then we're just going to nudge the whole layer. So I'm just going to press down and right So that's it and and the way that that worked and maybe down again. Well, no, I think So here's how it was you see those stars are pretty elongated I press down It really starts making them a lot more circular You press down again Press right again And they're starting to look a little funky now. So I think You know, here's where they were I think that's the best we can get But just to show you before and after There's the elongated stars there's after We fixed them with this star fix darken layer pretty cool, right Okay, so what should we do next? Let's bring out the dumbbell nebula a little bit what I'm going to do is I'm going to press control alt shift e That would be command option shift e on mac What that does is it makes a new layer from what is visible on screen And then I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this layer a couple times. Okay And What I want to do here Is Sharpen up some of the details in the nebula. So they really pop out And we're going to do this through something called high pass filtering. So let me zoom in on the nebula a little bit And I have this layer selected I'm going to go ahead and add a high pass filter. So I'm going to go to filter other high pass Okay And what I want you to see is this cool structure right there. See that That's actually real detail in the dumbbell nebula Just to prove it to you Let's look at a picture close-up picture See that That little thing running through there. That's that right there Pretty cool. Yeah, right? And then and then you can even see sort of this central bar shape There so we're getting all of the details Of you know a very advanced picture of the dumbbell nebula, but just shrunk down and you know not I shouldn't say all the details. We're getting the same details They're just not as high resolution as you're getting with a big telescope But we're getting those same details. You can see them here Anyways, okay So what you can do with the high pass filter is you play around with the pixel radius To try to bring out different features. So you can see with a pixel radius of 29 pixels. We're bringing out that that central bulge bar shape But when I bring the pixel radius down, I like that eight pixels then we're getting some of this finer detail in the nebula Okay, but you can see it did a lot of weird things to the picture So we are going to change this to Soft light And then to this top one. I'm going to apply that exact same high pass filter And I'm going to change the blend mode on this to overlay Perfect Okay, so now I hope you can see the difference here Let me just go back to this layer Before after right it's really brought out a lot of interesting details in here but I don't like what it did to the stars. I made the stars way too prominent and crunchy So we only want these High pass filtered layers to apply to the nebula and not the stars. So we have to make another mask. Okay So I'm just going to hand draw this mask. I'm going to add a mask A layer mask Same button this little white square with the black circle. I'm going to fill that layer mask with black Okay So we're back to where we were Then I'm going to paint with white just on the nebula Not on the stars Okay, then I'm going to apply that same layer mask to this layer So I'm just going to hold down alt or option on mac and drag it up here Turn that on And I like this effect, but I think it's a little bit too strong. So I'm going to group these control g And I'm going to turn down the opacity of that group a little bit. I turned it down to let's say 50% Okay, and here's the before and the after and you can see it it's dramatically sharpened up the nebula Now the next thing that I want to do with the nebula Is I really like the teal green color of it But this central stuff should be More red right the reason it's not very red is this is hydrogen Emission and this is a stock camera. So even though it picks it up it picks it up fairly weakly Compared to the green part of the spectrum So we have to emphasize it. So I'm going to do control alt shift e stamp another layer from visible here And In this one, I'm going to go over to the channels and So we're in layers go to channels find the red channel and there is The red data if we compare that to green You can see it's quite different. You can also sort of see why That red Central stuff hydrogen is getting blown out by the oxygen here because the oxygen is quite a bit brighter with a Stock dslr, but the cool thing is we did capture it. It's there in the red and so I just need to emphasize it the way I'm going to do that I'm going to do control a to select all Select all the red channel control c To copy the red channel I'm going to go back to rgb go back to layers And control v to paste that red channel on top Okay, so now we have just the black and white red channel On top of everything So let's give that a name. We'll just call it red And we need to actually now make it red in this layers panel We'll do that with a colorize layer So go up to your adjustments bring in a hue slash saturation adjustment Turn on colorize Change the saturation to 50 Change the hue to zero meaning red And then we want to clip this huge slash saturation adjustment layer to the red layer Which we do by holding down the alt key option key on windows and clicking on this little line between the two layers And then last thing is we have to set this red layer to a blending mode And you can play around with different blending modes I think probably Lighten is going to work the best Okay, so I've turned on lighten And It looks like we've really messed up our picture right like if I turn this off Okay, that looks pretty good turn it back on we've added a lot of red noise, right? But again, we're going to add a mask. So on this red layer go ahead and add a layer mask We know how to do this by now. Just click on the red layer click the add layer mask button Go ahead and fill that with black So I'm just going to do alt Backspace Or no, sorry control backspace. There we go So I'm just going to take the brush again this time. I'm going to lower the opacity make it a sort of fuzzy brush And so again, what we've done is we've taken the actual data It's here this red data that was de-emphasized because of the nature of a stock dslr camera And we've re-emphasized it uh question often Often get on my youtube comments or sometimes it's not a question. Sometimes it's an accusation is you know, you're painting in uh color basically Not really because i'm not just taking a brush and painting in a color what i'm doing is i'm trying to emphasize Data that we've already captured So i'm trying to make that really clear here is that we just took our red channel We brought it back in and then we're masking it back into the nebula We're not taking Something that isn't there and just painting it on The the point of painting is it's the easiest way to make a mask But we're actually using the actual data that is there I'm not i'm not interpreting anything. I'm not looking at this and then being like Oh, that's how it looks. I'm going to try to carefully paint that in. I'm just emphasizing what's already in the data Okay, so I think this is already looking really good It's not really much else I would do except maybe play around with curves and saturation and that might actually Bring out some other little things we might want to change. I'm just going to add a new Saturation layer Let's increase the saturation until it looks bad Okay, and increasing the saturation until it looks really bad actually Is is very interesting because it reveals, you know new issues we can see that You know the dumbbell nebula itself is supposed to be pretty green But out here we have a lot of green noise and green stars And we only can see that when we really raise the saturation So let's go ahead and try to fix that. I'll just leave the saturation raised for now So we can see what we're doing And let's add You know what let's just reverse this Mask that we made earlier because that's just the nebula and we want everything but the nebula So we'll add a new curves layer I'm going to drop this mask onto it just alt click and drag And then I'm going to invert that mask So I'll click on the mask and press control i to invert it And then I'm going to go into the green curve And bring down that green curve quite a bit Okay, let's turn off You slash saturation. Okay, that was too much Okay, I really think we're getting somewhere here. The last thing I'm really noticing though is that A lot of the stars have Sort of a red fringe to them So let's stamp from visible again control alt shift e And go into filter Camera raw filter And in camera raw filter under optics, there is this defringe option And the purple amount you can actually extend that into the orange Like this And then if we increase that it's going to drop off a lot of that sort of reddish orange fringing. I was talking about So i'm going to do that And here's before and after and it's a pretty subtle difference, but I think it really evens out The picture nicely So let's zoom in again and just make sure we still Like how that looks Yeah, I think that looks really nice Nice variety of star color the dumbbell nebula looks good So remember to check out brilliant org slash nebula photos and you're now seeing all of my current members on my patreon campaign If you want to see your name in the credits you can sign up over on patreon.com slash nebula photos it Has a bunch of benefits outside of your name in the credits of long videos I have made some exclusive videos just for patreon. There's monthly zoom chats There's a discord community where you can ask questions. There's monthly imaging challenges. There's Imaging projects with a group and of course, there's a direct way to message me with all of your comments and questions So if you like these videos, you want to learn More and learn faster consider joining over there on patreon for as little as one dollar a month Again, the link is patreon.com slash nebula photos until next time. This has been nico carver clear skies