 Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. For a long time now, I've been on the lookout for a used Nikon D810A at a reasonable price. And I finally found one. It's right here. I bought it. And for anyone that doesn't know, this is sort of a legendary camera. It's Nikon's only 4A into the astro specific DSLR world. And it's a full frame, you know, really high megapixel beast of an astro camera. And I got a chance to try it out the other night. But it was one of those nights where clouds were rolling in, so I only got off a couple shots. So I thought this would be the perfect chance to do another single shot challenge where no calibration frames, no stacking, just one raw exposure off of a DSLR, and we'll process it together and see what we can get. So I'm going to make the file and my intermediate files available to you. Check the link in the description. So if you want to process along with me, you can. But of course, it's a challenge, so you can also process it however you wish. You don't have to follow my lead. One really cool thing about this camera is that without doing any kind of things with intervalometers or menus, there is actually a mode on the camera that allows me to do 15 minute, 10 minute, any length exposure, basically. So I can shoot a 15 minute exposure just as a straight up normal exposure with this DSLR. And you know, or probably many of you know that most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are limited to 30 seconds unless you use a bulb timer. So I'm going to jump on my Mac. And in this video, I'm going to use Pixinsight and Photoshop. I don't know if I've ever used that particular combination in a processing video before, but it's actually a combination of software that I use often. That's usually sort of my go-to is Pixinsight and Photoshop. So we'll give that a whirl. Okay, here's the Nikon file. .nef is the Nikon RAW file ending. If I press Command I, we'll have some information about it. We can see it was taken by a Nikon D810A. I was just talking about and the exposure time is 15 minutes. It doesn't know the f number because this was taken with a telescope, but it was an f5 telescope at 300 millimeters focal length. And if we just take a look at the picture in this state, it doesn't look like much. We can see the bright star on Terry's right there. And what is that? M4, the Messier 4 cluster, globular cluster. But we can't really see much nebulosity. It's basically blown out. But through processing, I think we'll see a lot more. So let's go ahead and open this. I'm going to open it up with Pixinsight, which is a paid program that they do have a generous free trial if you're interested in trying it out. And the way that I have my Pixinsight installation set up, it does not automatically debayer RAW files from DSLRs. So if I zoom in, you can actually see the bear pattern of red, green, and blue pixels. And this is a grayscale image. So the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to debayer the picture by going to process and choosing debayer. And I'll just leave it on auto and just drag this little triangle onto the picture. That's the most surefire way to execute a process in Pixinsight if you're new to the program. You can see Pixinsight does give you some nice ideas of what it's up to. So the first thing that it did is it detected the color filter array pattern is RGGB, meaning that's sort of the order that the pixels go in. It's now done. Pixinsight has this handy feature. Well, even though this picture isn't stretched yet, as we can see, we can go up here towards the top and click on this little button that's like a radioactive symbol and it's the STF Auto Stretch, Screen Transfer Function Auto Stretch Tool. And if I click that, we get this. And this is very normal. A lot of people, when you're new to astrophotography and you're using a tool like Pixinsight or CRL, when you see this, everything's green. You might freak out or something because it looks so weird. But this is actually something that happens all the time in astrophotography. But let's say we did want it to display more correctly. We could actually just open up the Screen Transfer Function process and unlink the channels so that it can equalize the red, green, and blue channels and do that and it looks a lot more normal. Okay, so that's sort of a baseline of what we have here. Of course, we're going to want to bring out the colors and things a lot more than this. You can see there's just maybe a little bit of vignetting or something weird going on. And because it's a DSLR, I think we also have a little bit of a mirror issue here with these dark lines at the top and bottom. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to crop this a little bit. I'll probably crop more later. So I'm just going to open up Dynamic Crop and just, whoops, just crop off the edges just a little bit just by dragging in from the sides like that and then I'll execute that. Nope. Just by dragging in from the sides and then I'll hit the little green check mark to crop it. Okay, done with that. Next, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use something called the Automatic Background Extractor and this helps with just sort of the unevenness of this field. I think it's darker on this side and brighter on this side because that's how Rowe Ofiuki, this object, was setting. It was setting into the light pollution over here. So I'm going to use that to even out the field. So I'm going to go to Process Background Modelization, Automatic Background Extractor. And this is actually a very useful tool, but if we just use the defaults, it will be way too aggressive. So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the box size and the box separation quite a bit because this is a huge image and it's fine to increase those. Then the main thing I want to do is I want to turn down the function degree. This is how aggressively it tries to fit the model basically or create a model. So I'm going to turn that down to two and then for the correction, I'm going to choose Division and then we'll just drag this triangle onto here and I'm sure if we look at the background model, it'll be mostly, oh, so that's interesting. I don't know why it's so, why it's like that, the vignetting is so off because it wasn't on when I used the RA, interesting, with the same telescope. Sorry, I'm just sort of thinking out loud. But that looks off now because that's so green over there. Okay, well, this didn't work out quite right. Let's see what went wrong. Or maybe that is right and this is just the glow of the Milky Way. And it's sort of just turned out green all over. So I'm guessing that that really is the glow from the Milky Way over there. And it's just appearing very green on my screen. So I'm going to use Noise Reduction SCNR Green. I'll set it to something pretty aggressive, like 50%. Let's try that. Yeah, I liked what it did. So I'll run it again. Okay, so we're getting somewhere. It's a little bit boring because it's pretty desaturated and just sort of flat. But next up, let's do a fun tool in Pix Insight called the Masked Stretch. I don't know exactly how this works, like what it's doing behind the scenes, but I know it uses 100 iterations by default of some kind of stretching algorithm. And to use it correctly, you have to first define a preview of basically just empty sky. So I think this area looks pretty good right here. I did that. Sorry, I'm sort of rushing here. Let me delete that preview. To add a new preview, you click on this button up here. This is the new preview mode. And then you just bring your cursor out where you want to draw the preview. And you draw it right on like that. Then I can pick the preview in the Masked Stretch window here, and then just drag it on to the image to apply the Masked Stretch. Okay, and it's done. And it seems like something wrong happened, but it's actually just that I didn't turn off the screen transfer function before applying the Masked Stretch. So we can turn that off now by just going up here and clicking on the Reset Screen Transfer Functions button. Okay, and so this is the result of the Masked Stretch. And you can see that it didn't stretch it very aggressively. But what I find the Masked Stretch does well is retain nice color everywhere. Like you can see even the core of Antares here, which is a very bright star, didn't get blown out yet. So it's very good about retaining star color in this initial stretch. But then I usually find I do have to stretch a bit more. But sometimes I'll... I'm not going to do that this time, but I just wanted to let you know. Sometimes I'll create a copy because it really retains some nice details. And then I'll sort of copy and paste those details back in. It's sort of like a poor man's way of doing HDR. So anyways, this is the result after Masked Stretch. And I'm going to go ahead and go right on and stretch it some more. So let's go into Histogram Transformation. I'll bring up the preview, the real-time preview by like clicking this little empty circle right there. And I'll choose this. And then you can see in the real-time preview what it's going to do. I'll go ahead and stretch it like that. And then I'll bring the black level over okay. So this looks very flat, but it's now stretched I think enough. So I'm just going to finish here a little bit of the sort of the stretching process with the Curves Transformation where we can apply a gentle kind of curve. I'll just bring up the real-time preview again where we take the shadows down. But then right above the shadow level we're going to bring it back up. So something like that. Perfect. Okay, so I mean this is already looking really good. Just I mean we haven't really even done anything major yet. Just background extraction and stretching. Stretching with three different processes just because I sort of like bits of each one. But next up let's go ahead and make a copy. So to make a copy in Pixinsight you just click on the little tab over here and drag it out and it makes a copy. It calls it a clone. And with this clone I'm going to apply a star removal process. And for the most part in my videos so far I've been talking about StarNet plus plus, but I just want to show a different one here since I have bought it. This is Russ Krowman's Star Exterminator. And to use it you just drag the triangle onto the image. And it uses its own neural net and training model that is different from the StarNet one. So sometimes it works better for me. Sometimes it works worse. So I keep them both and try them both. And it's really nice having both actually because sometimes one will do much better than the other. It really depends on the image. One thing I can say the Star Exterminator does better on is anything with diffraction spikes. It cleans those up much better. Okay, so it's done. There is our Starless version. I don't know. This over here is still looking a little bit green to me, but I might just crop that out anyways because I sort of just like this central part of the image for the most part. But anyways, I think we're done now in Pixinsight. We're going to move on to Photoshop, but we're going to go ahead and save these two files. And I will make these available as well if you want to just skip right to the Photoshop part. So let's call this stars. Save it as a TIFF file. 16-bit TIFF. And we'll call this one Starless. Also save it as a 16-bit TIFF file. Okay, and then I'm going to take these two files, right click, and open with Adobe Photoshop. Before I jump into Photoshop, let me just share a little bit about today's sponsor, which is Squarespace. Squarespace.com is a really easy to use website builder that I think you should give a try if you need a website because it's quite affordable and I've never found a website builder that works this well. It's just seamless. So I'm actually in the website builder right now. I just want to show it to you here because you actually see your website live. You can just click through your website and let's say I want to edit this page. I can just click edit and just like that I'm editing it. I can go in here and I can change, you know, the spacing of the pictures and everything that I do here is just a live change. Like there's no waiting. There's no coding. It's just it's pretty amazing how well it works. If I want to add more pictures, you know, it's just so simple. I can just click upload images, find my pictures, and upload them. And then they're live on the website. I can add descriptions, links. I can do all of that. And this was a template that I picked. It didn't take very long to find a really good looking template that worked. What I really like about it, I'm just going to say done with this one, is there's just so much built in that was easy. Not even easy, just there. You know, like I didn't have to find it like I have with other website builders. Like I wanted a contact form. That's something that almost everyone would want. And it just worked. I just, you know, you just say I want a contact page and it's just, it's there. It sends the form to your email. You don't have to deal with spam or figuring out which plugin works best or anything like that. So and that's just my feeling with all of, I've seen of Squarespace so far, is that everything is there for you. If I wanted to add a store, it would be really easy just to go ahead and add and set up a store. Because it's all right there. I don't have to, I don't have to think about, okay, I have to integrate PayPal and do all this stuff. Squarespace has thought through all of that for you. So anyways, I've recently added some of my pictures from Scotland. If you want to go take a look, nicocarver.com. This is all built on Squarespace. And if you are interested in having your own website with your own domain name, like I have nicocarver.com here, you can just head over to squarespace.com slash nebula photos. And you can get a free trial. And then after the free trial is up, if you want to continue, you can use the code nebula photos and get 10% off your first purchase on Squarespace. There we go. And I'm immediately going to combine them. I'm just going to take this stars picture, press command a to select or control a on windows, copy it, command C, and paste it command V. So now we have star list on here and stars on top, just like that. And then I'm going to take the stars layer, and I'm going to change the blending mode over here from normal to screen. And at first, that's going to make, you know, the whole picture quite a bit brighter, which is actually sort of nice for working on the picture. Because now I'm going to go back to my star list layer. And I'm going to add some adjustment layers above it. So first, I'm going to add a curves adjustment. And just play around with that, add more contrast. And then I'll add a saturation adjustment. Add saturation. Then I'm going to do basically the same thing on top of the stars layer that affects everything below it. So once again, I'm going to reset the black level, add in a bit more contrast. I'm going to be a little bit more careful with adding contrast here, because I don't want to blow out the stars too much. And at this point, whatever happened with this corner is just not going to be really recoverable. I don't know what exactly it is. Maybe flats would have fixed it. But anyways, let's go ahead and crop it out, because I don't want to deal with it. So I'm just going to crop so that that is no longer part of the picture. And I'm also going to crop on this side. Let me zoom in so you can see what I'm seeing. Because there's a little dark spot there, probably on the sensor. There's some more sensor spots over there. Flats again would probably work with those. I should also just clean the sensor, it seems. But instead of dealing with those, I'm just going to be really lazy and crop them out. Because I think this central part of the image is what's interesting anyways. Now, when we zoom in, you can see this picture, even though it is 15 minutes long, 15 minutes is not a huge amount of time with a dim object like this. So when we zoom in, we can still see there's plenty of noise in the image. So next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to apply a little bit of noise reduction. And I like to do that with the camera raw filter. So let's go ahead and make a new from visible command option shift E on Mac, or it would be control alt shift E on Windows. And I'm going to actually darken this a little bit because it's just a little too bright still. Okay. And then let's apply the filter. So camera raw filter. And I'm going to go down to detail. And I'm going to apply plenty of noise reduction and camera noise reduction and just a little bit of sharpening, but not very much. But plenty of these. Okay. Maybe I'll add a little bit of vibrance to yeah, just to that helps with the blues, bring up the blues a little bit, a little bit of saturation, not too much. Okay, I like that. Let's go ahead and click. Okay. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do some weird stuff with masks. So I'm just going to use the image itself to bring out the brightest parts of the image. So you'll see what I mean here in a second. I'm going to add an adjustment layer. We'll just add a curves adjustment layer. Then I'm going to click on this image, select it command a copy it, hold down the option key or the alt key on windows and click on this mask and paste it in there. And it turns black and white because masks have to be black and white, but we're actually just using the image itself to create a mask. And then anything that I do in this curve will be applied more to the brighter parts of the image. So I'm just going to increase contrast on the brighter parts a little bit by doing a small s-curve there. And then I'm also going to increase, just holding down option, I'm going to replace that mask or it'll be alt on windows, alt and drag. You know what? I'm going to actually feather out this mask a little bit. So it's a little bit like this. So see here's before feathering. I'm just going to feather it out a little bit so that it's really just applying to the nebulosity. And I'm just going to increase saturation and lightness of the nebulosity a bit. Okay, and then I'm going to do one more final master curve here to reset the black level again. And then I'm just seeing, I know they said that was the last thing, but I'm just seeing the corners look a little bright. So I'm just going to do one more curves layer. And I'm going to apply a circular gradient to this. So it's just going to be affecting the corners mostly and not the middle at all. I'm just going to crop one more time because the corners are still not exactly to my liking. Let's see if this helps. Yeah, it's helped a little bit. I don't know. Every time you process, the colors are a little different. This overall is maybe looking a little too magenta to me. Yes, that was the issue. See that? This is where it was with magenta. And I think, I know the problem. It was applying that SCNR green twice earlier that messed up the color balance of the overall picture a bit too much. I should have just know that I was going to crop later. This is the correct color balance, but it was like this. So this is mostly just knowing this field well enough to know, oh, there's not enough green in this image. Anyways, that was a mistake earlier. Should have realized at the time, but now it looks a lot better. Okay, so I think we're done. This is my final interpretation. Again, this was a single exposure challenge. I know that was a lot of nonsense I was doing here in Photoshop, but hopefully you got something out of it, just watching me process live and sort of talk through it. Again, everything I now have on my desktop, let me get rid of this, these two files and the raw file, I'm going to put up online for you to check out yourself and play around with. And if you do process it, feel free to share it on social media and say, you know, this is Nico's single exposure challenge. And this is my interpretation because I'd love to see them. At this point, I want to thank all of my wonderful patrons over on patreon.com slash nebula photos. And if you're interested in seeing your name in the credits of any of my long videos, any of the videos over 20 minutes, you can head over to this link and support me there. The support of the channel starts at just $1 per month. And then I also have a $3 and a $7 tier. And there are a number of benefits included for signing up on my patreon. These include a vibrant discord community where people post their photos, get photo critiques, help each other with gear and processing and everything related to astrophotography. And we also have a monthly challenge object that's a friendly competition with some prizes. We have a group project if you want to work on something collaboratively with others. And finally, there are some exclusive videos including a monthly live Q&A that's always recorded and shared right on patreon. So if you sign up, you can actually already watch 10 of those monthly chats. And then lastly, like I said, you get your name in the credits of any video longer than 20 minutes. So the link again is patreon.com slash nebula photos. I hope to see you there. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.