 Hey everyone, Nico Carver here. One thing I often enjoy is putting constraints on my astrophotography and then seeing what happens. And this approach is what led me to try untracked astrophotography for the first time where you take hundreds or thousands of short exposures without tracking and stack them all together, which is something I still really enjoy doing. And today I thought I'd go in the opposite direction and see what can happen with just a single shot. So let me set the scene. The other night as I was wrapping up and I was considering driving home from the dark site, I saw the Orion constellation on its side. And it was actually much higher than I expected, rising over in the east. And this was about 4 a.m. So I turned my gear over there that I was currently testing some things with and I took a single four minute long exposure of Orion. And so for this video, I'm gonna make that one photo that I took with no calibration frames, no stacking, look as good as I can as fast as I can. Cause this is a five minute Friday. For those curious, I took this photo that we're about to look at with this Ascar 200 millimeter Astro lens, which I have on loan from Agena Astro. Thank you, Agena. And a full spectrum Nikon D5300 that I have on loan from Night Sky Camera. So thank you to Night Sky Camera. And I'm planning to do shootouts with both of these in the next month or so on the channel. Last thing before I jump into Photoshop, if you wanna follow along or try to outdo me with my own photo, check the description. I'll put in a link where you can get the raw photo just for joining my email list. Okay, I've downloaded the raw file here. This is again from the Night Sky Camera full spectrum modified Nikon D5300. And because it's full spectrum modified, we have a very red look here because I didn't do any kind of white balance, custom white balance or anything like that. But that's no problem cause we can fix that with the white balance settings right over here. While I'm playing around with these sliders, I'm gonna be looking at these histogram peaks up here and trying to line up their left edges. So I want the green, the blue and the red left edges all to be lined up. And so I'm gonna start by taking the temperature and moving it down. And you can see now the red and the blue are pretty lined up. But now we gotta light up that green one. So I'm gonna go ahead and take that one and pull it over. And we're getting somewhere. Let's keep going. Okay. And I think right about there looks good. You can see that we've basically aligned these RGB curves. Now there's a little bit of red showing over here but that's completely normal because we have the horse head and the Orion Nebula which have some pretty bright red mid-tone highlights kind of thing going on. So I ended up at a temperature of 2,300 Kelvin with a tint of negative 90. Now of course those values don't mean anything. They'll be completely different depending on which camera you're using and how it recorded the scene. I'm really just doing this looking at the histogram and looking at the scene itself. And I think this looks fairly natural now. If you sort of know what Orion and the running man and the flame and horse head are supposed to look like you can just do this by eye. Now the other thing that I wanna do since this is just a single exposure is I'm gonna take the whites and drop those way down just to try to prevent any clipping because we're gonna do a fair amount of sort of processing of this photo. So I don't want to clip the whites at all. So I'm just gonna drop that down to negative 100. Okay. Next step, before we open it up into Photoshop I also wanna save off a TIF of this so that I can make a starless version with StarNet++. So I'm gonna go up here to the upper right and click on this little save icon. And I've already set this all up but we're gonna save it to the desktop. We're gonna save it as a TIF and we wanna make sure the depth is set to 16 bits per channel. And then we'll click save. And because this is a five minute Friday I'm not gonna show the StarNet++ process but I'll put a link in the description to a part of another video where I do show that. But it's pretty simple. You just download it and do a few steps and you can make starless versions of your images and I'm about to show you why that's a good thing to do. Okay, so now I have the starless version that I made with StarNet++ and I have the star filled version. And we're gonna start with the starless version here. The first thing I'm gonna do is just in case I need to start over I always like to make a copy first thing. So we're gonna make a duplicate of the background layer. I'm gonna do that by pressing Command J if you're on Mac or Control J on Windows. And you can see now we have layer one right here. And let's go ahead and just apply a bit of a stretch to this layer. So we're gonna press Command L on Mac or Control L on Windows to bring up the levels command. And I'm gonna take the shadows slider, move it to the right, take the mid-tone slider and move that to the left. You can see we can see a bit more now. And I'm gonna keep going with that actually a little bit more. And sometimes I just like to really bring this over and see exactly what we have. And you can see there's a lot of interesting nebulosity. We probably can't bring it all out because this is just a single exposure. But it sort of shows you what you could do with stacking because there's a lot of stuff here. We'll try our best to bring as much of it out as we can. But I'm gonna back off just a little bit here. Okay. And this is why actually I like bringing things in in a lower contrast and stretching them in Photoshop. You can see that the glow from the core here is a lot more natural than it looked in the rock inverter. I'm not sure what's going on there, but I enjoy stretching here and not in the rock inverter. Anyways, so we have some artifacts that are showing up now. We have the normal StarNet++ artifacts, the star halos and things like that. These little ones I'm not so worried about. The stars usually completely cover over those when we bring the stars back in. But these bigger halos we might wanna just clean up a bit. And then we have these satellite trails. And those I'm not gonna try to fix. It's just too much work. But if we were using stacking, those would completely go away with a rejection algorithm. Okay. Let me just quickly clone stamp out these halos. And I'm just using a soft clone stamp here to do this. There we go. And anything else we should do here. I don't think so. So let's go ahead and bring in our star layer. So I'm just gonna press Command A or be Control A on Windows to select all, then Command C, Control C on Windows and Command V or Control V on Windows to paste it in. It comes in as a normal layer and we're gonna wanna use a screen blend. There's lots of good options here. You can use lighten. I'm gonna use screen. And the first thing I'm gonna do after I screen blend that in is I'm gonna reset the black point. I'm gonna do this with a curves adjustment layer. Just take the black point here and drop it over this way. Okay. And this is looking pretty cool. I could stop right here but let's just go a little bit further with the processing. So I'm gonna add just a slight bit of an S-curve here to this, just a very slight one. Looks good. And the dust in Orion is looking very red because this is a full spectrum modified camera. I didn't use a UVI or a cut filter or anything like that. So it is letting in a lot of the near infrared. I'm gonna try to balance that out a little bit and make it a little bit more of its neutral brown color that it should be using the selective color adjustment layer. So I'm just gonna click selective color. And if you have it, if it defaults to reds just change it to blacks. And I'm gonna take out some magenta and then when you take out magenta you can often look too green. So then you're gonna have to balance that out by taking out maybe a little bit of yellow too. And then I'm going to go ahead and add black to cover up some of the noise and just make this a little bit more contrasty. The only thing that I'm gonna do to finish off this quick edit of a single shot is I think that this lower quarter of the picture is not very interesting. Now, if we had done a stacked exposure and really brought, been able to bring out the detail on this dust, it might be more interesting but right now it's too mixed with noise. So it doesn't look very inspiring. So I'm just gonna cut that off with a crop. So I'm gonna grab my crop tool here and let's just do a 16 by nine crop. Then this can be my cover image as well for this video. For a single photo challenge, I think that this looks pretty cool. And I hope you agree and had fun editing it with me. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver at NebulaFotos.com, clear skies.