 Did you know you can capture beautiful photos of the Milky Way and deep sky objects with photography gear? You may already have if you want to get started with deep sky astrophotography with just a camera a lens and a tripod Then this video will show you every step of the process including planning capturing and editing your photos Hi, everyone. My name is Nico Carver. I'm a deep sky astrophotographer and my website is at nebulaphotos.com And this YouTube channel is all about helping beginners get started with astrophotography Which I think is the most fun and rewarding hobby out there I'll also just mentioned briefly here at the start that I do have a patreon to support this channel and I want to thank everyone who's already supporting me on patreon It really means a lot and if you're interested in joining my patreon starts at just $1 a month in this video I'm going to show you how to capture deep sky objects and by that I mean objects out in space that are outside of our solar system and Specifically we'll be capturing nebulae. That's just the plural for nebula And we're going to be capturing the nebulae in the core of our own Milky Way galaxy Our framing is going to include the lagoon Trifid Omega and Eagle nebulae and If you've seen my previous no tracker video where we captured the Ryan nebula This one's going to be sort of similar but a little different Especially the processing and to keep it interesting. I'm also going to be shooting with not just One camera, but two I have here a stock Canon 60d and then I also bought a Canon 60d that's been modified for astrophotography And that means it fully passes the hydrogen alpha emission line The the idea in really simple terms is that red nebulae should appear brighter and a bit more Detailed and a bit more red in the final picture with this camera Compared to this camera. So anyways, I'll be shooting the same patch of sky with both cameras And then we'll compare the results at the end of the video to see how much of a difference a modified DSLR makes When we're doing untracked astrophotography just meaning astrophotography without Star tracker or an equatorial amount But the main focus of this video is just learning the steps So I'm going to show you every step of how I'm going to plan this out capture and edit some photos of the core of The Milky Way it's sort of like a Milky Way photography where we are shooting the Milky Way core and we'll see it But I'm not doing a really wide-angle Milky Way photography with landscape We're gonna be shooting at 50 millimeter a little bit more zoomed in on and trying to feature the deep sky objects Because I'm gonna show every step and detail along the way I know this video is gonna be long, but there is gonna be a table of contents with time stamps in the description So feel free to skip ahead if you want There's a lot to go over if you just want to see the processing just skip to that Also in the description will be a link to my website with sample files exactly what I'm shooting So if you want to follow along with the processing part using the same files, I'm working with then you can All right enough intro. Let's get into it So let's start with the three pieces of equipment You'll need to take pictures of a deep sky object and luckily they're things I think most photographers already have the first thing you'll need is a tripod and For astrophotography the sturdier the tripod the better However, sometimes when you're traveling Especially do a dark site maybe Somewhere, you know exotic you'll need something small and so for this shot I'm gonna be using my backpacking tripod, which is this me photo road trip It's 100 $100 new I believe and it will work fine for this purpose The main thing you want to make sure with a tripod that has a ball head like this one is that it's designed to Support your camera and lens and that you can tighten it down Nice and tight so that it doesn't slowly droop under the weight of the camera and lens when you're doing long exposures It really needs to stay put and not move so that we get nice round stars And sometimes what you'll find is that the tripod is fine But the ball head that it came with is not up to the job in that case you can just go to a store like B&H and Find a replacement ball head with good reviews and specs and your price range and when I say specs I mean you really want to get something that's weighted for much more weight than you're putting on it Then when you get your replacement ball head all you do is you unscrew the old one And you put on the new one. So this is a Ball head out of Germany that's weighted for 60 pounds. It's been pretty good to me And the thing I like about it is that you can you can really loosen this ball head up and Then you can do this friction tightening like this And so then it's pretty secure But then you can really lock it down with this knob and now it's like incredibly secure and it's not going to Move at all. Okay for the camera as I mentioned, I'll be using the Canon 60d Which is not the newest and greatest that Canon makes But a big part of my motivation here is to show you that you can do this with the camera that you have Don't feel like you have to go out and buy a new camera for instance Just use what you have first And as I said in the intro, I have a stock 60d and then I have this Modified 60d. I bought both of these cameras used They're not available new the stock 60d was $300 on eBay and the modified 60d was $400 So just $100 more on cloudy nights classifieds, which is a really Great forum and then the classifieds is a good place to buy used astrophotography here on both cameras I installed something called magic lantern firmware and what that is is it's additional firmware that you put on the SD card and So you just take the SD card out you put it in your computer You add it to this and then you can install it and it does break your warranty because there are certain risks with Hacking your camera a little bit But since these are both out of warranty and I've used magic lantern before I wasn't so concerned about that aspect of it But maybe you should be so just fair warning But the reason I'll be using magic lantern tonight is for the built-in Intervalometer that that adds to Canon cameras and an intervalometer is just a fancy word for an interval timer Meaning something that can take a programmed sequence of photos So you could set up your camera to take a two-second photo Wait a second a true for the mirror to settle then take another photo and on and on like that for as long as you set it to go So you can set it for a hundred two hundred photos walk away from your setup so that you're not Messing with it and tonight what we're gonna do that We're gonna take hundreds of photos of the same patch of sky and again The reason for taking hundreds of photos is to lower the random noise in each shot By stacking them together and averaging them This is something that we called image stacking and we're gonna see that in you know in action in the processing section of this video Anyways back to intervalometers You may find that your camera already has an internal intervalometer or interval timer That you can access through the menus a lot of Fuji Panasonic cameras have those And maybe or maybe you could add an intervalometer with something like magic lantern That's what I'm doing another good option is to buy a small external intervalometer like this one by newer I'll have some links in the description if you're interested it costs about thirty five dollars and most DSLRs or mirrorless cameras will have The ability to just plug something like this right in just make sure you get the intervalometer that's designed for your camera and basically all I have to do then is just Program the sequence in right here on the front using the buttons and then when I'm ready It's all set up and focused. I just press start on here it starts taking photos and I've set this up to take a photo every few seconds and Then on the camera. I have that set to take two second pictures and It'll just keep taking photos for as long as you set it to do it So I just set it to take four photos and it just took four Very easy to operate and works really well Okay, another option though even cheaper if you don't want to spend thirty five dollars is you can just get a Cable release. This is like ten dollars Mikey and Goes into the same port on your camera And then what we can do is either just you know sit back on a chair and just take the pictures One by one with that or you can set your camera on continuous drive mode rather than single shooting and Then just lock the cable release And then what it'll do is there's no delay. It'll just keep taking photos one after another So not quite as good. The reason is is because with a DSLR The mirror is going up and down so you might get some vibration that way But I've actually tested this and didn't get any vibration in my photos But you'll have to try it if you already have a cable release It might be a good option and finally yet another option for newer cameras is to use apps on your smartphone to control your camera These 60d's that I have are too old. They don't have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth communication So I can't show that working, but I have tried this with my newer cameras and it can work just fine They basically talk with the the smartphone over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or both and then you can control the camera and Set up a sequence of shots So there are many options for actually taking the photos the thing we're trying to avoid is Actually touching the camera's shutter button to take the photos so Like this The reason is is that just by pressing it like that even if you're on a steady tripod You'll get some vibration shake by doing that if that's your only option You don't have any other way to control the camera then what I would recommend is just put it on a two second delay and almost any camera has something like that like a timer mode and then you press the button and completely remove your hand and Try to stay very still while taking the picture too of course because you don't want the ground to move and that that can work I've tried it. It's a little tedious, but it does work for the lens. I'll be using Canon's nifty 50 on both my 60d's This is officially their 50 millimeter f 1.8 STM lens and it's regularly a hundred and twenty five dollars But it also regularly goes on sale for about ninety nine dollars new so I picked up both of my copies at ninety nine And I'll be shooting at a focal ratio of f2 meaning the aperture is going to be stopped down Just a little bit from wide open wide open on these is f 1.8 and the reason to stop down meaning making the aperture opening inside the lens smaller is Typically lenses perform a bit better with star shape when stopped down Meaning wide open a corner star may look a little like a little seagull when we zoom in on it See it sort of messed up, but stop down a bit the stars look more like they should little pinpoints of light However, the trade-off of stopping down the aperture at all is whenever you stop down You're letting in less light less light is hitting the sensor since the aperture opening is getting smaller Remember the aperture is a fraction so with each stop on the scale From f2 to f2.8 to f4 You're letting in half as much light each time you stop it down and So if possible for this tutorial, I would shoot at f4 or wider meaning f4 f2.8 f2 etc But if your lens only goes as wide as let's say f 5.6 meaning That's the smallest number the smallest f ratio then don't let that stop you from trying It's just not as ideal for untracked astrophotography since we're dealing with such short exposures since we're not tracking as a quick aside If you do have a tracker then these so-called slower focal ratios of like f 5.6 f 6 f 7 Those will work just fine Because we can easily do much longer exposures because we're tracking so You basically counteract the fact that you're not letting in as much light by tracking and doing a much longer exposure But there are limits to this like you don't wouldn't want to do deep-sky astrophotography It's something like f22 because there's just not going to be enough light to make that work If you have a selection of lenses or a zoom lens The next thing we need to pick is the focal length and so I would strongly advise staying at 100 millimeters or under so 50 80 70 all those are good if you've tried Untracked astrophotography before and you want to experiment with some of these higher focal lengths then go for it But for your first time out I think the sweet spot of what we're trying to do which is capturing bright deep sky objects without tracking is In my opinion somewhere from around 24 millimeters Up to 85 millimeters and the reason is is that the shorter the focal length the longer we can expose So we can expose maybe for five or six seconds at 24 millimeters and then only two seconds at 50 millimeters, let's say So star trails are the limiting factor to how long we can expose for and again star The reason that stars trail is due to the Earth's rotation In the 24 to 85 millimeter range though Anywhere in there we can usually at least do like one to two second exposures at a minimum That's going to give us some decent signal if we do really bright DSOs Personally, I try to avoid going under around one second exposures this technique because it's hard to overcome the noise when you go really really short and so and then the reason I don't suggest like going to fish eye or 14 millimeter lens is that focal length you're basically into Landscape astrophotography territory where yeah, it will be a you can get a really beautiful shot of the Milky Way But the any deep sky object is going to be really really really small in your sensor So you're not going to resolve much detail when you're at 14 or 10 millimeters or something like that So at 24 millimeters you can start to resolve some of the bigger bright nebulae and for me The the sort of really ideal is something like 50 to 85 millimeters because that's sort of Right in between where you can resolve some detail But you can also do somewhat longer exposures like one to two seconds for each exposure Okay, and that's it for equipment now. There are additional accessories Of course, there's always more things you can do in astrophotography, but I'm going to try to keep it really simple tonight I'm not going to use a bottom-up mask because I may have mentioned in my past video They typically don't work that well at 50 millimeters or under anyways So we're just going to manually focus on a star and just try to get it as small as possible in the live view of the camera I'm also not going to be using anything to control Possible do formation on the lens the reason I'm not going to do that tonight is because since the lagoon nebula is Basically low on the horizon the lens isn't going to be pointed up and usually when the lens is pointed this way I don't have any do problems. It's only when it's pointed straight up that do collects on the lens But if you are shooting something that's straight up one really easy way to prevent do is just get some hand warmers that are like Activated by shaking them and then just rubber band them around the lens. So that's it for equipment At 85 millimeters or 70 millimeters You might optionally want to get a bottom-up mask because they really do start to work. Well at that focal length But you don't need one Next we have to figure out where to go shoot and the unavoidable truth with astrophotography is the darker the sky You can shoot under the better your results will be and So you can try to work around that fact, you know, I do a lot of narrow band work So these are really expensive filters so I can shoot in the city and that works pretty well But the truth is no matter what kind of gear you buy you still have this unavoidable issue of light pollution and if you can get under dark skies your results will always be better all That said you can definitely still try this out if you live in the city It's just if at all possible to get somewhere dark go for it because it's just amazing It's a better experience and your photos will be better Now I'll say if you're brand new to this and you're planning You know to spend some money on a camping trip or something to go try out astrophotography under dark skies Please practice first from wherever you live Don't make it your first time trying astrophotography on an expensive trip because things like focusing and using the camera And the dark can be pretty hard your first time out And so if you give if you practice those you'll you'll feel ready for that big trip to the dark site And I think you'll you'll have a much smoother experience If you're not sure where to go to find dark skies There's a good website for trying to estimate how dark a location will be it's called light pollution map info And what it does is it uses satellite imagery and surveys to estimate how light polluted the skies will be anywhere in the world If you're new to the night sky It's also good to download a planetarium app on your phone and learn how to use it a bit before going out They're not hard to figure out the cool and the cool thing about using these apps is they make finding stuff much easier Because they use the phone's compass and gyroscope to tell you exactly where in the sky Your deep sky object should be you just hold it up You line up your camera With where it says it should be on the phone and you and adjust the tilt a little bit until you Find it on your camera's live view and you found it And you can you can look at star patterns and things like this to make sure you're in the right spot And you can even change the time in the app so you can do some planning ahead of time This is what I do a lot of times I'll plan to see when the object is going to rise How high it's going to be in the sky And and for example, if the app says something like well this deep sky object It's only going to get five degrees off the horizon at its highest all night. Then you can forget about shooting it. That's too low My rule of thumb is like something like 15 degrees is as low as I'm going to go And that's if I really have a good horizon the lagoon which we're shooting the night I'm going to put it in the lowest part of my photo and it's going to be about 20 to 23 degrees for a few hours But keep in mind also that trees and can be buildings can be a really big hindrance so The best kind of location to find is one that has something called good horizons meaning If you look out there's no obstructions close by like a big field or a or a body of water Like a lake or the ocean sites like this that are really have good horizons and are dark or called dark sites and Ask around because a lot of Local astronomy clubs You know might know where these are in your area. Okay to calculate my exposure time I use something called the npf rule if you're interested in why I use this rule As opposed to something like the rule 400 or rule 500. I've made a whole video about that topic Which you can find on my channel To Calculate the npf rule. I use the original source calculator So you can find this on google by googling something like this or I'll put the link in the description of this video So we're going to pull up this website. It is in french But if you're using chrome web browser, there is a little handy Translate google translate tool right up here. So i'm just going to switch it from french to english And then it gives me a An okay translation of this page So if you're interested in how the rule works, uh, there's a bunch of information here at the top and way more at the bottom for understanding it But what we're going to do is we're going to use this calculator right here starting it where it says camera details And if you have a newer camera, don't try to choose anything right here You're just going to enter in your information manually And the way to find this information manually is Just to again google and Google the name of your camera. So i'll do canon eos r And then do pixel size And often the first thing that will come up is this digicam database dot com And i have found this is a good source for this information And so here where it says pixel pitch 5.34 microns That's what i would put in right here And then for number of pixels and width and height i think you usually have to Uh scroll down a little bit on this page on the digicam database till you get to sensor resolution And then the first number is always the width So six seven four one And the second number is the height Okay, so it's it's that simple just google google your camera name plus pixel size and usually the first um Thing that will come up is a handy website like this one Digicam database that will allow you to find all that information and put it in manually Now if you have an older camera like me instead what you can do is just choose the the make And the model right from this list and it will fill in the information for you Everyone i think is going to be dealing with a color Sensor, uh, so just leave that alone If you have one of these kinds of sensors you would already know and you can choose that For the focal length we're doing 50 millimeters And f2 Okay, um This is marginally important. It really it really matters if you're shooting directly north Then you can often get very much longer exposure times because You're closer to the north star or if you're in the southern hemisphere directly south But for other things it doesn't matter so much, but we'll use it anyways We're going to be shooting towards the southeast where the milky way will be And the latitude of our shooting location is Let's say 46 degrees And the target height above the horizon. I said was 23 degrees If you don't know these things just guesstimate, uh, you can use your planetarium application to try to figure them out Okay, go ahead and click calculate the exposure time And then just scroll down to this yellow box and the information that we want is in this, uh grid of nine squares You can see that for my camera, um, it's telling me two seconds You know on this corner, maybe we could get away with 2.1 seconds, but if you if you get a Something like 2.5 or something like that just always round down. So because usually a camera can't do Uh, something like 2.5 anyways, so you're just going to be rounding down anyways So we've figured out our exposure time is two seconds It does compare that to other rules here a simplified mpf rule a rule of 500 and a rule of 500 Uh, with equivalent focal length Oh, by the way, uh, this equivalent focal length thing reminded me a lot of people have asked me Should I try to figure out the equivalent focal length when I enter in my focal length here? No, so even though I am using a crop sensor camera I'm not going to change my focal length here because this calculator Calculates everything it takes everything into account You don't have to go ahead and try to figure out an effective focal length Just put in whatever the lens says on it, uh, right there, um And put in the information as accurately as you can and this will be the answer This will be the max exposure time we can get until Uh, stars start to streak or get out of round All right, the last thing to do, um before leaving the house is just to make sure all your gear is ready to go And that means, uh charging your camera battery to full If you have an extra battery charge that one to full two, um If you will get into this, but make sure you have a good memory card You format it so that uh, it's ready to go. You have plenty of space. You can also bring an extra memory card I'm really into extras of everything. So, uh Don't feel like you have to buy extras of everything, but it's just how I am. I always have extras um We also want to make sure that our camera is on all the right settings before we leave And so let's go through all the menus on this, um Canon 60d Um and make setup for deep sky astrophotography But if you have a different brand and you know, then things will be a little bit different than this Nikon is a little bit different. Sony is a little bit different But if you don't see a particular setting, don't worry about it Just follow along as much as you can and it should work out fine There's really, you know, only a few really important settings and I'll I'll definitely highlight those as we go through Okay, I'm going to start in the quick menu here, which you just get by pressing q on a Canon camera And most uh DSLRs have some kind of quick menu like this And I'm going to set the aperture the shutter speed and the iso I'm not going to set them to the values. I think I'm actually going to use for shooting which would be Something like f2 iso 1600 and I think we found out two seconds Instead I'm going to set them a little bit more aggressive, which I use for Framing so just for finding my object. I want to go as fast An aperture is possible I want to go a little bit more aggressive on the shutter speeds a little bit longer exposure And I usually pick a higher iso And this just allows me to see the image a little bit Clear to see if I have it framed up if I actually Have it framed up on the milky way as I want and then when I'm ready to shoot I change these values back to what I actually want to take my hundreds of pictures with To get round stars and things like that Okay, so again Just set these a little bit more aggressively than you would normally a little bit higher iso a little bit faster f-stop and longer exposure And then you can dial them back to what you want after you've found your object The other thing that I do in the quick menu is instead of having it on single shooting I always put it on two second timer I find that really useful when I'm trying to find my object because then I don't have to hassle with an intervalometer or anything else I can just take a two second delayed picture So it's it's it's going to be sharp because I'm not actually Hitting the shutter button. It takes the picture immediately. It waits two seconds before taking the picture And that way I can get a sharp exposure that lets me know if I'm in the right area And how focus is and things like that Uh, other thing I can set in here We could also set this in the main menu is how I wanted to take the pictures So right now it's set to raw plus jpeg. I actually don't need a jpeg. I just need the raw So I'm just going to turn off the jpeg option there and just get raw frames if you Forget everything else. Just always make sure before you go out to set your DSLR or mirrorless camera to raw you it's much better And you can actually calibrate your files if they're in raw mode if they're not it's it applies a Transformation inside the camera and you won't be able to properly calibrate with darks flats and bias Also in here we have our white balance mode. I always just put this on Uh daylight for extra photography It doesn't really matter since we are shooting raw We can always we're always going to change the white balance after the fact and post processing But just as a habit. I always put mine on daylight Everything else is looking pretty good here Let's go ahead and go to the big menu now. So I'm just going to hit the menu key Okay, we already set our quality but just to show you you can also set it in there So we haven't set to raw I always turn off any kind of sounds just because I find them annoying at night to deal with beeps and things I also turn off the image review This can be handy when you're framing, but I find it's just as easy just to go into playback mode Then I can look at the histogram and things like that in playback mode And the problem with having image review on is once you actually start taking your pictures It will turn on that screen every few seconds and that can really heat up the camera And drain the battery and do other bad things. So we don't want that. I'm going to turn it off Most of these settings are not really Don't really have anything to do with astrophotography and will now have no impact basically things like picture style are just for the jpeg transformation So you don't have to worry about it Like I said, white balance doesn't really matter too much if you're going to do a the processing like we're doing Color space again, that only applies to the jpeg transformation and won't be an issue for raw files Sometimes uh, oh Yeah, sometimes, uh, you'll see an option in these menus. It's not on this canon 6d because it's too old but for um Something related to iso like a like an iso noise reduction or some kind of noise reduction Option if you have if your camera has that I would recommend turning it off I know that sounds sort of counterintuitive. We want to reduce noise, but um, it messes with calibration and calibration is how we're going to Really reduce a lot of unwanted noise. So I would turn any kind of noise reduction option off if your camera has it um Live view shooting we want enabled And we do want exposure simulation enabled too. That just makes the the picture brighter in the live view Okay, these are mostly about playback The one thing that I want to point out here in the playback mode is this histogram option So you can set your histogram and playback to brightness or rgb Both are really useful For evaluating exposure overall, I usually just leave it on brightness But sometimes it is really helpful to go into the rgb Histograms and see where your different channels lie because a lot of times You want to at least get your weakest channel, which is usually red Off of the noise floor meaning off of the very left hand side of the histogram This is more applicable though to tracked astrophotography. So it doesn't really matter for us too much um Okay, uh auto power off. I usually set this to something really high or even just disable it entirely I'll just set it to 30 minutes Because when I'm working I don't want to have to deal with auto power off Auto rotate I turn this off and I would recommend everyone do that because Um, I have seen with the stacking programs auto rotate Somehow getting interpreted and messing up the stacking. So I would turn it off um Format so this is where you can format your card. I'm not going to do that right now because I'm not sure what's on this But I do recommend it. Uh, just to make sure you have enough room So go to you know back up your entire sd card and then format it before you go out And it's it's always best to format it in the camera To for the best results rather than you know erasing things on the computer I always format on the camera to get a very clean starting point Okay, I usually turn my lcd brightness up uh all the way. Um When I'm it's really useful for when you're framing objects when you're trying to understand You know, do I have it in frame that to have that lcd brightness high? Then after you've found your object you can go back in here and turn it back down. Um If you remember because it does save on battery to turn the lcd brightness down and can also Help with your night vision Date and time it's very important. I think to set the correct date and time Because later on you're going to want to remember well, when did I take those files and uh, you know, I sort of remember I took some files of the lagoon on August 3rd, but if that date time is set wrong, then you don't know when you took them and it's not as helpful Um, okay sensor cleaning um this one Can be good to have the auto cleaning. Um, but what I usually do is actually um Before I start doing any extra photography. I do the auto cleaning on the sensor And then I turn auto cleaning off The reason for that is that um, if for some reason you have to change a battery or something like that Um, and then you put the battery back in you power your camera back on it does the auto cleaning You know automatically when you're turning the camera off and on and if you haven't done your flats yet Then the auto cleaning can can mess up the dust Particles on your sensor and then your flats won't match your lights So I always I always do a cleaning and then disable the sensor cleaning property. That's how I get around that Okay, I think we're we've reached the end here of the options that matter So that's it. Um, we've gone through all of the different camera options and set them up for astrophotography All right, tonight we're going to see how a stock DSLR compares to a full spectrum DSLR These are both Canon 60d's but one has been modified for astrophotography And we're going to be shooting ha emission nebulae. That's where it really makes a difference between Modifying your DSLR versus having a stock DSLR. And so if you've been wondering Doesn't make sense for me to modify my DSLR This little test should help because we're going to be using the same lens Same camera body. The only difference here is that one is modified and one is not Okay, it's starting to get dark, but it's not quite dark enough to start shooting our lights yet meaning our pictures in the night sky But we can start shooting our calibration frames because I think the temperature is stabilized and so I'm going to start with my bias frames and to shoot bias frames what you're going to want to do is Cover the lens so that it's completely dark So I'm just going to put my lens cap on and it's just pointed at you know the dark sky and then I'm going to set my shutter speed to The fastest it can go so for this camera. That's one eight thousands of a second For some cameras that might be Like one four thousands of a second, but just set it to as fast as it can go And I'm going to do everything at ISO 1600. I have found that's a good ISO value for this camera Okay, and then I just want to take a bunch of these So I could either just set up an intervalometer or what I usually do since camera shake and things like that aren't going to matter is I just put it on to Continuous shooting mode and just hold down the trigger for a while So that I can take 100 Or so if you Don't Want to do it that way though. You can always use your intervalometer Okay, and then I'm going to take my dark frames Which should be the same exposure length as my lights And I know from the npf rule that we're going to do two second lights tonight So I'm just going to set this to two seconds Keep the lens Cap on the lens so that we're taking these in complete darkness keep the ISO the same And then I'm just going to take About 30 or 50 of these I'll use my intervalometer again Okay, and for my last type of calibration frame here This is our flats and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this led tracing panel That I bought for about 30 dollars off of amazon And I'm going to put it on top of the lens here with the camera pointed straight up But before I put it on I have this sort of a tracing paper diffusion material on Attached to the lens with a rubber band You can also use a clean white t-shirt to do the same thing Basically the diffusion is just so that we can get slightly longer exposures and avoid any banding issues Okay, and then the way I'm going to take these I've just put the camera into live View mode and I'm looking at the screen here And I can see that two seconds is way too bright because when I hold the shutter button down halfway It tells me that's over three stops overexposed So I'm going to bring this down to Let's try one eighth of a second. It's still overexposed Okay, and I'm just looking at that little meter down at the bottom Now at one fifteenth of a second we're about one and a half stops overexposed Okay, if I bring it down to I'm going to say it's somewhere around here one 40th or one 50th of a second looks about right Let's try one 50th of a second I know you can see some some very quick banding there That's that's fine. I think that one 50th of a second is going to be long enough to avoid it, but we'll see It's going to go ahead and take a picture and I'm going to press The info button And you can see there is our Histogram mountain and you can see that it is about one third of the way over so that looks good um I usually Air on the side of a little bit under exposed flat rather than overexposed Right in the middle is fine too But a little bit underexposed has always worked for me as long as you're you know seeing the entire histogram mountain It's not clipped on either side and it's at least a quarter of the way over on the histogram Usually that kind of flat will work fine. The other thing that I'm looking for here is that uh If I click the info button again that all three color channels are represented So you can see that in the rgb histogram there And if I look at it that I'm not seeing any banding issues That happen sometimes when you take a short flat like this and what those would Look like is horizontal dark lines across the frame I don't see any banding issues, but I'll probably take a few more flats just to make sure that they don't pop up And then if I'm happy with this I'll go ahead and take about 30 to 40 flats Okay, it's now time to focus usually I focus on a bright star in the sky But since jupiter is out and that's brighter than any star. I thought it would be Good for this example just because it's so bright that we'll be able to really see it easily in the video And so, uh, even though it's not a point source it it should work okay for this example And basically what we're trying to do is just make the star as Small on the screen as possible and Using manual focus so you put it on to manual focus mode on your lens if there's a switch And then you'll just use the focus ring Back and forth until you find that spot Where the star is the smallest it can be And usually this takes a little bit of trial and error And I found that on a bright star when you get it to the smallest Focus point usually you see a little chromatic aberration a little bit of pink magenta tone around the star And the other thing to look for is smaller stars should all of a sudden just pop out So basically when you really get into focus you'll see these little small stars just sort of pop out of nowhere Um and with jupiter you can really see it here because jupiter's moons are really not visible until we get Into focus and then all of a sudden you see that little those two little moons right to the side of jupiter here Okay, now it's time to point our camera at our deep sky object. Um The lagoon nebula is also known as m20 messier 20 And so i'm just using the free application sky map here on my android phone To find where it is i'm just holding it up in front of the sky and I can see it should be in this direction So i'm going to point my camera in that direction and then just use the live view To find it All right, I've now found uh the milky way and the lagoon nebula and uh, so So i'm going to go ahead and take a test picture. There we go Um, I can see the milky way there. Uh, it's a little bit cloudy still, but hopefully those go away Let me uh zoom in here so I can uh show you where the lagoon is in this The lagoon is pretty easy to spot because even in this uh three second test picture We can see some nebulosity And then we can also see the nice cluster of stars in the lagoon core there So this is looking pretty good, but i'm going to go down to two seconds to make sure that I have pinpoint stars I'm going to go here into my quick menu and actually set this up for um Shooting so ISO 3200 is a little too high. I'm going to bring that back down to ISO 1600 I have a rule of thumb that for older canon cameras like this always pick either 800 or 1600 and for Untracked astrophotography like this. I always go with 1600 I'm not going to get into the reasons why but that's what I do for these cameras um For the shutter speed we found from the npf rule that for this camera and this 50 millimeter lens We want two second sub exposures. So that's what I'm going to set it to And for the aperture before I said I was going to go with f2 But I've changed my mind last minute here and I'm going to go wide open at f 1.8 The reason is is just because from this dark site I think that I need as much light as I can get and just looking at some of my test shots here Uh, I'm comfortable with f 1.8. I'll accept the sort of Weird stars on the edge, which I'm going to crop away anyways, so Okay, so that's it. We've set our shutter speed our aperture and the ISO correctly last thing I'm going to do here I'm going to turn off the self timer set it to single shooting Okay, if you have an external Intervalometer, you would now be ready to program that and start your sequence that way since I'm using an internal Intervalometer via magic lantern. I'm just going to hit the trash button on my Canon camera here And to enter the magic lantern menu system, and I'm just going to go over here to the intervalometer option Turn that on Press q to set the options I actually want it to take a picture every three seconds because I want to give a little bit of time for the mirror to Open and close and not cause vibration issues. I should say possible vibration issues. I've never really seen them I'll start the trigger meaning start the sequence after I leave the menu and I want it to start after 12 seconds because I want to give plenty of time for me to sit back and get away from the camera and not Stomp around too much and I'm going to uh, do 150 shots and then at that point I'm going to Check focus reframe that kind of thing Um Have I I've had a lot of questions about what to set this to how do you know how long you should go before you reframe? um, it's really sort of a guess um an educated guess, uh You don't want to let it go too long because then you know your your main subject will be get too off center And you'll have to do so much cropping in post. Um, but you also, you know, want to give it a good run before you Have to constantly be checking it. Um, so I usually do something like Uh 100 to 200 or something like that. Um, and that's with these low focal lengths like 50 millimeters If you're shooting at something like 200 millimeters untracked then you would want to Um Set this much lower set it like 30 or 40 and reframe More consistently through the night. Um, so that you don't have to crop So much because You know the more zoomed in you are basically the more you're going to have to reframe to keep your object centered on screen Okay, that's good. Take a picture every three seconds start the trigger after leaving the menu and start after 12 seconds Okay, take 150 shots Okay, that's it. We can now hit the trash button again to leave the magic lantern menu and it'll start the sequence Okay, so we're back inside and the first thing we have to do to actually start, uh, Processing our files is actually get them onto the computer organized And I'm actually going to start with the camera Because uh in playback mode on the camera, it's really easy to actually understand which files are which because Most cameras have an info button that then gives you some metadata about the file in playback mode and That way I can just quickly see not only Um, visually what kind of file it is. So obviously the ones with stars will be lights and the ones that's all Uh, Bright like this is a flat But when it comes to the files that are completely black like bias and darks, it's hard to differentiate those without the metadata So looking in the upper left hand corner here, it tells us the shutter speed and so a Dark would have a shutter speed that's the same as the light two two seconds While a bias frame would have a shutter speed That's one eight thousandths of a second, which is the fastest, uh, shutter speed this camera can do So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to open up Notepad on my windows computer here There's also a program called text edit on Mac both of these are just quick note-taking Uh applications and I'm going to type in lights darks bias Flats because that's the order that I took these files in And I'm just going to take note here of the file names the range Uh of each type so we can see the first light here is ends in eight three one The file name, so I'm just going to type in eight three one dash And then I'm going to press the zoom out button And just use my uh scroll wheel here to scroll down Until we see something that doesn't look like a light frame meaning we don't see the milky way anymore It'll turn probably completely black eventually Took a lot of light frames There we go. Okay, so you can see starting with one one three five This is a completely black frame and because it's two seconds. I know that it's a dark. So the the last uh light frame is one one one two And then I guess I deleted some files Probably because the clouds came in and then the first dark frame is One one three five Okay, now I'll just keep scrolling Until up there in the upper left hand side of the screen it changes from Two seconds to one eight thousands of a second and then I know this is my last dark frame So one one eight zero and my first bias frame is one one eight one. Okay, and then I'll just keep scrolling Until we get to the flats Looks like I took about a hundred bias frames There we go 1280 is the last bias frame And then my first flat frame is 1437 I know that's a a huge jump there in numbers. Um I deleted some things from the card just to make this a little bit uh easier Um, so then I'll just keep scrolling. Whoops And my last flat frame is one four six five Okay, so now I have everything all of the information that I need to organize these files because I have the file names and Uh, the numbers here and what type of file they are and so now what I can do is I can just remove the memory card from the camera And take my memory card reader here And this is a nice usb 3 memory card reader that's nice and fast for transferring the files to the computer It's made by kinkston And it also has slots for other type of memory cards if you have uh camera with cf or something else um Okay, and it says blah blah blah. I don't care It opens up that in the file explorer if you're on mac this would be finder And uh, if it if it does if the memory card opens up in some other program some photos application just close out of that We don't need it What we're going to do now with uh, this window open over here and our notepad file here Is we're going to copy the files off of the memory card onto the computer But before we do that, um, let's make some empty folders to transfer them to So i'm going to make a new folder on the desktop just right click and choose new folder and i'll call this lagoon And then inside my lagoon folder i'm going to make four sub folders just the same way right click new folder And i'm going to make one for lights one for darks one for bias And one for flats Okay, now with these two windows open Here's my memory card. I'm going to go in here into my picture files And here's my empty folders on my desktop I'm going to start with lights and so lights go from eight three one to one one one two So i'm going to open up my lights folder Over here on my memory card. I'm going to click on the first file eight three one And scroll down Until I get to one one one two There it is and hold down shift and click and so shift click Makes it so that you can grab the whole list of files Then i'll just left click and drag to drag these 282 files over to my lights folder and let go And it copies them Okay, the copying is done. So now i'm going to go back a folder just by clicking on lagoon And next i'll go into darks So i'll click on the darks folder It says the folder is empty. Then i'll just copy over from 11 35 to 11 80 So i'll click once on 11 35 scroll down Shift click on 11 80 Copy those to my darks folder Well, that's going I can look the next it's bias 11 81 to 12 80 So open up my bias folder Click on 11 81 scroll down to 12 80 Shift click and click and drag 100 bias files Okay, and then finally flats is everything else here So we'll just copy those over to the flats folder And then we'll be done. Okay all done. The only other thing I want to say about um um file organization here Is uh, that if you are using deep sky stacker um When it stacks together all of these bias frames to make a master bias It leaves that master bias file In this folder So if you have a previous project that you worked on and you still, um Have all of these folders look in your bias folder. There's a master bias File in there that then you can reuse for project after project. You don't have to um Take the bias frames all over again and restack them. You can save some time just by Reusing a master bias file. So that's why I I shot a hundred bias frames just to get a really good um Master bias file and then we don't have to actually shoot those bias frames again We can reuse that master bias file over and over again Okay, I'll close out of this stuff And now let's go ahead and open up deep sky stacker here Okay, this is deep sky stacker 4.2.3 the 64 bit version The first thing I'm gonna do here is go down here to settings and go to stacking settings And Right here where it says temporary file files where it says temporary files folder You can see that I have mine set up to an external drive the d drive, which is just a External hard drive. I have connected But yours might be um on the local drive And that's fine as long as you have plenty of hard drive space, but um, if you don't for some reason, I would recommend setting this up um To where you want it to go where you have plenty of space because these temp files can get really really big like It since we're stacking hundreds and hundreds of frames these these temp files can get up to like 60 gigabytes Now they are temp files. I mean, they're temporary They only are are there when you have the program open and then when you close the program they're deleted from your hard drive But still you need the space. So if you're working off a fairly small like startup drive like an ssd You may want to pick a different location for this temporary files folder like I did Okay, with that said we can now open up our picture files. This means our lights And so I'm just going to navigate here to the desktop And then to my lagoon folder Into my lights sub folder And I'll just click on any of them and then press control a to select all and click open Okay, it brings them in um For some reason, uh deep sky stacker has this quirk where I think it's because you could just bring in All of your frames all at once and it let it try to figure out Which are your light dark and flat and bias, but I really wouldn't recommend that because I might Mess something up. So what I usually do is I just bring in my light frames first But none of them are checked right now. So then I go over here and just click check all Okay, then it tells me I have 282 light frames Okay, then I can click over here on the left hand side under open picture files where it says dark files Just go to my darks folder And again, click press control a and open up all my dark files And it tells me I have 46 of those Then I'll open up my flat files Open those 29 And finally my bias files open Okay, we're not using dark flats Uh, you usually only need to use dark flats if you're shooting really really long flats like 30 seconds or something like that If you're using a slow scope or something like that But we we shot very quick flats So I'm not worried about dark current noise and we don't need to correct the flats with dark flats Anyways, we have all of this set up now We can now go on to This red highlighted thing down here that says register checked pictures Okay, um Let's start With the main window here under actions. So we have register already registered pictures These are not already registered so we can leave that unchecked We have automatic detection of hot pixels. It's fine to leave that checked We have stack after registering. I'm going to go ahead and check that I want to just do this all in one process Sometimes you break it up and you might want to register first and then Look at the scores and do different things with that. But let's just keep this simple and stack after registering Um, I have 282 frames. So I'm going to tell it to select the best 95 Percent of pictures and stack those so it's going to throw out the worst of the five the worst five percent of the pictures Which I'm fine with. I think there's some which have maybe some passing clouds or somewhere Maybe I'm I'm re reframing and the stars are are Are streaked and it deep sky stacker will do a good job of finding those kinds of things and throwing them out Because they won't be considered in the best 95 percent Okay, I'm going to go over here to advanced and just make sure that my star detection threshold is okay I don't remember what the default is, but let's just start at 20 percent And then press compute the number of stars And it found 117 if I bring that star detection threshold down like that You can see that it finds slightly more stars And if I bring it up It will find fewer stars So at 36 it's only finding 59 stars, which Might work probably would work, but I usually like to get over 100 stars So I'm going to bring that back over to 17 percent And that gives me 147 stars as long as you're seeing like something between let's say 50 and 3000 stars it's probably going to work just fine if you're seeing like 20 000 stars or zero stars then those are outliers and I think something is going wrong So then you would really want to examine your files, especially the zero stars That would mean that you probably didn't get focus right because if it's not finding any stars then then it's not going to be able to stack your pictures so I then you're going to have to take a look at your files You could open them up in photoshop or something like that ahead of time and see what the issue is But usually this works just fine and you might even be able to just leave it on the default, but I always like to check it Okay, and then I'm going to click on recommended settings And what I like to do in here is just sort of scroll through And see if there is anything that is popping up in red that usually indicates. This is something you should address I mean, it says you are stacking 280 to two light frames here. That's sort of in red But I mean where you're seeing all these green statements. What the green indicates is that those are settings that it considers Already set and that are appropriate if you're seeing something in red Then that means something that you haven't set or that you maybe should pay attention to before you start the process But for the most part the default values in deep sky stacker work pretty well If we go into stacking parameters Um, there's some different options in here standard mode mosaic mode intersection mode You definitely don't want mosaic mode. That would mean that you get uh, that's for if you are Basically taking a mosaic of the night sky. We also can think of this as a panorama Something like that where you're you're putting together a bunch of different pictures to make a bigger picture of the night sky But what we want to do is actually stack the pictures all together to to Average out the noise in the picture and for that you can either use standard mode or intersection mode Basically to the difference is just that standard mode isn't going to Crop away anything it's going to leave in the rough edges and intersection mode Will automatically apply a crop, but I don't necessarily trust it So I always just leave this on standard mode and do the cropping myself afterwards Okay, um, you want to use all available processors down here at the bottom Don't want to turn on any Drizzle or aligning of rgb channels usually, um This thing, you know the different uh clipping modes work just fine in the defaults I have the lights on kappa sigma clipping with a kappa of two and then Darks flats and bias are all on median kappa sigma clipping I have alignment set to automatic The intermediate files this is sort of interesting you can either choose tiff or fits so that if you were working with other Astronomy programs you might choose fits which is the more standard for astronomy programs But since we're going to be working mostly with just deep sky stacker and photoshop Tiff files are just fine This is interesting If you are finding that even with your calibration frames Your darks are mostly supposed are the ones that are really supposed to take care of hot pixels But if you find that you you stack and you calibrate and stack and everything and then Your result still has a lot of hot pixels. You might want to try this Cosmetic correction right here where it can try to detect the hot pixels that are remaining automatically and Change the value of those so that they're not as noticeable Okay, we want to create an output file the autosave.tiff. It's fine So basically my point here is that I'm just using all of the defaults I'm on standard mode for result And I'm going to go ahead and click okay And click okay again And it gives us a final um summary of everything that uh We've told it here You can see that I did 200. I have 282 light frames at iso 1600 You can see my bias darks and flats are also all at iso 1600 Because we have 282 light frames at two seconds each That's a total exposure turtle integration of nine minutes 24 seconds Um And the process will temporarily use 31.2 gigabytes on the d drive So you can imagine if we instead had over 500 frames This may take up something like 60 gigabytes. So you can see these temporary files really do add up So just make sure you have enough space Before you start I don't think it will actually let you start the process if you don't have enough space Um, but remember if you if you want to set that temporary drive to some other place Just go down here to settings and uh, you can you can set that temporary drive wherever you wish Okay, this all looks fine. I'm going to go ahead and click okay again And now it's the waiting game. Um, basically this can take hours, uh, it really just depends on how Modern your computer's processor is how many threads it has that kind of thing. Um, I don't believe Deep Sky stacker has any GPU acceleration So it's really just using your cpu and the really again the most important thing is Is just if it's a more modern more powerful processor. Um, this will go faster. I'm just using um A Lenovo think pad. It's a few years old. So I know this is going to take my computer hours to finish But that's fine. Um, I'll sometimes, you know, take a break and do something else or leave it overnight and then Pick it up in the morning so, um I'm going to fast forward or skip this part of the video and uh, we'll see what it looks like when it's all done Okay, it did take a few hours. I actually just, uh, waited overnight and this is the next morning and we have a finished picture here. This has been Calibrated registered and stacked now. It doesn't look like much right now, but this is completely normal This is actually what you want to see. You don't want it to look, uh, bright at this point You want it to look black with only a few white dots This is because it's unstretched or in a linear form still and then we're going to do the stretching and all of the linear to non-linear Curve work not here in deep sky stacker, which is a fairly Crude way to do it, but in another program like gimp or photoshop or etc um So to it actually is already saved. Um, so if you look right up here, um, it tells you where it's saved So it's saved in my lights folder is autosave.tiff The only issue with this autosave.tiff file is that it is a 32 bit floating point file and some programs I know gimp, um, and even some versions of photoshop, um, won't Play well with that 32 bit file. So what I would recommend You do just to make sure that you have compatibility with the programs we'll use next is go over here to the processing Section on the left hand side and go down to save picture to file And this lets you save off a 16 bit tiff file 16 bits per channel, which is what we want The default settings here are the ones you want compression set to none and under options You want embed adjustments in the saved image But do not apply them. You want that checked And so then i'll just save it as lagoon dss for deep sky stacker And click save And then we can see here on my desktop This is what i'm going to bring in to the next program lagoon dash dss.tiff Um, and then while we're here I'll just mention really briefly if you do want to reuse your master bias frame in future projects what you can do is in that folder at the bottom you should see something called master offset iso whatever dot tiff and this is what you would save to reuse And you don't have to reshoot bias frames because they're technically the same Every time as long as you shot them correctly Okay, that's it for deep sky stacker We'll move on to the next section, which is the fun creative part of Processing and really bringing this data to life Okay, i've switched over to my mac just because that's where i have photoshop installed And then i transferred the resulting 16 bit tiff file from deep sky stacker to my mac And then i'm just going to open up photoshop. I have photoshop cs6 Mainly just because i haven't bought creative cloud or don't want to pay the monthly subscription And cs6 works fine for everything that i do But there's a few things that i'll mention here that are a little bit different and the main one is that Under filter there is no adobe camera raw option under filter and cs6 So when we get to the very end and i'm going to do some noise reduction in adobe camera raw I'll show you how to get around that if you do use an older version like me Okay, let's go ahead and open up the tiff file And the first thing i'm going to do is i'm just going to go up here to the image menu and go to mode and just confirm that it is RGB and 16 bits per channel If you did bring in the autosave.tiff and you were saying seeing 32 bits per channel What you can do is you could just switch it to 16 bits and then it would say something like Are you sure proceed and you just click proceed and it works fine Okay So this is exactly how it looked in deep sky stacker the first thing we're going to do in photoshop is we're going to duplicate the layer So i'm just going to right click on the background layer and choose duplicate layer and i'll call this first stretch And i always like to duplicate just so i have a backup in case i want to Just quickly Check my work or or do something with this Original background layer later on in the process. We probably won't but just in case i like to have it there Okay, so with the first stretch layer active, let's go ahead and bring up our image adjustments levels command and You can see when you go into a menu in photoshop It does give you the shortcut right there And so since i'm on a mac the shortcut for levels is command l But if you were on a windows computer, it would be control l so From now on out. I'll probably just use the keyboard shortcut, but you can also get it from the menu right there Okay, the other thing i'm going to do in addition to bringing up levels is i want to bring up my histograms And if you don't see the little histograms icon over here, you can just go to window And turn it on from here We just want to change the channels option from rgb To colors so that we see the different colors red green and blue here and we see them up here in a color display And the first thing i'm going to do is i'm just going to apply a pretty gentle stretch Just to the entire image to all three channels the rg and b red green and blue Something like that Click okay And now you can see uh, you can see a little bit more of the image and you can see these red green and blue Channels come out a little bit and we can see that they're a little bit misaligned But if we do that one more time it will become even more apparent Both in the image down here, which is looking very teal and up here You can see that our green and blue channels are pretty aligned But our red channel is lagging behind here and that's why the image takes on this sort of Greenish blue off colored color balance And so there's a lot of different ways to approach color balance in photoshop But if you want to do it while stretching the image what you can do is just go here and into the channels And just pick a particular channel in the levels command and stretch it Separately from the others and the reason that I like to have this Display up is because then I can see when i'm getting close with the histograms To and it's sort of equalized color balance where the three channels are pretty aligned So that's looking pretty close both here in the histogram display and here in the image While I have this open it looks like the blue channel is a little bit skinnier than the green and the red So another thing I can do here is I can go into the blue And I can hit both the mid tone slider and the shadow slider bring the shadow slider into the right And the mid tone slider into the left and that will in effect stretch out the blue channel And I just keep going with that Until it seems about as stretched out as the red and the green okay, I'm going to go ahead and click okay and There is this little line of red over here and up here That's why we're seeing that that red streak in the shadows area over here. I believe So we can ignore that but otherwise when we look at these three histogram spikes, they look pretty well aligned and if we zoom in We can see that the color balance is looking Pretty good. Here's an orange star a blue star that kind of thing At this point, I think I want to do a few things I want to crop and I also want to Apply some saturation boosting so I can really see what I have here So I'm first going to I think just apply a adjustment layer The huge less saturation adjustment layer and I'm going to really bring up the saturation in the image just like that Not that far, but maybe up to 70 And this isn't permanent. I know it looks sort of weird But it's really just to see How our color balance is doing And where many where any problems may be and also where I want to crop where it seems like it really drops off in terms of image quality because of the stacking and what I mean by that is because We didn't have a tracking mount. So we we were realigning this But obviously I didn't do a perfect job And so there's going to be a lot that we have to cut away out of the frame by cropping Um Where we didn't have overlapping pictures. There's a lot more noise and that's where we get these registration artifacts as well Okay, so let's go ahead and crop I'm just going to press c for crop or over here in the toolbar. You can just click on the crop icon And so I don't want any of this over here on the left hand side I also want to get rid of these cropping artifacts on the top But I don't want to cut off the eagle nebula, which is right there I'm going to be careful not to crop that out. I'm going to crop in a little bit on this side as well And the other nice thing about cropping It really focuses in on the actually Interesting part of the uh photograph for me, which is the dark structure in the milky way in the nebulae Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and accept that crop And we can see the main issue with color balance after I increase the saturation is still That it is too Green and blue. So let's go back to our first stretch here And look what looks let's look at the histograms with that hue slash saturation slider applied We can see it really separated out again the green in the blue and the red So let's go ahead and correct that again with levels I'm going to do that by stretching the red Not that much But when I stretch the red you can see it's now quite a bit fatter than the green in the blue So I'm going to have to stretch them a little bit too Okay, I'm just going to look at the image here and see what I Think I think that's looking pretty good And keep in mind with with something like the milky way where it's filling so much of the frame It might be natural actually for the red to be a little bit wider than the green in the blue because there's so much um sort of brownish reddish milky way stars which are are much more sort of yellow and gold and orange and red in blue So I'm going to say that is good for now And if I take back off that stretch you can see that's before that's after So it looks very desaturated without this Saturation adjustment, but what we could do now is we could go back into this And bring this back down to something like 35 for now And then I'm just going to do some more adjustment layers here. So I'm going to bring up a Curves adjustment layer And I'm going to do something like this just so we can see the picture a little bit more This is just a slight s-curve I don't want to Too far with bringing up the highlights because I don't want to blow out my stars Okay with that done I can go back here into huge slash saturation and see if I increase this a little bit Okay, this is looking pretty good at least in terms of the stars I'm not quite happy with the how the milky way looks yet, but we're going to we're going to keep working on that Um, so I'm going to I'm going to do a little bit more color balancing here Um, just a taste basically so we're going to open up a color balance adjustment layer and I'm going to Take out just a little bit of green and a little bit of blue and a little bit of Cyan so I'm basically making the picture warmer Then I'll go back into my curves adjustment layer and continue sort of fiddling with this You can see with the picture sort of coming alive. So here's uh before with just the stretch it's very uh dull And then here's as we're adding Um these saturation layers and these curves layers and things like that Um We can also I sometimes just add a little bit of saturation directly to the stretch layer So we can go to adjustments and add it here Usually don't want to overdo it here. This is because this is a permanent change to that layer But I think that that sometimes helps bring it alive a little bit. We can turn that off and on and see That was before that's after And just it just makes the picture pop a little bit more Okay, um I'm gonna actually Add another curves adjustment and Probably in my final image. I'm gonna want to make this darker But for now, I'm just gonna actually just make it brighter to bring out Some of this detail a little bit more Okay Now at this point, I am pretty happy with this star color and I don't want to it makes a picture Much brighter because it will it will affect that star color. It will start blowing out the star cores and making them pure white So what I want to do at this point with the picture is actually separate the the stars and the The nebulosity the milky way and the and the the nebulae within the milky way And there's a number of ways to do that one way we could do that is is right here in um Photoshop There is a dust and scratches filter Okay, and you can see That could do something that could remove some of the stars and leave us with just sort of this bland outline of The milky way and then we could enhance the colors that way So that's one way to do it, but um, it it you lose a lot of sharpness doing it that way Um, so instead what I want to do is I'm going to use a machine learning algorithm that, um Someone named Nikita misura. I think I'm not sure exactly how you say their name Um, but they have released this for free. It's called star net plus plus And so I'm going to just show you how to download that now Okay, so from google. I'm just going to Um Search for star net plus plus like that And the first uh search result here is this source forge dot net download site and that's what you want to go to And then uh go over here to files And if you do have pics insight you can get the pics insight module, but um, Assuming you don't have pics insight. We're going to just get the standalone version And so you would just go into version 1.1 here and then pick your operating system So if you're on windows pick windows Or win if you're on mac pick this mac os and if you're on linux pick the linux one And I'll just click on that And then it will start downloading here Okay, it's finished downloading so I'm just going to Open up those Open up the zip Folder and put it on my desktop And also on my desktop. I'm going to save this image in progress from photoshop I'm going to save it as a tiff. I don't want layers checked So I wanted to choose tiff as a copy and I'll just call it lagoon Um For star net I'll save it to the desktop. Okay. I'm going to hide photoshop Here's my lagoon for star net file and here's my star net underscore mac os folder I'll open that up And if you look at the read me, this is where it's going to give us instructions on how to use it Okay, and basically we just have to look at this little Shell file here, uh, this is a just a little command that's given And if we open that up, I'm just going to open it with, um A text editor, but you can open it with Any kind of text editor it doesn't matter Um All we're going to do is just change this right here to the name of our file. So I'm going to choose. I'm going to say lagoon for Star net tiff and then I want the output to just be Lagoon starless And then the last thing here is I'm just going to change the stride number to 32 What that means is that it will take a little bit longer to process than with a stride of 64 But it will give us a better result for for removing the stars, um, especially with Uh wide field images like this one. I'm going to go ahead and save that script Close out of that. Okay with That done we've edited the script 32 bit stride. It has the right file name We can go ahead and run the script. The way we do that is through a command line Program, so I'm just going to use the built-in command line program on mac which is terminal And to run it we have to do two things we first have to move to this directory. So I'm just going to type in cd space to do change directory command and then drag this folder over So cd space and then go to the folder Hit enter we're now inside the folder and from there I can run this command just by dragging it over and hit enter again Okay, and then it starts its thing. Um, it, uh Reads the file. It tells me yep. It's a 16 bit file with three channels. Here's the height and the width Here's the CPU I'm using with tensor flow And then, uh This is the number of tiles that it's going to break the file up into and then it's going to look at each one And remove stars from those tiles and then recombine the image and then down here It tells me how long it's going to take for that to happen a percentage as it's going And uh, you can see it just went from zero to one percent So it does take quite a while probably at least an hour maybe two On an image of this size. So we'll let it do its thing and then we'll Pick back up when it's finished Okay, it took it about an hour and now it's completed. Um, so we can see here in the same folder. There is now a lagoon Starless file which looks like this Uh, you can see, uh, there are some blue star halos that, uh, look a little bit ugly, but for the most part it did a good job of removing the stars From the image So now what we can do is open back up photoshop And open that image. So I'm just going to do file open And open the lagoon starless image And I'm just going to play around with this a little bit. Um, just open up a curves adjustment and just add a nice S curve here to make it really dramatic Actually, I'm going to take care of this little Uh, reddish corner a bit here. Let me just, uh Open up a hue slash saturation And I'm going to bring down the saturation Then I'm going to fill this layer mask on the hue slash saturation with black So, uh, we can just do edit fill with black Okay, so that basically Made this null, but then I'll just use a little gradient here in the corner to bring that back So I've just set up a gradient here that goes from black to a mid gray And then I'll just, uh, draw in a little bit up there And continue to turn down the saturation in that corner just a little bit Okay, so there's before And after just tone down that redness in the corner a bit Okay, uh, now I'm going to go ahead and take my star layer here. First I have to Create its own layer. So I'm just going to do Command option shift e or control option shift e on windows And that's just going to take what's visible right now And create a new layer out of that So command option shift e or control option shift e on windows Makes a new layer from visible and it's right over here layer one I'm then going to select that layer with select all And copy it And paste it onto this image the starless image Okay, and then with this layer what we can do is just apply a Screen blend mode. So you can see right up here right now. It says normal. I'm just going to change that to Screen Okay, and you can see this Image is now a lot more Detailed than this image because uh, we're layering the stars on top of the starless image Um, the only issue with it is that it's too bright So i'm going to now, uh, open up a curves And reset my black point and apply a tiny bit of an s-curve here Like that And then the last thing i'm going to do here is, uh, the whole thing appears too saturated now So then i'm going to reset the saturation point just with a new saturation Uh slider And i also just think it's just a little bit too bright still so i'm going to take down the Opacity of that of the stars layer Just a little bit like that Down to 90 percent And i still feel like this corner is a little bit Too red So i'm actually going to double up this, uh huge slash saturation layer up there So there's different ways we could deal with the These sort of purplish star halos one way is we could go Could turn off this layer here for a second and we could deal with them directly in this starless layer by Clone stamping them out That's going to take a long time. So instead what i'm going to suggest we do is just use the adobe camera raw um magenta and green Halo reduction thing. Um, I don't know exactly what they call it, but You'll see it here in a second to deal with that and then while we're in adobe camera raw We can also apply some noise reduction to this image because it's only a Like a 10 minute total integration. So it is fairly noisy. Um, and so we can We can bring down the noise a little bit, but i'm basically happy with how the colors look and uh And how much uh detail we've we've gotten out of the lagoon and trifid especially, but we also see a little bit in the omega and ego up here at the top And and also some nice detail here in the center. This is called the Sagittarius star cloud um, okay, so to bring it into adobe camera raw if you have adobe Uh photoshop creative cloud you can just go up here to filter and there should be an option somewhere in here for adobe camera raw filter Which is really easy, but since i'm on an older version what I do is I go to file save as And i'm just going to save to the desktop and call this lagoon final And I don't need layers. So i'm going to turn that off I'll go ahead and embed the color profile Save that tiff and then i'll open it right back up So i'm going to click on lagoon final tiff, but then where it says format right here I'm going to change this from tiff to camera raw And click open And then that will open up the image in camera raw. I'm on version 9.1.1 And there are two tabs that I want to use in here The first is this lens corrections tab You can use Uh automatic lens profile corrections Let's just uh, but it's not finding it since we did all this work on it. So let's just uh, not use that Let's go right on to color And click on remove chromatic aberration And then drag this uh purple slider over A little bit Like that and I can just turn this off and on and you can see that it took out a lot of the purple out of the image and made it Made those really aggressively big purple halos on some of the stars less noticeable and and you can play around this with this slider So initially I'd put it at four And then when I look at the change it made to the image Maybe I think it took out a little too much purple. So then I might bring it back down To like three or two And if you are noticing any green, uh noise in your picture, you might also play around with this removing green Chromatic aberration too I don't think that's making any difference on my image. Oh, maybe a little bit. I don't know I'll just leave it at one Okay, the other thing we can do that I mentioned is we can apply some noise reduction and for this I recommend um Zooming in a little bit So here's our lagoon and triphid And then I'm going to go to the detail tab And I'm just going to apply a little bit of color And luminance noise reduction So I usually started around 20 For both of these And then just let the detail tabs just sort of Go automatically You can also Play around with sharpness. So one thing that happens is when you apply noise reduction Your image can look a little bit Blurred because that's basically what it's doing is it's blurring at a particular scale So then you can bring back some of the image sharpness that you've lost through this sharpening right up here And so it's basically a dance between All of these different sliders until it's something that you like and so what I'm always doing is I'm turning This little preview Check mark off and on To see what it's doing to the image and I also like to look at it at different scales So so far I like what it's doing I wanted to zoom in on This part of the image Yeah, and in every view that I've looked at so far, I like it better With the noise reduction on so that's good And I'm just going to zoom out and look at the whole thing again And yeah, I'm I'm happy with how this image is looking. So uh Now it's just uh saving it or you can open it back up into photoshop If there's something else you wanted to do like if you want to Continue working on crop or colors or whatever you can just click open image right there But I'm happy with this. This is basically my final step So I'm going to click on save image So, uh from this save options, uh thing you can save it as a photoshop document A dng jpeg or tiff. Um for now I'm just going to do Tiff and call this lagoon final two And then I'll also Go back into that same save image thing and save it as a jpeg for saving on for sharing on the web Called it the same thing Okay, and I'll say done And then I'm just going to take a look at my final image here Okay, now the moment of truth, uh as I mentioned a few times in this video I was shooting everything with two different cameras using the same 50 millimeter lens one camera was the stock 60d That's what we just processed and then I also shot it with the modified 60d And did the processing as closely as I could to be the exact same so that we could do this comparison at the end And here is the result So we have the stock 60d on the left and the modified 60d on the right and uh You can see that we do have some color differences Both the color of the milky way, um is a little bit different. It's a little bit more Yellow in the stock 60d example and a little bit more reddish magenta in the modified The biggest color difference. I think is this star cloud. Uh in the stock 60d We have these really brilliant blue stars and in the modified 60d. They got a little bit purple and a little bit not as Extreme, uh, you can really see that's a cool Explosion of blue stars in the stock one and the modified one Uh, I don't think it makes quite as much of an impact But what do we gain by going modified? Well, the first thing that I notice is that, uh, this we have some star Loading maybe I would call it the stars appear a bit bigger on the stock 60d And they appear quite a bit sharper on the modified 60d, especially if you look in this region right here And the reason for this is because the stock 60d still has what we call an optical low pass filter or an anti aliasing filter Installed in front of the sensor while with the modified 60d. We've removed that so Um, we get we can get sharper stars The downside is that if you were shooting something like a brick wall or something you might get artifacts, uh with the modified 60d Which you wouldn't with the stock The other big difference and you've probably already noticed this is that the HA emission nebulae like the lagoon nebulae down here A little bit in the trifid the omega up there and this guy right here I call it the twiddle bug nebula. I think I read that online are much redder and more detailed on the modified 60d compared to the stock Um, you can see the lagoon gets a lot more filled in and it looks a little bit Better I think then on the stock 60d where it gets a bit more Blown out. It's a bit more noisy On the modified 60d. It looks uh, this really nice Sort of bubblegum pink color um And then when the twiddle bug nebula Really we're we are getting some faint HA emission in the modified and really nothing in the stock So that's a big difference too between those two Other than that though, I think uh, they're both, you know, just 10 minutes of data So there's still both quite noisy if uh, we did longer Integrations we we could get these looking a lot better. So just keep that in mind This is just uh, really a test and for education purposes. Don't feel like these are Finished pictures necessarily. Hopefully this comparison illustrated some of the differences if you're considering modifying I will say that, uh Modifying does make daylight Photography a little bit more challenging You can get filters that will return it to the original white balance in most cases So if you're considering modifying and still want to use your camera for daylight use you might consider that Or you can also always Uh shoot a custom white balance. So whenever you're out Shooting in the daytime, you can bring a white card and shoot a custom white balance and get pretty natural color that way too Um, but you can see even with trying to get the colors Is as similar as possible, uh in my processing. I couldn't quite do it I was trying to get the Milky Way to look like this and the stars to look like my stock 60d here in the modified version And it just wouldn't, uh, let me get to the same colors Without really screwing up the rest of the image. So I will say that, uh, if you do modify your camera You're never going to get back to Probably completely natural color But for most people the trade-off is well worth it because of the sharper stars And the, uh, uh, greatly increased, uh, ha emission sensitivity Okay, this has been, uh, Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial If you, uh, did and you want to support this channel, uh, please consider subscribing Liking the video leaving comments and also, uh, you can join me on patreon for as little as one dollar a month You're about to see everyone who has already joined me on patreon Everyone who signs up on there gets their name in the credits if they wish All right till next time clear skies