Photoshop

I see some people here use photoshop to process their photos. What kind of filters do you apply in it or is it just sharpening the image and touching it up a little.

I just apply an unsharpen mask and save for web but then I only recently got photoshop.

I used the GIMP before but just did the same thing.

Steve - I usually only use Photoshop to:

1. Adjust white/black levels
2. Apply an unsharp mask
3. Apply a minimal Gaussian blur

Its rare that I'd use 2 and 3 but they can help bring out fine detail and/or soften noise a little. The effects are marginal and barely perceptible. But you find that the more you process images, *you* will see the differences more markedly than a novice.

There have been some interesting discourses, over the years, about image processing and 'ethics' etc.

See: www.astropix.com/HTML/J_DIGIT/ETHICS.HTM

Personally, since my major goal is science, I'm doing very little processing. But remember, if you can fine-tune your system and take the longest exposures you can under the darkest skies you can get, there'll be little if any image manipulation to do (in terms of altering the image - you may still have to stack images or merge colour-planes etc). You also need to get into dark frames, bias frames and light frames etc to get the best possible image you can...

Have a lash anyhow - the site above has some good tutorials on processing with Photoshop. Well through working through them with your own images or any of the images you see on these boards (with the owner's permission of course )

Cheers

Dave