what photoshop techniques do you use on images of planets

after you have your image out of registax, apart from sharpening, what else is best done in photoshop?

I think it can be subjective Fintan. I mean, with what you've captured, is there light pollution, is it bright enough, are there halo effects around the brighter stars because of dew or fog, and things like that, are what govern techniques to be used. Photoshop is adorned with many, many features that for the latest CS3 version you almost need a small degree to know what to do!

Have you tried the likes of Picasa at all for minor tweaking?

Seanie.

i could try picassa, although I recently got photoshop elements 6 for the Mac so I wana give that a go, considering I actually bought it! my computer is finally running completely legit software, never thought id see the day!

Fintan

Picassa will do some minor tweaks but it is not nearly as capable as Photoshop.

The processing that you probably would want to do in PS would be:
Sharpening - Either by using Unsharp Mark or High Pass filter
Removing light pollution - Use photofilters
Levels - Use the images->adjustments->levels dialog
Saturation - increase/decrease
Shadow/Highlights - increase/decrease

You can do all of this manually or you could use a set of workflow actions like Guy Gowans (etntworld.com) that semi-automate the process.

Darragh

The processing that you probably would want to do in PS would be:
Sharpening - Either by using Unsharp Mark or High Pass filter
Removing light pollution - Use photofilters
Levels - Use the images->adjustments->levels dialog
Saturation - increase/decrease
Shadow/Highlights - increase/decrease


That's about the size of it. That just about covers the basics of PS for image editing to get better results. I havent done MUCH planetary image editing but in general for MOST images/editing the above will cover it.

Hi Fintan,
The lads above pretty much described what you can do.

The first thing I do to see what's really there is to do an auto levels to see what comes out, I usually reverse this.
Then play around with the levels manually, colour balance, unsharp mask and image size. One way of reducing noise is to reduce the image size. You might find at times that increasing the brightnesses increases the graininess, so reducing the image size tends to hide this, of course the better solution is to capture a better avi in the first place.