Hi Jim, I agree with Chuck. When I first read your post I went to the gallery expecting to find something awful. Instead, what I found was an image that looks better than my original. Mine looks like it's being viewed through fog. Yours is much crisper and shows much more detail. I am really looking forward to Tyler's talk next month. While I don't have the patience to duplicate his level of work I am interested in seeing how he does it. patrick On 24 Jan 2009, at 13:22, Chuck Hards wrote:
Jim, don't be discouraged. Your "first try" image actually has more information in the center of the nebula, where Tyler's is much too bright and "over-exposed". Further processing could almost certainly fix that, however.
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Jim Gibson <jimgibson00@yahoo.com> wrote:
Well, Tyler's processing is indeed very impressive. I have been reading books and online articles trying to process Patrick's kit and have not even come close to what Tyler has produced.
The idea occurred to me to download Tyler's B&W, Red, Green, and Blue images and stack them by hand; witch I did. My expectation was that I should come up with Tyler's final product; but I guessed wrong. I was hoping that if they did come out the same, then I would at least know what intermediate steps to shoot for. It didn't happen like I hoped.
Then I started monkeying around with the color to see if I could figure out his secrets. But no.
I am temporarily posting on the Gallery two photos of trying to reverse engineer Tyler's photo. The first one is simply hand stacking the four images in PhotoShop 7 with the B&W as background and the Red, Green, and Blue set to 50% opacity – no dice. I can't even tell you how I got to the last image other than I started from the first composite image. I tried like the dickens to get the purple to be redder. I just couldn't seem to get the blue out. I have a lot to learn about color blending and about PhotoShop. This whole thing has been fun for me though.
I would agree with Patrick's assessment to send all my images to Tyler except that if Tyler can do it, I can do it….I hope. It might take some time though. I hope I have enough time left.