A reworked Milky Way

In August I went to Wales on holiday... did post some photos up of that trip. One of them was a a staight up shot of the Cosmos and the Milky Way core.

I have since been learning more and more about astrophotography and how to process the images. So...

Here is a reworked shot from that holiday.




I have also done a couple of composite images using it to. One is in the gallery and here is the other.

Nice work Spad. I enjoy astro pics as I'm learning too, I hope you don't mind but as it's raining again I had a play with Rawtherapee on one of your pics. I tweaked contrast down a bit and played with less blue, noise reduction, when I clicked to enable "impulse noise reduction" an immediate change was seen; it removed some stars I must admit but overall I quite liked the change? Maybe it lowered contrast in effect, it's certainly darker, I don't know, but have a look and see what you yhink. I know pictures can be 'played' around with all day to get slightly different results, but hey ho.

Funnileeeeeeeeeeeeeee enough.... I was looking at Star Reduction after i posted these!

I am looking at what you have done on my phone. So I'll reserve judgement until I have seen it on my mac.

Is that Rawtherapee worth getting? I use Photoshop.

Also have a look at a book by Adam Woodworth, called Night Sky Photography. Cheapest I found it was on fleabay.

Rawtherapee; it's cheap = free But allegedly has more over other PP packages, I wouldn't know as I've never used 'owt else, being new to Digital. It is a bit geeky IMO but as I run only Linux it suits me LOL.
If you go with RT it's a long learning curve, see Andy Astbury on Youtube for tips, lots on line at rawtherapee.com. It's also keyboard fiddly until you get familiar with it, apparently not as easy as the old PP packages eg. LR etc.

Not saying my version is any better, a different flavour? colour/less contrast/ just playing......

That's SPOOOOKEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

When I did star reduction in PS... It looked pretty much the same as yours!!

Must have been the Haloween effect!!

Star Reduction must be the same? I checked on the RT site and found this, played on my monitor and could see it working - clever stuff, a 'must use' perhaps on Astro shots;

"The effects of this tool are only visible at a preview scale of 1:1 or more. Use a detail window (click on the Window-add.png icon under the main preview panel) to inspect a part of the image, or zoom the main preview to 100% (also called 1:1) Magnifier-1to1.png.

Suppresses salt-and-pepper noise - sudden white and black pixels, which remind one of salt and pepper sprinkled over a photo. This is done after demosaicing.

Whereas salt-and-pepper noise is typically just white or black, hot pixels can be of a pure, saturated color, while dead pixels are black. Hot and dead pixels occur for a very different reason than salt-and-pepper noise and should be handled using the Hot/Dead Pixel Filter, which works before demosaicing.

The slider adjusts the threshold which must be exceeded for the suppression to be applied. "

I'll def give RawTherapee a go!!

I have just done a reworked one in PS and also redone it in ACR. I have also reduced the stars a tad.

Nice work.
Not to take over your thread......sorry.....but I have played with another shot of mine this time with an eye on the histogram (not that it matters?) but here is one where I managed to keep the histo fairly 'neat' (hopefully) no interesting foreground though. a Single shot as always for me.
CC's welcome as any helpful hints/tips, I did try unsuccessfully to remove the somewhat brightness out...

No that's fine... it's nice to have someone to talk to and bally ideas around with!

Have you thought of getting Adobe's Cloud Service? You can get both Lightroom and Photoshop for about 10 quid a month? Photoshops tools are very powerful for astrophotography.

Also are you using a Mac or PC?

Ah, I have an aversion to paying anything monthly (or otherwise LOL).....money not a problem strangely can't off load it anywhere (must buy more lens). Re. Adobe, I never tie myself into a sole outfit e.g. Microsoft/Apple/Adobe etc. There are (nearly) always free offerings on open source/linux etc.
Oh using PC.

Ahhh... you're a linux man!

Strangely I use a Mac for photography even tho I have 2 quite powerfull PC's.... Mainly coz Mac OS is massively better than windows! Evne tho my Mac is a 2010 one it runs PS and LR faster than Windows!!

Very Nice I have never tried anything like This

They are all massively better than anything I've managed to produce ! The sheer number of colours is simply jaw dropping.