Post by howie1 on Feb 2, 2017 4:14:46 GMT
Mucked about the other night trying all sorts of colour adjustments in Toaster, and in exposure times. So many bugs biting me I declined to do a PA so ended up with star trails at 90 secs, but very little trailing at 60 secs. So here's a single 60 sec ISO800 M42. Processing in Toaster was simply to push expand to 18 to bring out the faint nebulosity and dust lanes between the main nebula and the Running Man, but of course that bloated the core. So dropped the contrast down -12 to reduce that blowout, and then saved off the image. The plan was to use Photo Gallery editor to take what was then a fairly dull photo, and make it 'pop'. I used my Photo Gallery editor 'workflow' ... which is to first pull out detail via Shadows, then drop Highlights so the whole thing looks lots more details and little bloat, but still looks kinda 'flat' - and then play with contrast, brightness, color tint and saturation, before lastly clicking Gallery's noise reduction. I've done this workflow many times in the past looking at if Photo Gallery can be used to replace Toaster. So I knew it well. And with the saved M42 image it also worked very well. I will have to try this technique on other targets (especially the dimmer ones) and see how it goes. Although waiting 60 secs is a PITA. Yeah, I know I normally do 30 sec shots and that's long for some people ... LOL ... but heck after getting used to only waiting 30 secs, it seems like forever to wait 60 secs! Good detail in the final image though. Much better than 30 secs.
