Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Back on October 19th, after I made the photo of the comet A6 Lemmon at Big Sur, I decided to try and get a close up of the comet using a 400 mm lens. I set up near my home, knowing that I would be dealing with light pollution, but given that the comet was in the southwest sky I thought it might workout. I have attempted to process this photo several times and this is the best I have come up with so far given the data I have to work with. I have about 30 minutes of integration and I was hoping to get one hour, but I was not careful with where I set up the tripod and the tracker ended up dropping the frame into a bush the blocked the sky. It reminds me of when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.
Specific Feedback
Any feedback is appreciated, but in particular, does the extended tail work, or is it just to dim and noisy?
Technical Details
Nikon D850, Nikon 400mm f/5.6 lens set to f8, 60 sec, ISO 3200, 20 frames tracked using an iOptron SkyGuider Pro.
I processed the frames in Siril for registering and stacking the comet separately from registering and stacking for the stars by basically following the same procedure I linked to in my Pinnacles photo. I used Starnet++ to obtain a starless image which I then processed in PS before recombining with the star stacked image, and finally coming back to PS to finish it off.
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1 Like
Only one word here, Youssef…Fabulous!
Your effort here paid off handsomely.
-P
Youssef, Revisiting this image certainly paid off. The detail in the ion and dust tails you managed to pull out in processing, in spite of the obstacles, is amazing. To me the noise does distract just a bit so I took the liberty of downloading the image and running it through Topaz Denoise (Standard +70 noise/+6 sharpness). I think it cleaned up the image nicely without losing stars. I also burned in the mid tones to reduce the halo on the leading edge of the comet. See what you think. You should have better results with the original.
@Paul_Dileanis ,
Thank you for working on the image. I will need to figure out how to deal with the noise on my end, since I don’t have Topaz, and unfortunately, ACR only does its its denoise magic on RAW or DNG files not on TIFF. But seeing what you were able to do with it has given me the enthusiasm to try and figure out a way. Thank you.
A nice exercise! The noise is less than ideal, and interesting how it varies across the frame. I don’t know Siril but doesn’t it remove shot noise by averaging? But come to think about it, in the PixInsight procedures for comets, there is always some more NR to be done.
I find Topaz DeNoise to be well worth the price, even though I now mostly use LR denoise up front. But it’s easy for more of it to crawl out later, especially in dark areas.
I’ve GOT to get my comet done. It wasn’t as long an integration as I wanted but should yield something interesting. I got hung up needing to learn a couple of processes that I’ve been avoiding.
And – I may have a new NR idea. I’ve been figuring out how to set up my R5 for our granddaughter to shoot some birds at the feeders, and I set it to Raw + JPEG as she has no way to process raws. (Yet!) I was quite astonished how well it removes noise. Things come out more contrasty than I like, but I wonder about using it for this kind of wide-angle astro! (Super easy to shoot both!)
I may do some experimenting…
I assume you are feeding raw files to Siril (or outputting TIFFs?) but couldn’t you do LR denoise on each raw sub as the first step? (I’ll go back to your previous post to check the details – maybe I misunderstood your steps.) Or – maybe the raws you feed in can’t include any adjustment steps. I can see that.
Yes Diane I thought I could do that. But in the latest rendition of ACR, which I think is the same RAW engine used in LR, I can’t save a DNG like it used to when using the Denoise. I will go back and double check, and if I can use Denoise first and send in DNG files I will run through the processing again. Thanks for the reminder.
The new DN method (same in ACR as LR as far as I know) no longer returns a DNG, it is now just an adjustment to the raw file. PI can take Canon (and several other) raw files (with conversion to its native format), but probably now the denoise step won’t be included as it is merely an adjustment. Maybe Siril has the same limitation.
But as I go through the steps in PI there are several places where I can run its powerful denoise process. The latest and greatest is NoiseXTerminator, but I assume it only works in PI. But maybe there is something similar in Siril.
