Cygnus Wall SHO

[patent axle]

man that's a nice first SHO image

i like the processing too, even if the data looks mediocre

nvm i take that back the data is good

[late belfry]

The data was good. I dont use graxpert or blur x (🤮) or anything fancy, just ghs and colour calibration. I am a firm believer in integration time. I don’t know much but pretty sure space ain’t that sharp… and neither am I.

[patent axle]

ah ok, the gradient looks good so keep doing what you're doing for that. the 2 critiques i would have would be to deal with the noise a bit more (deepsnr or grax denoise, both are free and really good), and also do make sure not to saturate the centre

[late belfry]

Thanks!👍🏻

[shell jasper]

Here I removed a little bit of noise and fixed your contrast also did a bit of saturating

[patent axle]

looks worse

cant really take someones jpg, edit it, and expect it to be better

also, im saying that the bright part is saturated, which means those pixels cant hold any more or less information, not that it needs more colour saturation. youve misunderstood me

this is the part that seems saturated on all channels

however this whole area looks a bit saturated on red, i bet if you separated the channels it would be fully white

but its understandable, shooting sii is already hard, and with a full moon it would be very tough to get good data

[late belfry]

Looks gross… too sharp, didnt read anything before that? Too hard on the colour as well. Much like most places of business, look but please do not touch. Thank you!😉

I appreciate everyone’s unrequested critiques, they are most helpful. Unfortunately I am a visual learner, so please be so kind as to post YOUR 18hr+ Cygnus Wall in SHO so I can have a reference point of how it should be done and what it is ‘supposed’ to look like. Thanks in advance!🫡👍🏻

[patent axle]

would love to give a visual example, but i live in the southern hemisphere and shoot OSC.

a good way to understand what saturated pixels look like is to look at bright star cores

you can see in both images, the centre ~10 pixels dont increase in brightness anymore, and are a uniform white, or whatever the channels have been designated as "white"

that means there is no more information in there, and the white pixels are literally just representing a numerical value 1

that can happen if you brighten your data too much, like with tools such as histogram transformation

in astrophotography its often referred to as "clipping" the highlights

i can't tell for sure because of jpg compression, but the centre of your image seems to have completely white pixels, or at least conpletely white in some channels

[late belfry]

Thank you so much for explaining that!😃👍🏻

[late belfry]

Yes, it looks really bad when you take it down to a per pixel basis! Thank you for taking the time to examine it and show me. 🫡 I think I should probably take it down, it doesn’t really compare to all the other quality images in this section.💯

[patent axle]

thats all good, ive had to process literally HUNDREDS of data stacks to inprove. its a hard game

this is already really good, im just nitpicking

[late belfry]

Yes, thank you very much!👍🏻

[late belfry]

Hopefully you make the rounds to critique the rest of the absolute trash that gets posted on here. I would be terribly disappointed if you were wasting it all on me!👍🏻

[patent axle]

well its not wasted when you take on the data with a positive attitude, lots of people just get offended and leave 😢

[shell jasper]

I didn't even sharpened it lol

And that was not the point when i edited your image i was trying to help you see that it can look better

[patent axle]

if thats the goal, then its better if you processed the original stacked data, rather than his final image