Editing astrophotography | Hacker News Reader

Editing astrophotography

astroimagery.com

24 pointskarlperera11 comments

This article is kinda not that great. It's shallow, skips all the information about stacking, calibration frames and all the base layer needed to get to the editing step.

It also has steps out of order (gradient removal is done first), and doesn't even talk about linear/non-linear edits.

Highly recommend picking up pixinsight and a book on how to use it.

Bona fides: I'm an astrophotographer, you can see my work in the link in my profile (not posting it here because I'm not trying to promote it).

The internet has been around long enough that pretty much everything has been posted. The older content is probably better content as it was done as an actual write up by knowledgeable people vs new content written by someone looking to be a thought leader to boost their influencer profiles. Nevermind the AI generated content.

I have no idea the background of TFA's author, but it is a noticeable trend that makes my use of the internet decrease.

Looking more through this blog, it's clear that even if there's a human directing it, it's just blogspam. Every post is filled with surface level drivel and tons of affiliate links.

Look at their most recent post about the horsehead nebula: https://astroimagery.com/astrophotography/deep-space-astroph...

It's just straight up bad advice with affiliate link after affiliate link after affiliate link.

Surprisingly little real information in this article. It could be summed up as "use noise reduction, tone curves, and local contrast" without need for further waffle. Smells a bit like blog spam.

What I would've found helpful would be a discussion of proper exposure for astrophotography, which oddly enough was missing. If your exposure is screwed then your edits will be screwed too. They mention pulling back the star highlights and boosting darker areas, well it would be interesting to hear the author's opinions on the optimal exposure settings to enable those edits without excessive noise or clipping.

Also my pet peeve, getting colour science technicalities wrong. "RAW files are dull" no RAW files are simply not viewable as-is and any attempt to display them without proper tone mapping is pointless. "Linear image" - what does this even mean? No respect for the colour pipeline :(

You are completely right mcdeltat. The problem with writing content is that without feedback it is easy to forget or miss something, even if it appears to be very obvious to you sometimes it is just too easy to miss. A webpage needs to be constantly updated.

I am very happy with your comments and will use them to update and improve the page. On the website as a whole I have all the things you talk about including an exposure calculator: https://astroimagery.com/techniques/imaging/astrophotography...

Of course, it is not perfect. Nothing can be but it is a good starting point and I tried to base it on real experience and some research.

The wrong words yes for RAW files: they appear black and lifeless but contain a rich amount of detail which requires stretching and the rest.

Recently bought the Celestron Origin, which dramatically reduces barrier to entry because it automates a lot of the manual work like image stacking. Output is not as stellar as a more bespoke workflow, but payoff is more immediate. https://www.celestron.com/products/celestron-origin-intellig...

> dramatically reduces barrier to entry

.. But it adds one big barrier which is the $4000 price..

You can do astrophotography with a DSLR for a tiny fraction of that cost.

For a fraction yes, for a _tiny_ fraction... most likely no.

Instead of using the more expensive software such as Pixinsight which costs at least 300 Euros, I try to use free software where possible. I do use Photoshop a little which is not free but not expensive either.

I have used many techniques in Siril and Seti Astro Suite to create many awesome astro images. These two programs are constantly improving! Which software do you use for astrophotgraphy?

Is this account posting solely LLM-generated content? Please don't do that here.

I am a real person and some of those comments sting! believe it or not I will try to improve and am doing my best documenting my journey and all that have learnt in astrophotography.

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