Solar System Imaging - A Processing Attempt

Superb.

Colours look natural, the image isn't over-sharpened and you've managed to bring out lots of detail on the surface.

It looks perfect to me!

There's always a tendency to over-sharpen these images, to the extend that it looks fake, but this looks spot on in my opinion.

Thanks, Mike!

Yay! Not bad for a first venture in planetary image processing then 🙂

I wasn't sure that I'd aligned and stacked the frames correctly. I decided to use Registax to do everything (apart from the pre-processing in Pipp) so that I could get a better grasp of the software before introducing myself to Autostakkert, which is what Rupert had recommended to use for stacking in his workshop.

The first few times I tried to align and stack in Registax, the resulting image appeared to have large chunks missing from it. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong so I stacked without aligning and it seemed to work perfectly… Odd! After that I had the option to use my unaligned, stacked image as a reference to re-stack with. Re-did it using that and it worked a treat. Though I still have no idea whether I've done this correctly.

Agree with your views on over-sharpening. Having played with it myself now, I can totally see how easy it is to get carried away with the finer adjustments of the various layers in a bid to squeeze out just that little bit more detail.

Looks like our first new image for the April video! I'll double-credit it - image by Rupert, processing by Christina!

Lovely processing Christina! As Mike says, you punched out the details without too much sharpening which so often gives it an artificial look but yours look like the real thing you would see through the porthole window of an Apollo capsule that got accidentally catapulted off its moon orbit to a flyby of Jupiter 😉

yours look like the real thing you would see through the porthole window of an Apollo capsule that got accidentally catapulted off its moon orbit to a flyby of Jupiter

Wondering what Rupert has been up to to get this kind of footage… 😉

Thanks, Tej for your your kind comments and Andy for your suggestion to add it to the April presentation. Still not convinced that I stacked/aligned the frames properly. Would be interested to hear from anyone with experience of patches missing after doing this in Registax to understand what I was doing wrong. Or whether it really is a case of it not being the appropriate tool to use?

Hey Christina, this is a good start.

A few other things to try.

In PIPP there is a 'Quality' tab. Try the Quality Estimation / Percentage to keep and the Quality weighting options. Getting rid of bad frames and duplicating the best ones can reduce noise and allow more aggressive sharpening.

Also in PS, make a B&W image then add it as a luminance layer, with opacity at 40-60%

See

Luminance addition by astrograph ltd, on Flickr

Tweak tweak tweak.

Apart from some basic sharpening, colour balance and levels in PS no other processing is done.

Thanks Rupert! I'll definitely be having another go and trying out all your recommendations.

Great to be able to visually compare my version to yours too (and to see what it should look like). Mine is quite a bit lighter/brighter to yours but the additional B/W luminance layer in yours really has brought out a lot more detail.