Nature Photography

Bird, wildlife, and landscape photography by Jon Rista
Rosette Nebula

Rosette Nebula, Reprocessed


I picked up a new piece of software about a week ago, called PixInsight. PixInsight is an editing and post-processing tool dedicated to astrophotography, offering some extremely powerful and often unique tools that support the stretching, noise reduction, and enhancement of deep space imagery. While Photoshop is a powerful tool, sometimes it just can’t touch what PixInsight can do. I spent some time reprocessing one of my favorite astro images so far: Rosette Nebula. Rosette is a truly amazing object, beautiful in form, but also beautiful in color. My original attempt at editing Rosette resulted in a fairly deep, almost monochromatic red tone. That was partly due to how I had to perform some edits when using Photoshop, which drained some of the natural color and color contrast from the image. With PixInsight, I was able to preserve that natural color and contrast, which helps enhance a lot of the nuances of detail that are somewhat lost in the original.

While I think some aspects of my original edit are better, I do like the color in this one. I may come back to this to edit it again once I have more experience with PixInsight, although I think it more likely that I’ll get some better sub frames to start at a dark sky site, and see if I can do better overall.

6 Comments

  1. Alien Shores

    Nice work Jon … Very sharp, and you’ve captured the dark lanes really well which I’ve tried to do without much success. Wes

    • Jon Rista

      Thanks, Wes! Glad you like it. It is definitely a difficult challenge getting the right kind of exposures to bring out the detail. I had to expose for a very long time (I think at least five minutes per sub, maybe longer, at around 30 subs) to get enough signal strength in the nebula. I’m really starting to struggle now, with my 7D, to get good subs. I’ve thrown away probably a hundred or so over the last couple of weeks, as my images are very, very noisy now with the warmer nighttime temperatures. (I was lucky before, temperatures hovered around 0°C (+/- 3°) at night through feb. and most of march, which was basically like having a thermoelectrically cooled astro CCD imager…these days, my 7D sensor temps are around 20-24°C, which is far too hot…)

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