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What is your preferred false-color (or even natural color) narrow band palette?

Processing Narrowband Deep Sky
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Jon Rista avatar
Jon Rista avatar
Since I've been out of the hobby for a while, a lot of things change around me. Its been very intriguing getting back into things, and seeing how people are processing their images today. I've been browsing around ABin, and the orange and blue, or orange and cyan, often very VIBRANT, even "electric" narrow band renditions are coming across my screen. It is very interesting seeing some of the new ways people are processing their narrow band images, and it certainly has increased the variety and diversity of images. Its a positive trend in the community, IMO. I've even heard about some blending palettes I've never heard of before (and for some, still have never seen yet.)  

So, I'm curious, what is your favorite false-color narrow band palette? Well, I guess they don't necessarily have to be strictly "false" color, realistic palettes are welcome, too!  

For me, I think, over all the years, I'm primarily partial to the Classic Hubble Palette. I think it can be a very colorful palette in the end. It isn't necessarily just an orange/green/blue palette, you can actually push those blends and the color gradations pretty far, and cover most if not all of the rainbow of the visible spectrum. Many Hubble images processed with this palleted are incredibly colorful, depicting everything from dark rusty-red and browns, through reds, oranges, yellows, greens, cyans, deeper blues, and even violets. 

That said, some of these new, what I'm going to call the JWST Palette images, are really incredible!! A recent Seagull Nebula image that is so electrically vibrant on my screen, that it seems to hover in front of it. BRILLIANT image, and I think it shows off this newer palette wonderfully well. I love the deep blue and vibrant orange. There are a few images of Monkey Head here on AstroBin that also use this new palette, and while they don't quite have the incredible blue of the Seagull Nebula image, they have this vibrant orange/cyan blend with transition zones in yellows, and they are rather incredible. (I think one of them is by Bill Long.) The vibrancy that this palette can take on, is really quite intriguing. It is less colorful than Hubble in some ways, but for some objects, it really fits!  

So...what are your preferred palette, and why? What other palettes do you also like most?
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Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
For me it really depends on the object. Usually when I'm planning a project I have some idea of what I want the image to look like in the end. For my Monkey Head Nebula image I went into that thinking I would use the old classic Hubble coloring. When it came time to process it, the dynamic blend looked absolutely awesome and different (for me anyhow) so I went with that. I recently reprocessed my really old Pacman data, and the dynamic sho blend also made that image really incredible in terms of the colors and transitions. 

Other data projects have looked poor to me using this method though, but looked great using the NB Color Mapper. My Heart Nebula with the HB3 SNR in it looked amazing with the colors I was able to construct with that, and not really all that great with dynamic. 

I went into by archive drive (the vault) and pulled out some really old stuff from way back when I was just getting rolling. I had the Crescent Nebula Soap Bubble data which was all the rage on CN about 6 years ago, and I used the NB Color Mapper, which I mapped HA to Red and OIII to blue and this very interesting purpleish and blue image came on my screen that I couldn't resist processing up. That's not something I've ever seen personally, but it looked awesome to me. The data is really noisy but that wasn't really the point.

Same thing happened with Cave Nebula, which is also really noisy old data. This time with the same settings in NB Color Mapper a still kinda purpleish image came out but the tone was different and the contrast of the dark inky bits was stunning to me. So I rolled with that.

I think it's pretty great that we have options like this available for dialing in the data how we want. I also think there's merit in the tried and true approach of old. I just ask myself if I feel the image is representative of the 3 channels of data I took to produce it, or 2 in the case of HOO. If so, I think it's fine to experiment.

If I were to pick a method I prefer, it's very likely to be using NB Color Mapper. There's just so much you can do with it and the more I use it the better my results and creativity become. I guess that's all I personally could ask for.

Bill
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Brian Puhl avatar
Brian Puhl avatar
My techniques lately involve using the narrowband data to enhance the natural RGB palette.   Standard SHO is becoming a bit outdated from an artistic point of view. SHO rarely catches attention these days from viewers.    Most prefer the HOO palette because of the vibrant reds, which also somewhat mimics natural RGB color. 

I take it to the next level by subtracting the narrowband data from the RGB image, processing the dust, then re-adding the narrowband data in a palette that closely represents RGB.  The data is weighted similar to HSO, but sulfur ultimately becomes more of a luminance addition to the Ha data, which sits primarily in the red channel.  Enhancing those details, I then take the Oiii data and add it balanced between the green and blues.   The young mastermind @Charles Hagen gave me alot of the tools and techniques that I use today.
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Jon Rista avatar
Jon Rista avatar
Brian Puhl:
My techniques lately involve using the narrowband data to enhance the natural RGB palette.   Standard SHO is becoming a bit outdated from an artistic point of view. SHO rarely catches attention these days from viewers.    Most prefer the HOO palette because of the vibrant reds, which also somewhat mimics natural RGB color. 

I take it to the next level by subtracting the narrowband data from the RGB image, processing the dust, then re-adding the narrowband data in a palette that closely represents RGB.  The data is weighted similar to HSO, but sulfur ultimately becomes more of a luminance addition to the Ha data, which sits primarily in the red channel.  Enhancing those details, I then take the Oiii data and add it balanced between the green and blues.   The young mastermind @Charles Hagen gave me alot of the tools and techniques that I use today.

Subtracting the NB from the RGB to get the dust is pretty intriguing. Is your SH2-308 image an example of this process? Its a beautiful image.
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Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
Brian Puhl:
My techniques lately involve using the narrowband data to enhance the natural RGB palette.   Standard SHO is becoming a bit outdated from an artistic point of view. SHO rarely catches attention these days from viewers.    Most prefer the HOO palette because of the vibrant reds, which also somewhat mimics natural RGB color. 

I take it to the next level by subtracting the narrowband data from the RGB image, processing the dust, then re-adding the narrowband data in a palette that closely represents RGB.  The data is weighted similar to HSO, but sulfur ultimately becomes more of a luminance addition to the Ha data, which sits primarily in the red channel.  Enhancing those details, I then take the Oiii data and add it balanced between the green and blues.   The young mastermind @Charles Hagen gave me alot of the tools and techniques that I use today.



Very interesting. I'll have to explore this myself.
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Brian Puhl avatar
Brian Puhl avatar
Jon Rista:
Brian Puhl:
My techniques lately involve using the narrowband data to enhance the natural RGB palette.   Standard SHO is becoming a bit outdated from an artistic point of view. SHO rarely catches attention these days from viewers.    Most prefer the HOO palette because of the vibrant reds, which also somewhat mimics natural RGB color. 

I take it to the next level by subtracting the narrowband data from the RGB image, processing the dust, then re-adding the narrowband data in a palette that closely represents RGB.  The data is weighted similar to HSO, but sulfur ultimately becomes more of a luminance addition to the Ha data, which sits primarily in the red channel.  Enhancing those details, I then take the Oiii data and add it balanced between the green and blues.   The young mastermind @Charles Hagen gave me alot of the tools and techniques that I use today.

Subtracting the NB from the RGB to get the dust is pretty intriguing. Is your SH2-308 image an example of this process? Its a beautiful image.



Actually the 308 data was rather limited integration time and NB subtraction would have little benefit.   My best examples would be my Wolf's Cave, Ced 51, and even my Flaming Star, though unfortunately I removed a bit of the Hb data on accident.    Almost all my latest works use NB addition to enhance the RGB detail, best example of that would be my Christmas Tree and also Bubble Nebula, both are remote data sets from Insight taken under really good seeing.
Jon Rista avatar
Jon Rista avatar
Brian Puhl:
Jon Rista:
Brian Puhl:
My techniques lately involve using the narrowband data to enhance the natural RGB palette.   Standard SHO is becoming a bit outdated from an artistic point of view. SHO rarely catches attention these days from viewers.    Most prefer the HOO palette because of the vibrant reds, which also somewhat mimics natural RGB color. 

I take it to the next level by subtracting the narrowband data from the RGB image, processing the dust, then re-adding the narrowband data in a palette that closely represents RGB.  The data is weighted similar to HSO, but sulfur ultimately becomes more of a luminance addition to the Ha data, which sits primarily in the red channel.  Enhancing those details, I then take the Oiii data and add it balanced between the green and blues.   The young mastermind @Charles Hagen gave me alot of the tools and techniques that I use today.

Subtracting the NB from the RGB to get the dust is pretty intriguing. Is your SH2-308 image an example of this process? Its a beautiful image.



Actually the 308 data was rather limited integration time and NB subtraction would have little benefit.   My best examples would be my Wolf's Cave, Ced 51, and even my Flaming Star, though unfortunately I removed a bit of the Hb data on accident.    Almost all my latest works use NB addition to enhance the RGB detail, best example of that would be my Christmas Tree and also Bubble Nebula, both are remote data sets from Insight taken under really good seeing.

Gocha. I should have some time later tonight to check out those other images. I'm really curious to see how that works out. Intriguing!
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Richard avatar
Richard avatar
Great to see you back and enjoying the hobby again Jon.

I've recently been enjoying two different narrowband colour palettes:
  • Modified ForaxX (ie that orange and blue palette)
  • Colour accurate RGB


Modified ForaxX
I use Bill Blanshan's NB Normalisation process. You merge your SHO master lights using regular Hubble palette (ie map SHO to RGB), stretch to non-linear then modify the colours using afermentioned process.

Link: https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?threads/new-process-narrowbandnormalization.21441/

My most recent image (IC 1848 Soul nebula) is my best example of this. It works really well because the blue and orange hues are well separated with little to no overlapping causing a magenta hue. I've just finished collecting data for my Rosette nebula mosaic, but when I try this approach I get a lot more magenta cast due to the overlap between the blue and oranges. However, I tried another palette which I think worked really well for the Rosette nebula.

Colour accurate RGB
Imagine making a colour accurate RGB image using SHO narrowband data. That's exactly what you can do using the NB Colour Mapping script. Following advice given by Adam Block (https://youtu.be/0XxB-sOFD0Q) you can assemble a colour image from monochrome data where you assign a hue and saturation level to each channel. Of course, you can also use this approach to make any colour palette you want.

Adam explains in his video that you can map S, H and O to their natural hues and then can control the blend of each channel by modifying the midpoint of each channel. I would then run SPCC to colour calibrate and this actually gives more natural looking stars compared with the dull ones you get from traditional SHO colour palettes.

I haven't uploaded my Rosette to my astrobin yet (literally finished it last night, might tweak it a bit, not sure!), but I much prefer how it came out compared to my ForaxX version. Here's the version I ended up with last night, however, this is a smaller file size to attach to this comment so the resolution/quality may be worse than the original file.

Would be interesting to hear your thoughts! 🙂

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Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
The RGB-like Narrowband blending in NB Color Mapper is something I've also been playing with. 

https://www.astrobin.com/obe9l8/

If you look at a pure RGB image of that target you'll see that it's very close, like the Rosette shared here. The stars in the image are also blended to be RGB-like, but separately via a pixel math script. One could argue that the center of the structure is less blue than a traditional RGB image, but you can do that quite easily if you wanted to, in NB Color Mapper. I did not as the result I got here was more pleasing to me personally. 

I've found that the traditional Hubble blend has gone out of favor. It still has its charm but the newer methods definitely have taken over. NB Color Mapper has been my heavy favorite, but these two Foraxx script blended images are pretty cool as well.

Monkey: https://www.astrobin.com/zer4z6/

Pacman: https://www.astrobin.com/zd2xtt/

Bill
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