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[RCC] IC 434

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Kevin Knight avatar
Kevin Knight avatar
Hello all,

Shot this a few nights under bortle 5 AZ skies. Any help, pointers, or brutal ripping is much appreciated.

710x30s (started with ~1000) 
SPCC
Flux
gradient removal
BXT
NXT (NEW AI MODEL)
Dynamic Crop
SXT
GHS (still not comfortable with this tool)
Curves (slight bump in saturation and luminance) I’m trying to be better about over cooking my edits, so once I had it the way I liked it, I backed it off two steps 😂
Stretched Stars with Arcsinhstretch
recombined star/starless

Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar
Overall I think it's still a bit over-baked, especially in terms of contrast and a bit too much color saturation, at least to my taste. You could benefit by making those smaller changes by fine tuning the image in a photo editor like Gimp or Affinity Photo. Use PI to do the heavy lifting and fine tune in the editor.
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Leonardo Ruiz avatar
Leonardo Ruiz avatar
Hi, it is undoubtedly an excellent image and the comments that I am going to write to you are from my point of view and may not coincide with that of another astrophotographer.
First of all, I see the dark nebulae as too contrasty, which makes them lose their naturalness. Perhaps it is an excess of BXT or contrast, but from my point of view you should lower the sharpness in those areas, which will give you more naturalness.
I leave you an image where you can compare:
https://app.astrobin.com/search?p=eJy7WVKSWlFiq2rupGpkVJaYU5oKpFWNHYFkRmpiiqqRQUZ%2BUTFY0MgZSOYmli RnhFQWIJQ5%2BviA2OYuaonliUUptqqmIKMy80tSQMKmLmoFiemptoZgKjizCsg0MAAAJc8iTA%3D%3D&i=6198#fullscreen

On the other hand, if you can, lower the exposure to NGC 2023 so that some structure appears.
Lastly, and this is a very personal point of view, the Alnitak flash is very long, I don't know if that's how it appeared in the photo or if you are using a program like Starspikes. If you can control it, try reducing it a little to see if you like it better.
As I said, the photo is very good.
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Joon Ren avatar
Joon Ren avatar
The image looks pretty good (in terms of noise and detail). Probably the highlights (large star areas) and shadows (in the Flame nebula) are too bright and dark respectively so you could back those off a little. Otherwise it looks great 👌 Saturation is subjective so there is room whether to increase or decrease it.
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Rakeen avatar
Rakeen avatar
this is incredible man 🔥🔥
Dunk avatar
Dunk avatar
I think it looks great - but holy crap those diffraction spikes are long! I'm sure its just my brain adding, but the right-hand spike on Alnitak seems to consume the entire width of the image, and the up/down spikes also..hopefully you didn't add them after the fact (you didn't mention your OTA and all your images in your account are on a redcat)