How do I bring out the red in the Cigar Galaxy M82? I shoot with a colour camera. Do I need a filter to capture the red separately? I use pixinsight and Lightroom.
Here is my photo.
📷 Bode's & Cigar Galaxies M81 & M81
Red in Cigar Galaxy
If you got a filter like the L-extreme, L-ultimate, or any other dual bandpass filter you could bring it out quite a bit.
By red I assume you are talking about Ha. You would need to get data with an Ha filter or a dual band filter that includes Ha. After that there are various methods you can use to combine the data.
I suggest you calibrate your existing image properly first as at the moment is just all off-white. That alone would bring out some of the red Ha signal in those galaxies.
Helpful Concise
It might help if you share your processing workflow, filters that you used (if any) and the sky conditions. From my Bortle 7 sky I could not get too much of the red either.
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I processed the image with bias, flats and darks in Pixinsight’s WBPP. Should that not calibrate it? I then used gradient correction, spectrophotmetric calibration, Blurxterminator and stretched it with Generalized Hyperbolic stretch. The rest was tweeking such as noise exterminator. I am wondering if Tony & Quinn are right and I need a filter to capture more Ha and then combine the two images.
Flat, darks and bias (or dark flats) do not calibrate for color. The SPCC does that with the condition that you have enough signal.
I understand from your reply that you did not use any filter.
I understand from your reply that you did not use any filter.
I agree with Andrea above, your image lacks almost any color at all which suggests it hasn’t been processed correctly. The WBPP process does calibrate your image but it does not yield a good color balance. You say you used SPCC but how does the image look with the ScreenTransferFunction activated before stretching?
Skip GHS for now and do a simple test with HistogramTransformation, then apply masks and gently balance saturation a bit. I’m guessing whatever you do in GHS is the main culprit here. You could also try to balance color/saturation in GHS by choosing the correct mode:
📷 image.png
Just to be clear, you do not need a Ha filter to capture the red jets that are already visible in your image. For the fainter parts of it, sure, then you probably would gain by using a NB filter.
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If you want, you can post your stacked image here and will try to process it to see what I can get out of it.
Jan: Stretching the saturation in GHS worked. Thank you.
📷 M81&82_more_red.jpg