skylane5sp Loc: Puyallup, WA

Altogether I took about 50 images and about 20 of the same angle. D5200, 11mm, f2.8, Auto WB, Aperture Priority but different ISOs and shutter openings, just to see what was what. I shot both RAW and fine JPG.

This one was the most extreme at the camera's equivalent to ISO 25600 at 20 secs. Again, AUTO WB. Yes, it's very noisy. The RAW file looks pretty much the same. This is the SOOC jpg resized but my question is: Why is it so green?

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

I would think the green is coming from the Auto WB in that it didn't quite know what color setting to use. For stars, I often set my WB to 2500. Incandescent is a bit higher than that, perhaps 3500, and the color effect will be different.

In Photoshop and Lightroom, you can change the white balance setting and see how it looks.

If you were to place a raw in dropbox, if you have access, I could treat the noise with DxO Prime and see how the noise cleans up. It would be interesting to try this with several ISO values to compare.

DxO Prime only works with the RAW image and not the JPEG version.

skylane5sp Loc: Puyallup, WA

The first post was Auto WB. I tried a couple on Incandescent and they came out very blue. It seemed that in Auto, the higher the ISO, the greener the image.

Could that be just the way the camera/sensor/software sees the world?

I don't have a dropbox but I probably should set one up.

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

Well, the way the sensor sees the world will be heavily influenced by the WB setting. In the auto WB mode, the camera has to make a WB decision and it could pick something that is not appropriate.

skylane5sp Loc: Puyallup, WA

That was the max ISO available and I was "playing" around. Thanks! I just looked at the DxO website. Looks very intriguing.

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

The are two DxO Optics products. The upper tier one is called "Elite". Only Elite has the Prime Noise removal.

Another product that can be useful is Focus Magic which can remove motion. By motion, I mean star trails. For short start trails, it can concentrate the streak into a single point. It has a limited range, about 20 pixels of streaking, which shows up when magnified.

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

Do you have any series of these shots in which you kept the camera aimed at the same spot and did not change settings, and took a series of shots all using the same settings? This would be useful to try stacking which can dramatically reduce noise and improve signal to noise ration. Works best with RAWs converted to TIFF. I have been using DeepSkyStacker (DSS).

As you take a series of shots, the earth is rotating. The software auto-aligns the images. This will leave a band around the outside edge of the final result that needs to be cropped out of the picture.

skylane5sp Loc: Puyallup, WA

No, I did not. Stacking is on my short list though. Thanks👍

Desert Gecko Loc: desert southwest, USA

Sounds like good advice. I shoot a little higher wb for my jpegs, tungsten (about 3200) to get a bit more blue, but that's all personal preference and not relevant in the raw anyway (I also shoot both.)

I know you were playing, but 20 seconds seems a bit short for an 11 on a crop. The 600 rule says you can go about 36, but I see some trails so I abide by the 500 rule and keep my 11-16mm Tokina, set at 11mm, at 30 seconds. I see no trails no matter how hard I look. And, for what it's worth, at f2.8 and 1250 ISO I usually get pretty good results on my Sony a77ii, but I'm thinking your D5200 (or did you say D5300?) would probably do much better, perhaps even well at ISO 800. Thou can bring a lot or in post. Indeed, much of what DxO rates in a sensor's dynamic range is what it can bring out of the darkness, measured in stops.

As I write this I'm sitting in my truck while my camera, on an intervalometer, is happily snapping a couple hundred pics for me, trying to catch some meteors. I might finally try my hand at a time lapse.

Serge has a pretty good tutorial on using Lightroom and Photoshop with Topaz de-noise to process MW shots. I've had much better results since following it, and as I said, you can get a lot from your raw images, even what you didn't know was there. If your shots are recent, there's a good chance you even picked up some Perseids meteors that will show up once you prices them.

And to the other poster (I can't go back and get your name while I'm posting this with my cell) I'll have to look at the DSS program you mentioned. I tried Star Stacks (Stax?) once but couldn't get it to even load an image.

Desert Gecko Loc: desert southwest, USA

Removed double post

Desert Gecko Loc: desert southwest, USA

Removed triple post. Alas, the cost of living in the solitude & tranquility of the beautiful high desert: sketchy cell & data service.