Rosanna Loc: Montana

Was taken with Canon 5D III, 16-35 f2.8. Settings were f2.8, 20 sec. 1250 ISO. Had a person wanting an 8" X 12" metal print of it made and I do not like the way it came out.

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CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

I would try an 8" x 12" paper print first to see how it's going to turn out.
But it looks like a pretty darn nice shot to me.
There are programs that can make different adjustments to it depending on what you want to do.
Just give us an idea and maybe week can help. What's wrong in you mind with it???
Craig

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

It appears that the stars are not in perfect focus. This is something that is super critical. As they go out of focus, even the tiniest bit, the brighr ones grow fatter, and the dim ones disappear.

This can be corrected with a software package called Star Tools. It has an option to reduce star sizes and can redeem a picture like this. There is a learning curve.

Albuqshutterbug Loc: Albuquerque NM

I agree with JimH. The stars on zoom are not in tight focus.
If you can clean that up, I really like the composition of the shot.
I think it is worth the effort.

Rosanna Loc: Montana

Thanks guys for your help. I have a dickens of a time with focus. I set everything to manual, use spot focus and hope it comes out. When it's so dark out, I have trouble with using the LCD screen. The northern lights are so fast appearing and disappearing, I get excited and am afraid of missing a shot.

Rosanna Loc: Montana

Hi Craig, Thanks for responding, the photo just doesn't seem clean. I only use Lightroom, keep up with the latest versions. Like in your avatar, think that's what it's called, your Milky Way is so vivid; I don't know how to make it so intense, more pop. Rosanna

Rosanna Loc: Montana

Thanks Jim, focus is important to me so if you can help with me getting it better, I'd appreciate it much! I use spot, one focus point, manual settings. I'm interested in the Star Tools package, can you tell me how to go about getting that. Thanks much, Rosanna

Rosanna Loc: Montana

Do you really have a partridge in a pear tree?! Yes I want it cleaned up, definitely. I'm tech ignorant! Use Lightroom, keeping current with its versions. Rosanna

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

I hear this so often. I am using a Sony and turn on the focus magnifier to full magnification and am able to watch the star diameters on the screen as I focus. And as I get close, fainter stars star appearing, so I turn my attention to a faint star and adjust focus until that faint star is a bright as it can be. When I do this, stars are in perfect focus every time.

Here is the package that can save the day: http://www.startools.org/

Mostly, I see the YouTubes on the web focus on doing galaxies and nebula, and don't really address the simple things like reducing stars, which it can do perfectly. And the trick here is to adjust the star mask smaller by a step or two so the mask disappears from the small stars and then to increase the star mask back to what it was so that only the fatter stars are selected.

If you get Star Tools, the price is about $50.

Here is a post that I used Star Tools to show how to make them round. I didn't have any focus problem and didn't have fat stars. But, when imaging stars, the atmosphere causes the light to twinkle around a bit and the result is that stars don't end up perfectly round if you magnify a lot.

I could make another recipe to show how to make fat stars thinner.

By the way, I tried to download and fix this image, but there is not enough information in this picture to be successful. The download is only 640 x 427 pixels. I had to convert it to TIF, then loaded into Star Tools. My first effort reduced the stars out of existence. The 2nd try was to reduce only one pixel, but it didn't look so good. If you can upload a more suitable file to experiment with, it would be better. Star Tools can't use JPEG, and besides, JPEG throws away too much information. I shoot RAW and convert to TIF and its happy with that.

Rosanna Loc: Montana

Jim, I shoot totally in RAW, I didn't know what size to post, can I post the large jpeg here?

Rosanna Loc: Montana

I just retread your post, I've never converted to TIF, I can do that. How come you convert to TIF?

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

It is because Star Tools won't open JPEG. It will open FITs, TIF and PNG formats only.

In the manual, it also says that JPEG is especially unsuitable for astrophotography with it lossy compression that throws away what Star Tools needs.

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

You can post a JPG that is arounf 15 to 18 MB. But once it is JPG, a lot of info is thrown away that Star Tools wants to use. Perhaps for just shrinking stars it won't matter as much. But Star Tools does not even read a JPG file.

Just noticed that I forgot to provide a link on the results of Star Tools:

http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-346301-1.html

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

I searched and found that I had a somewhat out of focus image of the Hercules Cluster with a nearby blown out Jupiter. This is the first image.

The second image has the benefit of using Star Tools. The stars are made more round and are shrunk. Special attention to Jupiter since it was so blown out. It has also been stretched to show the stars better.

Original

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Used Star Tools to make round and to shrink stars and Jupiter

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nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

From what I can see....it looks just fine. I agree with all of the posters that shooting raw is a must.

I look at it this way. It is like cooking a cake. If you shoot anything but RAW, once the cake is out of the oven...it is what it is., You can't add or subtract ingredients. When shooting RAW...that is NOT the case, if you think your cake is missing important ingredients.....you can make all kinds of ingredient changes after the fact.

When shooting JPEGs, TIFF's, your camera essentially makes all of the critical in-camera decisions with your help. With RAW, you can alter most of those in-camera decisions in post processing. The one big exception is FOCUS.....and I have yet to find one Focus software program that does any better than "unsharp mask" which is very limiting. If the image is out of focus - in the name of storage - I delete it and "kick the camera" :)

Just my two cents!