Saturn Colour

[cstone]

My Saturn image looked a little washed out so I was wondering how do you get more color into the image?

http://www.boltonastro.org.uk/Gallery/d ... at=0&pos=2

[rwilkinson]

Well Carl, the image looks rather low in contrast - are you sure that you've optimised the camera settings to get the best dynamic range?

Using my Toucam with my f/10 SCT and a Barlow lens, I've been operating the camera at 1/25 sec with the gain set at about 70%. It's also worth playing with the "gamma" and "saturation" seetings on the camera menu.

And once you've finished processing the image with Registax, you can do some more adjustments of the colour balance in a photo-processing progam, such as IRIS:

The result of post-processing your image in IRIS.

Carl_Sat2.jpg (2.97 KiB) Viewed 5988 times

To do this, I performed the following steps:

• Load the JPEG file;
• Digital Photo... RGB separation.. into r.pic, g.pic, b.pic
• Load r.pic file;
• Open the View... (L)RGB and move the R +1.5 and B -3.5 to to align the colours. Then save this file as temp.pic;
• Clean up the noise with Processing... Adaptive filter... Noise 5.0;
• Then View... Colour stretching... Stretch 0.0010, Intensity 2.50;
• Then View... Saturation adjustment... 1.25;
• Next, View... White balance... Green 0.97;
• Now save the file as Carl_Sat2.jpg