Processing 101

Processing is the second half of astrophotography.  This is where your vision really comes to life and you put your touch on your project.  This is also probably the most important and tedious part of the hobby.  

I like to think of processing an astro image like body work and paint portion of restoring a car.  You will have your corrective work you perform in order to get the body of the car perfected and ready for paint.  Once you paint, you will beautify it by polishing and apply a top coat such as wax or ceramic.

When I first started this hobby, I did not want to process because I felt that was taking away the natural aspect of the imaged object.  I felt processing was making the image "fake", but I soon realized that is not the case at all.  Processing your image is crucial to ensure your image is at its best quality.  Just like the analogy I used of restoring an old car, you will prepare your image by performing corrective actions in the beginning which perfect and set the stage for beautification.  

The corrective actions include, but not limited to, gradient removal, star corrections, color balancing and calibration, background neutralization, noise reduction etc.  All of these actions bring your image to its potential glory.  When painting a car, you want to remove any rust, dents, dings and replace any bad panels, right?  These things happen due to age and use and if you just paint over them, what is your final result going to be?  The same applies here.  Nothing is perfect and there are so many variables when to comes to astrophotography that you cannot beat all of them.  Processing your image is the use of tools available to us in order to do final corrections caused by the variables we could not and, sometimes, cannot correct for during the actual imaging stage.  

After corrective actions are taken on your image, we stretch the data to its final form, just like painting the car.  Painting the car finalizes that hard work you put into the body corrections.  With careful measures and attention to detail, you will bring out the details of your image and you will literally see your vision coming to reality!  

Once the data is stretched, you can bring out the remaining details that are missing, sharpen, adjust saturation curves, fine tune contrast and lightness and even add color palettes!  Yes adding color palettes brings you into the none-realistic realm, but this is your vision, your creation and if you choose to keep it completely natural, then that is just as amazing as well!

I teach processing on PixInsight, and yes, there is a learning curve with this, but I have an entire video series going over everything from downloading and setting up, to each process I use in my personal workflow, to demonstrating a basic workflow and more advanced workflow.  

Check out the link below for a video index of my entire PixInsight series.  Once, you learn PixInsight, you will be able to say you know how to navigate the most powerful astro imaging processing program available!

As always, if you have any questions, you are not alone in this.  Please feel free to reach out to me any time.