Got told my Orion Nebula shot was too red and it changed how I process

A guy in an online astro group looked at my photo of the Orion Nebula and said it looked like a tomato. I thought I had the colors right but he pointed out I was clipping the red channel from overstretching. He told me to try doing separate curves adjustments for each color channel instead of just one global stretch. I spent last Saturday re-processing that same stack in GIMP and it took like 4 tries to get a balance where the blue and green came through. The final version showed way more of the wispy dust clouds around the core that I had totally blown out before. Anyone else had a stranger online give feedback that actually fixed your workflow?

2 comments

2 Comments

wendysmith10d ago

YES I been there too @holly_flores79 and that separate channel trick is basically mandatory once you learn it, GIMP's curves tool lets you pick each channel from the dropdown so it's super easy to test. That 2am excitement over seeing dust is REAL, I did the exact same thing when I finally pulled out the faint hydrogen around Barnard's Loop.

holly_flores7910d ago

Oh man that reminds me, my buddy Dave had almost the same thing happen with his Orion shot. Some random guy on a forum told him his colors looked like a clown wig and he got all defensive at first but then tried the separate channel trick and it blew his mind. He texted me at like 2am all excited about the dust he could see after.