That false color trick on nebula photos nearly got me banned from my astro club

I tried stacking RGB channels in a weird order to make the Orion Nebula pop more, like a shortcut to get that Hubble look without the proper filters. Problem was the greens came out radioactive and the blues looked fake, so the club president called me out during the meeting last Tuesday. He said real astrophotographers don't cheat the color balance, and honestly the raw data from my Celestron 8 actually looked better after I ran it through the proper stacking in DSS. Has anyone else tried weird channel tricks and regretted it or am I the only one who learned this the hard way?

2 comments

2 Comments

avery7214d ago

Tried that once with a moon shot, rearranged the color channels to make the Mare look like a sick painting. Ended up with a purple and green blob that looked like a bruise in space. Showed it to my buddy at the local star party and he laughed so hard he almost knocked over his dob. Went back to monochrome processing after that, just feels more honest with what the sensor actually saw.

barbara4294d ago

Oh man that is too funny! My friend Dave tried something similar with a nebula shot he took last summer. He went wild with the color curves trying to make the Ha data pop and it came out looking like a Jackson Pollock painting had a fight with a unicorn. He posted it on our local astro group and someone asked if he was trying to do astrophotography or abstract art. He was so embarrassed he deleted the whole thread and went back to just stacking and stretching normally. Now he jokes that his only artistic move is cropping.