The guy at the star party who called my photo 'overprocessed'

Ngl I was at a local astronomy club meetup in Tucson last month showing off my shot of the Orion Nebula. This older dude walks up, stares at my laptop for like 10 seconds, then says 'Looks like you cooked the pixels, son.' Honestly it stung because I spent 3 hours stacking and stretching that data in PixInsight. He pulled up his own version on his phone and it was way more subtle with the dust lanes barely visible. I wanted to argue but he had 30 years of experience and a 12 inch dob in his truck. Still bugs me that he dismissed my work without asking about my process. Has anyone else run into gatekeepers like that at club events? What do you do when someone trashes your processing style?

2 comments

2 Comments

tyler_baker5d ago

Man I gotta say I'm kinda on the old guy's side here... so many new astrophotographers just blast the saturation and sharpening until it looks like a video game. Subtlety is where the real skill is.

charlie_stone725d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, tell me about it. I was browsing some astrophotography forums the other day and saw this nebula that was just... purple. Like, completely purple. No natural color balance at all. It looked like someone dropped the saturation slider into the floor and then picked it up and threw it through the roof. I mean, I get that processing is part of the hobby now, but if your final image doesn't look like something that could actually exist in space, you kinda missed the point. Idk, maybe it's just me but I'd rather see a slightly noisy, natural looking photo than something that looks like a screensaver from 1998. There's this whole "make it pop" culture now and people forget that the actual skill is in pulling out the faint details without making everything look radioactive.