Unpopular opinion: edited astro photos look less impressive than raw ones

I spent last Wednesday comparing my raw stacked shots of the Orion Nebula against the final processed versions. The raw ones had way more natural depth even with all the noise. Anyone else think we overdo the saturation and sharpening in this hobby?

2 comments

2 Comments

riley5173d ago

Last Wednesday I actually spent two hours processing a single Andromeda shot and ended up deleting all the layers and starting over from scratch. Honestly I used to be all about cranking the saturation and clarity sliders to make everything pop. But staring at that raw stacked data, even with all the gradient and noise, it had this subtle glow that I completely killed with my heavy handed processing. Tbh it changed how I approach every edit now, I leave way more natural color variation and let the faint outer arms speak for themselves instead of boosting them to the point they look fake.

grant.kevin3d ago

Sorry but without processing we'd all be staring at boring grey noise instead of seeing actual detail.