Hi everyone nico carver here one thing i often enjoy is putting constraints on
my astrophotography and then seeing what happens and this approach is what led me to try untracked
astrophotography for the first time where you take hundreds or thousands of short exposures
without tracking and stack them all together which is something i still really enjoy doing and today
i thought i'd go in the opposite direction and see what can happen with just a single shot so let me
set the scene the other night as i was wrapping up and i was considering driving home from the dark
site i saw the orion constellation on its side and it was actually much higher than i expected
rising over in the east and this was about 4 am so i turned my gear over there that i was
currently testing some things with and i took a single four minute long exposure of orion and
so for this video i'm going to make that one photo that i took with no calibration frames no stacking
look as good as i can as fast as i can because this is a five minute friday for those curious
i took this photo that we're about to look at with this askar 200 millimeter astra lens which
i have on loan from ajina astro thank you agena and a full spectrum nikon d5300 that i have on
loan from night sky camera so thank you to night sky camera and i'm planning to do shootouts with
both of these uh in the next month or so on the channel last thing before i jump into photoshop
if you want to follow along or try to outdo me with my own photo check the description i'll put
in a link where you can get the raw photo just for joining my email list okay i've downloaded the raw
file here this is again from the night sky camera full spectrum modified nikon d5300 and because
it's full spectrum modified we have a very red look here because i didn't do any kind of uh white
balance custom white balance or anything like that but that's no problem because we can fix that with
the white balance settings right over here while i'm playing around with these sliders i'm going
to be looking at these histogram peaks up here and trying to line up their left edges so i want the
green the blue and the red left edges all to be lined up and so i'm going to start by taking the
temperature and moving it down and you can see now the the red and the blue are pretty lined up but
now we got to light up that green one so i'm going to go ahead and take that one and pull it over
and we're getting somewhere but let's keep going okay and i think right about there looks good
uh you can see that we've we've basically aligned these
rgb curves now there's a little bit of red showing over here but that's completely normal because we
have the horse head and the orion nebula which have some pretty bright red mid-tone highlights
kind of thing going on so i ended up at a temperature of 2300 kelvin with a tint of negative
90. now of course those values don't mean anything they'll be completely different depending on which
camera you're using and you know how it recorded the scene i'm really just doing this looking at
the histogram and looking at the scene itself and i think this looks fairly natural now if you sort
of know what orion and the running man and the flame and horse head are supposed to look like you
can just do this by eye now the other thing that i want to do since this is just a single exposure
is i'm going to take the whites and drop those way down just to try to prevent any clipping
because we're going to do a fair amount of sort of processing of this photo so i don't want to
clip the whites at all so i'm just going to drop that down to negative 100 okay next step
um before we open it up into photoshop i also want to save off a tiff of this so that i can make a
starless version with starnet plus plus so i'm going to go up here to the upper right and click
on this little save icon and i've already set this all up we're going to save it to the desktop we're
going to save it as a tiff and we want to make sure the depth is set to 16 bits per channel
and then we'll click save and because this is a five minute friday i'm not going to show the
starnet plus plus process but i'll put a link in the description to a part of another video where
i do show that but it's it's pretty simple you just download it and do a few steps and you can
make starless versions of your images and i'm about to show you uh why that's a good thing
to do okay so now i have the starless version that i made with starnet plus plus and i have
the star-filled version and we're going to start with the starless version here the first thing
i'm going to do is just in case i need to start over i always like to make a copy first thing so
we're going to make a duplicate of the background layer i'm going to do that by pressing command
j if you're on mac or ctrl j on windows and you can see now we have layer 1 right here
and let's go ahead and just apply a bit of a stretch to this layer so we're going to
press command l on mac or control l on windows to bring up the levels command and i'm going to take
the shadows slider move it to the right take the mid tone slider and move that to the left
you can see we can see a bit more now
and i'm going to keep going with that actually a little bit more
and sometimes i just like to really bring this over and see exactly what we have and you can see
there's a lot of interesting uh nebulosity it's it's we probably can't bring it all out because
this is just a single exposure but it sort of shows you what you could do with stacking
because there's a lot of stuff here we'll try our best to bring as much of it out as we can
but i'm going to back off just a little bit here
okay and um this is why actually i like bringing things in in a lower contrast and stat and
stretching them in photoshop you can see that the glow from the core here is a lot more natural
than it looked in the raw converter i'm not sure what's going on there but
i i enjoy stretching here and not in the in the raw converter anyways um so we have some
artifacts that are showing up now we have this the normal starnet plus plus artifacts
you know the star halos and things like that these little ones i'm not so worried
about the stars usually completely cover over those when we bring the stars back in
but these bigger halos we might want to just clean up a bit and then we have
these um satellite trails and those i'm not going to try to fix it's just too much work
but if we do if we were using stacking those would completely go away with a rejection algorithm
okay let me just quickly clone stamp out these halos and i'm just using
a soft clone stamp here to do this there we go and anything else we should do here i don't think so
so let's go ahead and bring in our star layer so i'm just going to press command a or be control
a on windows to select all then command c ctrl c on windows and command v or control v on windows
to paste it in it comes in as a normal layer and we're going to want to use a screen blend
there's lots of good options here you can use lighten i'm going to use screen
and the first thing i'm going to do after i screen blend that in is i'm going to reset
the black point i'm going to do this with a curves adjustment layer just take the black point here
and drop it over this way
okay and you know this is looking pretty cool
uh i could stop right here but let's just go a little bit further with the processing
so i'm gonna add just a slight bit of an s curve here to this just a very slight one
looks good and the dust in orion is looking very red because this is a full spectrum modified
camera i didn't use a uvi or cut filter or anything like that so it is letting in a lot of uh
the near infrared i'm going to try to balance that out a little bit and make it a little bit more of
its neutral brown color that it should be using the selective color adjustment layer so i'm just
going to click selective color and if you have it if it defaults to reds just change it to blacks
and i'm going to take out some
magenta and then when you take out magenta you can often look too green so then you're
going to have to balance that out by taking out maybe a little bit of
yellow too and then i'm going to go ahead and add black
to cover up some of the noise and just make this a little bit more contrasty
the only thing that i'm going to do to finish off this quick edit of a single shot is i think that
this lower quarter of the picture is not very interesting now if we had
done a stacked exposure and and really brought been able to bring out the detail in this dust
it might be more interesting but right now it's too mixed with noise so it doesn't it doesn't look
very inspiring so i'm just going to cut that off with a crop so i'm going to grab my crop tool here
and uh let's just do a 16 by 9 crop then this can be my cover image as well for this video
for a single photo challenge i think that this looks pretty cool and i hope you agree and had
fun editing it with me till next time this has been nico carver nebulaphotos.com clear skies