A comment on my Orion nebula photo made me rethink my whole editing process

I posted a shot of the Orion Nebula I took back in February, and someone pointed out that my stars looked bloated and the core was totally blown out white. At first I was defensive, but they were right. I had been cranking up the saturation and curves to make the nebula pop, but it was wrecking the detail. They suggested I try using layer masks to only boost the nebula area without touching the stars. So I did that last weekend on a new stack of data, and the difference was night and day. The stars stayed sharp and pinpoint, and the core actually showed that faint greenish glow instead of just being a white blob. Now I check every image for clipped highlights before I even start editing. Has anyone else had a stranger on here change how you process your photos?

2 comments

2 Comments

abby30823d ago

@terryb11 did the same thing to me with M31 last month... totally changed how I look at detail now.

terryb1123d ago

Oh man, that exact thing happened to me with my Andromeda shot last fall. Some random dude on here showed me my stars were basically blue donuts from overprocessing, and I was so annoyed at first but he was totally right. I had been running this same workflow for months just cranking everything up and not paying attention to what it did to the fine details. Now I use starnet++ to separate the stars and do my edits on the starless layer, then blend them back in at the end. Its crazy how much subtle detail you lose when you just blast the whole image with curves and saturation. The green in the core of Orion is such a good example, you miss that whole color range when everything is cooked to white.