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Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha - Teds Processing Routine

Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2014 2:19 pm
by edobosz
Hi Folks

A quick effort from this morning to capture the most current active areas. Not the best framing.

Taken with the Lunt80 single stack, DMK23U274 and 2.5X powermate. Thanks for looking.

Ted
Ha Sun 27July2014.jpg

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2014 2:47 pm
by MapleRidge
Nice shot Ted...you've got that feathery texture on the disk...one I've never been able to replicate. Well done :bow

Brian

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2014 3:18 pm
by Valery
edobosz wrote:Hi Folks

A quick effort from this morning to capture the most current active areas. Not the best framing.

Taken with the Lunt80 single stack, DMK23U274 and 2.5X powermate. Thanks for looking.

Ted
Ha Sun 27July2014.jpg
Excellent resolution and... fantastic processing. Very unusual. May we know the secret of such processing?


Valery.

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2014 5:41 pm
by swisswalter
Hi Ted

thanks for presenting an original Ted

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 3:32 am
by edobosz
swisswalter wrote:Hi Ted

thanks for presenting an original Ted
Thanks Walter :)

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 3:35 am
by edobosz
MapleRidge wrote:Nice shot Ted...you've got that feathery texture on the disk...one I've never been able to replicate. Well done :bow

Brian
Thanks Brian, that look I believe is combination of several factors and largely dependent on the tools and starting point.

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 3:46 am
by telescopemaker
Nice details, thanks! Looks like a snake heading for the limb ;)

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 4:35 am
by edobosz
Valery wrote:
edobosz wrote:Hi Folks

A quick effort from this morning to capture the most current active areas. Not the best framing.

Taken with the Lunt80 single stack, DMK23U274 and 2.5X powermate. Thanks for looking.

Ted
Ha Sun 27July2014.jpg
Excellent resolution and... fantastic processing. Very unusual. May we know the secret of such processing?


Valery.
Thanks Valery!

The result is somewhat accidental and not really my cleverness. In fact several things contribute to outcome and I my knowledge is technically superficial and unstructured.

Firstly the avi is captured without any use of gain in camera because it is not avaible on my camera. So the result is quite grey looking.

I always take a large number of frames. I usually never capture less than 4000 frames. I usually never stack less than 350-400 frames. Some may argue that too much movement has elapsed during the 3min 20sec it took to capture the avi, however at the the scale of 80mm lunt and 2.5X powermate, the seeing/tracking is likely to contribute more to blurring effects. Any sun surface movement that has occurred will largely be deconvolved as part of component of normal seeing. In very good seeing + tracking however, I believe the deconvolution results in a slight flow effect on edges of moving structures, but yet still retains the peak details. This I believe contributes to flow/feathery appearance.

I apply Van Citert decon to stacked image from astraimage. The remainder of the image is then managed in PS.

The processing in PS makes heavy use of Topaz plug-ins and layers. I use the Micro contrast enhancement function in Topaz to redistribute dynamic range to something more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I do this at the beginning but technically it probably should be at the end. I just use the presets given in Topaz but the customisation is limitless.

Next I go through a multiple series of layer masks in PS, similar to the artificial flats process. These layers are blurred and blended into the original on an iterative basis. I start the blurring at 3 pixels and check the results in the various blending modes e.g colour burn, linear burn, multiple etc). I work my way to higher pixel values, normally not going beyond 20 unless there are severe gradients requiring artificial flattening. Also, I alternate the use of a positive and then an inverted layer for the blurring. I carefully note and follow the effect of each iteration to see what it adds or detracts from the image. If an effect has promise, I may adjust its impact by applying curves to the blurred layer. If you want me to explain what is technically happening and whether some of these steps are redundant, then I have no idea. What I do notice is that certain information becomes more apparent from adjacent tonal distributions where no real information exists.

At some point, I decide to run the result through Topaz infocus module. The process imparts some 3D effect to the result. A denoise routine in this module smooths the noise into the background and enhances flowing effects.

Depending on the quality of the data, it may get a touch up in PS curves if it is fairly average. If it is pretty good data, it gets fed back into Topaz Detail. I run detail enhancer preset, then I run the soft looking preset. The result of these is then blended back into the version before I applied the two presets.

Anyway, this is roughly what occurs to get the result. I know some of it looks insane and probably 50% of it breaks some rules about data preservation/destruction, but it works for me :)

Ted

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 6:12 am
by marktownley
Good picky there Ted!

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 8:05 am
by mattwastell
Great pic Ted - thanks for the detailed description too!

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 9:14 am
by Montana
A fantastic work of art Ted, a very beautiful Sun :bow :bow :bow

Alexandra

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 9:56 am
by Valery
Ted,

Thanks for you processing routine description!

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014 11:27 am
by Derek Klepp
It almost looks alive Ted.The processing is beyond me but thanks for the description perhaps mark can archive it in the library .
Cheers Derek

Re: Today's (27th July) Quickie Sun Piccy in Ha

Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2014 4:04 am
by edobosz
Thanks everyone for your kind comments!

Ted