That one photo of Saturn taken from my driveway changed how I edit everything

I used to spend like 45 minutes per astrophoto cranking up the saturation and contrast to make it look dramatic and colorful, you know, like all the Instagram posts. But last month I stacked about 200 frames of Saturn with my 6-inch Dobsonian and got this clean, pale yellow disk with barely visible rings. No reds, no purples, just that soft cream color. I was about to Photoshop the heck out of it when my buddy Mike looked over my shoulder and said "that's exactly how it looks through my eyepiece, why would you fake it?" That hit me hard because he was right. I had been processing for likes instead of for accuracy, which is silly when the whole point of amateur astronomy is capturing what's actually up there. I still do some gentle sharpening and noise reduction but I dialed back the color sliders to near zero. Has anyone else had that moment where they realized their editing was making things worse instead of better?

2 comments

2 Comments

willow_morgan14d ago

A buddy of mine named Carlos went through almost the exact same thing with his moon shots last year. He had this whole workflow where he would stack like 100 frames of the moon and then layer on these crazy HDR effects to make the craters look deep and dramatic. I saw him messing with it one night and his final image looked more like a video game than the actual moon. His wife who never looks through his telescope saw it and asked why the moon was purple and orange and he just sat there kind of stunned. He told me later that he deleted all his previous moon edits and started over from scratch with the raw data. Now he posts these crisp black and white shots that look way more impressive because they actually look real.

leelewis13d ago

Feel for Carlos man, that's rough getting called out like that haha.