Astroart Forum

Hi - After reading the forums for years, scouring the web, and hoping to find some of/more of the following, I thought maybe I would just finally ask.

Might those of you who have discovered useful, step-by-step REPEATABLE, POST-PROCESSING, "Starter", Pretty Solid, "Rewarding" workflows for certain objects, post them in a form of the type below.
Again, providing your steps after pre-precessing and color combining (for an RGB equivalent) is complete would be most helpful, i.e.,

Deep Sky - A "Pretty Good" Basic Workflow [a structure Example]
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Step 1: Color, Color Balance
Step 2: Filter, Histogram Stretch (or using histogram button); type, amount, etc. - some details
Step 3-n: Filter - Others, DDP, etc. - when used, in what order, when most helpful, iterative application, etc.

Perhaps the best examples would be solid "step-by-step" approaches some of you have found repeatably effective on specific images you have posted.
Perhaps the most important 4-6 steps that got you there, or many more if desired.

I have seen the Lagoon, Rosette nebulas, numerous galaxies and more posted and looking great, using AA as the primary processing tool.
It would be wonderful to know how they came to be. (Assuming acceptable to great starting data and images, of course.)

It is possible that all of these "examples" may already exist. But I'll be darned if I can find them:)
If they do not exist, we certainly could help new users out by creating some (or more.) Not to mention promote and make easier the learning curve to grow the AA user base.

If they do exist, a consolidated set of links to the "How I got theres" would be grand.
Thanks. Muchas. Grazie.
Greg

Hello,

I agree to Greg.

Nevertheless Astroart still have a solid set of tutorials and an excellent feedback on questions here in the forum I miss some "give me your hand, noob" in depth workflow tutorials, not only in Astroart (there is a tool named P!x!ns!gt that tried to eat my brain), too.

Noobs as me sometimes dont see the tree in the forest. For the experienced and the developers, I think, its simply logical to do the right steps in the right sequence like talking in their mother tongue.

Try think of us noobs as foreigners that just have learned the basics of a language. Its one thing not to starve and another to have an dinner at an star chef restaurant. And we already have a lot of other languages to talk, family, job, social activities and so on. And not everyone is a spoke prodigy. So its an good idea to see it from this point of view. Never mind "that thing" is to easy to need explanations.

On the other hand I know there are always many roads that leads to Rome. But to have an idea of the raw direction, some guard rails and signposts makes the travel more conveniently, avoiding dead ends and frustration. For me, I stuck for a while on an set of M13 data. This time the stars are round, its not burned out, not to many satellites and airplanes but I cant get the blue colour out in the manner I want it (beside some other things I am still not happy with).

thank you, kind regards, Dirk

Sorry for so many metaphors

Indeed, when a satisfactory workflow is found for our equipment, then it can be repeated without effort for all the future subjects. So I think that the actual goal is to find an (almost) repeatable procedure for one's instrumentation.
A tutorial from another user is fine to learn the tools, but usually it cannot be applied exactly on our images, the difference in CCDs, light pollution, optics and desired result prevents that.
So, a solution could be to publish your M13 data (or another data, there's no difference) and challenge the community to find out and explain the best workflow and the final result (using also different software, why not?). I also suggest to indicate your desidered final colors and visualization, picking an example from the web ( search: M13 , then Images ) For difficult subjects there's the problem of raw quality of course, nowadays 3-4 hours of combined exposure are common, and light pollution must be low.