Hot take: that picture of the Andromeda galaxy from last week was way overprocessed

I get that everyone wants their astro photos to pop but that thread on the front page looked like someone cranked the saturation to 200% and clipped the highlights on purpose. Real space doesn't look like a neon sign. I've been shooting deep sky stuff for about 5 years now and I'm not saying my edits are perfect but that blue glow around the core was just fake looking. Am I the only one who actually prefers the raw stacked frames where you can still see the natural color gradient?

3 comments

3 Comments

charles_coleman6d ago

Man it's the same thing everywhere now. Walk into a grocery store and half the apples look like they're made of plastic because they wax them up so much. People are so used to seeing stuff through filters and edits that they don't even know what natural looks like anymore. I swear half the time someone posts a real unprocessed shot they call it "boring" and scroll right past it. We've conditioned ourselves to want everything punched up to 11 even if it's fake. Makes me wonder what else we're missing out on just trying to make things look perfect.

jason_stone596d ago

But people have always preferred the polished version, that's just human nature.

-1

stellat466d ago

You gotta keep data integrity while you stretch those levels, but there's a fine line between bringing out detail and making it look like a cartoon. Try pulling back on saturation by like 40% and see if the natural color gradient starts showing up again in your own edits. Honestly most people just need to stop chasing upvotes and actually look at what a real galaxy looks like through a decent eyepiece.