One Year In....

Well this will be my first blog ever in my life. I want to elaborate more on why I decided to make a site like this in a later blog but for now, I wanted to show a quick comparison of one of my first pics of andromeda and one of my latest edits. These two images are the same photo, just edited differently/”somewhat” correctly. The reason I say “somewhat” is because I think I can still get better but I feel like my latest picture is pretty respectable. Here is the first picture shot with a hyperstar and edited in lightroom.

As you can see, its grainy, not sharp, probably stretched way too much, just overall not good. At the time I thought it was amazing though and to most people, it was. But after seeing all the amazing pictures online, I decided to go back to the drawing board and dive into photoshop. And I mean really dive. I had never used it before and had no idea what I was doing. Thanks to some online tutorials and a lot of practice and trial and error, I was able to achieve the image you see below. This was done by stretching the image, changing the overall colors, adding texture, and bringing down the noise a bit. I don’t like to use brushes or things like that because I like to preserve as much of the natural image as possible and I don’t want to feel like its fake.

This was my most recent edit of andromeda. There is dimension, the core is not blown out, you can almost see the rotation. This is what I wanted. This is what I felt like I saw when I googled “andromeda”. The time I have put into this hobby in this first year has to be 100s of hours. I have become addicted. It has been frustrating and rewarding at the same time. So basically Im hoping what I have planned for my little site here can help the people, like me, who are captivated by the night sky. I will be adding things as I go that I wish I could’ve found for my set up that would’ve helped save me some major headache. Welcome to my page and I hope I can be of some help in the future!