More realistic skies

[amatula]

Hi,

I appreciate the help I received regarding image sharpness. My other issue has been skies... does anyone have any suggestions on having skies more realistic. Would a polarizer filter fix the issue?

Thank you in advance for your assistance! 🙂

Annie

[ebiggs1]

One question? Do any of you really think we didn't do anything to film in the dark room? If so I have a bridge to sell you too!

[TCampbell]

I'm assuming you are referring to astrophotography images. 

But even those are not "composite" images.  If you look at one of my astrophotography images, everything in the image actually was there (there's no copy & paste from another image).  But astrophotography images require very heavy post processing to tease out the details.

The image of the Andromeda galaxy was presented in two ways... one was an "as shot" version of the image which doesn't look like it has color in it -- but if you inspect it carefully you'll see that it really does have color but it's so subtle your eye can't easily detect it.  The second method is the processed result which is much more colorful.

To product the 1st image I only applied very slight contrast adjustments.  

To product the 2nd image requires considerably more steps.  But it actually is an image shot by that camera (through the telescope).  Nothing in the image is added to it that wasn't originally present.  Even the color you see in the processed image is effectively a kind of saturation boost of color that was actually present in the original image.

To be fair, the processing steps needed to tease the detail out of the image without ruining it are complex and have a steep learning curve to learn how to do this.  So yes, there is a heavy reliance on tools.

But also to be fair... sometimes there's a very heavy reliance on physical filters.  I've got an image of the Dumbbell nebula (I have not posted that yet -- I'm not quite satisified with the processing work) shot from urban light polluted skies.  In an "as shot" image straight out of the camera, you can hardly even notice there's anything in the sky at all.  But the nebula glows strongly in Ha and OIII bands.  So by using special filters, I can block the light wavelengths generated by things like high pressure sodium lights and mercury vapor lights (which account for most of the light pollution) that the camera can more easily see the nebula.  This creates slightly wonky colors in the image and there's still a lot of image processing work that has to go into creating the image... but without any filters at all this would be much more difficult to acheive.

So the bottom line is that while it's hours of work to capture the image and it's even more hours of work to process the image (all this to get a single image), the image isn't a composite -- it's real.

You can see the mostly "as shot" image here:  https://flic.kr/p/B18eTQ

You can see the "processed" image here:  https://flic.kr/p/AZ1K5j

(I re-worked the "processed" version of image, start to finsih, three different times because I wasn't happy with the first two results.  I learn a little more each time I do another image.)

[RobertTheFat]

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@ebiggs1 wrote:
One question? Do any of you really think we didn't do anything to film in the dark room? If so I have a bridge to sell you too!

---

Sure, and Ansel Adams (just to name one prominent photographer of the film era) was famous for his darkroom tinkering, But everybody knew that, and he never tried to pass off his photographs as something they weren't. (Well ,,, almost never. There was that photograph in one of the Boston area Adams exhibits a few years ago where it appeared that one of his pictures of a waterfall had been converted into a double exposure by using a mirror image of the original.)

And if Adams were alive today, he'd surely be every bit the Photoshop enthusiast that Ernie Biggs is. 

[ebiggs1]

"So the bottom line is that while it's hours of work to capture the image and it's even more hours of work to process the image (all this to get a single image), the image isn't a composite -- it's real."

Un-huh, sure it is.  And all the others are just as "real" as the photographer wants them, too.

[jrhoffman75]

The discussion originallyn started concerning the concept of "realistic". I offered (poorly) that what is allowed in nature/wildlife photo competions could be a good definition.

From the Photographic Society of America Nature Division:

No techniques that add, relocate, replace, or remove pictorial elements except by cropping are permitted. Techniques that enhance the presentation of the photograph without changing the nature story or the pictorial content, or without altering the content of the original scene, are permitted including HDR, focus stacking and dodging/burning. Techniques that remove elements added by the camera, such as dust spots, digital noise, and film scratches, are allowed. Stitched images are not permitted. All allowed adjustments must appear natural. Color images can be converted to grey-scale monochrome. Infrared images, either direct-captures or derivations, are not allowed.

[ebiggs1]

I can live with that.................................most of the time! 

[amatula]

Thank you everyone!

...so it sounds like I have to resign myself to the fact that no camera can capture skies as good as my eyes can....

I'll experiment with the different techniques you suggested and maybe a spice of creativity to see how to make it work. 

Happy holidays to you!

Annie

[Peter]

Dual ISO would have fixed that sky without more exposures than one or any copy paste. Require a Canon with Magic Lantern.

[jrhoffman75]

The human eye has a much greater dynamic range capability than film or a digital camera. Even though you think you're seeing an entire scene your mind is only processing a small portion at any given time. Stand in a dark room facing a window where its bright outside. Look out the window and you see fine. Shift your eyes to the room and you see fine. Take a photo with proper exposure for the room and the window will be blown out and probably pure white. Expose for the window and the room will be much too dark.

[ebiggs1]

"No techniques that add, relocate, replace, or remove pictorial elements except by cropping are permitted. Techniques that enhance the presentation of the photograph without changing the nature story or the pictorial content, or without altering the content of the original scene, are permitted including HDR, focus stacking and dodging/burning. Techniques that remove elements added by the camera, such as dust spots, digital noise, and film scratches, are allowed. Stitched images are not permitted. All allowed adjustments must appear natural. Color images can be converted to grey-scale monochrome. Infrared images, either direct-captures or derivations, are not allowed."

Just out of curiosity, how do they know.  How can they tell?  By, I swear?  

Reality and illusion have become interchangeable.  It happened while most of you were sleeping!