START PROCESSING Smartscope images today

Love your smartscope? Taking images all the time? Ready to take those images to the next level but do not know where to start? Stuart Atkinson has a super simple, absolute beginners guide to getting started in processing your Smartscope images.

Stuart Atkinson

Does this sound familiar? You have had your Smartscope for a while now, and you can set it up and be taking images within ten minutes or so. And those images! You never imagined you would be able to take your own photos of such famous objects as the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades and the Andromeda Galaxy. Yet, there they are on the screen of your phone! After each session you download them onto your laptop to see them in full, wide-screen glory.

But as good as they look, there is a little voice whispering in your ear that they still do not look as good as the images you see in the magazines.

As annoying as the thought is, there is some truth to it. While those published images started off ‘raw’, just like the ones you have taken, they were then processed using software. Some only a little, some so much that they are almost unrecognisable from the originals, but almost certainly every Smartscope pic you see in Astronomy Now has been processed to some degree.

So, if you want your pictures to look better, you too must become an image processor. It is not as scary as it may sound. While some expert image processors are basically sorcerers, wielding computer programs such as Photoshop and Pixinsight like Gandalf wields his staff, you do not need an advanced degree in computer sciences to improve your Smartscope images. If you have a laptop and can download software onto it from the web, you are good to go. And you do not need to spend the cost of another Smartscope on buying high tech image processing software; there are some excellent free image processing programs available, more than good enough to get you started.

While some expert image processors are basically sorcerers ... you do not need an advanced degree in computer sciences to improve your Smartscope images.

I know this because I have been an astrophotographer since (what feels like) just after the Big Bang. I started off using a dented and scratched second-hand SLR camera, then moved on to digital cameras and now use a Smartscope but, since taking my first image of the night sky, I have never used expensive software to process my pictures.

The secret to success

The basic truth is that image processing is just a fancy term for playing about with your image until it looks better. You can do that just using the basic photo tools that are already on your phone – the same ones you use to make pictures of your cat clearer and more colourful. You could also download freeware onto your laptop and use that.

Whatever you use, image processing basically comes down to changing a surprisingly small number of things about your image to make it look better. Too bright? You can make it darker.

Out of focus? You can sharpen it up, at least a little. If it has got a Martian orange hue due to that pesky streetlight at the end of your garden, you can get rid of that, too. And all without spending a penny.

My free processing program of choice is FastStone Image Viewer (FIV). There are others, GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) for example but, if you are a Windows user, FIV is more than good enough to do everything you need it to do. Regardless of the program you choose, they will all have the same sections/ terms/functions as the ones we are going to go through here, although the names might be slightly different.

So let us make some simple but impressive changes to your images using Faststone Image Viewer.

Getting started

Once you have downloaded the program, go into the folder where you store your Smartscope images and choose one to work on. Do not pick the best because it will be easier to see the improvements on an image that was not quite as good as you had hoped it would be, ideally of a galaxy or a nebula. Duplicate the image, so that if it all goes wrong at least you still have the original.

Choice made, right click on your image thumbnail and tell your laptop to Open it with FastStone Image Viewer. Your image will fill the screen, without any text or menus on view. To open up the program’s menu, right click on the image.

Select Colours from the menu of options and a new submenu will appear. At the top is ‘Auto Adjust Colours’ which is essentially a one- click ‘Make It Look Better NOW!’ processing shortcut. If you click on that your image will be instantly transformed. It will be much brighter, much more colourful, have much greater contrast but you will see it is a lot grainer and messier too. Using this is a useful way of taking a quick look at the potential hidden in your image but it is very crude, so cancel it to go back to your original image and go to Colours again.

The six options below Auto Adjust Colours are the beating heart of astronomical image processing. They are common to all programs and once you have got used to them they will change your images in ways you will not believe. But you have to use them sparingly and not get too carried away, or else your images will end up looking worse not better.

Click on ‘Adjust Lighting’. These options are basic but among the most useful of all. Adjusting the ‘Shadows’ and ‘Highlights’ of your image lets you change how bright or dark it is. Sliding the Shadows bar to the right will bring out subtle details and features in your image that are not immediately visible, such as the misty outer regions of nebulae and the speckled arms of spiral galaxies but do not take it too far or you will ‘burn-out’ the already brighter areas of your image.

Sliding the ‘Highlights’ bar to the right does the same thing, but much more subtly and less aggressively. By changing the ‘Contrast’ of your image you can make the whole image brighter or darker, very useful for darkening an image affected by light pollution or moonlight or just generally poor seeing.

As for ‘Saturation’, this allows you to increase or reduce the richness of the colours in your image. Boost it and reds will become more vibrant, blues will look colder, greens become more verdant. Reduce it and your image will look more muted. Caution is again needed:

changing the saturation of an image can really bring it to life or kill it. This is a common problem with astronomical images, especially those of the northern lights which are often so deliberately over-saturated that they are garish and unrealistic. My advice is only change saturation sparingly. Here, less really is more.

Next steps

The next thing to do is click ‘Adjust Colours’. Adjusting the strength of individual colours in your image is a process that, again, should only be used gently. The aim is to tease out the naturally beautiful rose pinks and flame red colours of the nebulae, the lavender blue hues of the galaxies and the silvery sequin shine of the star clusters in your images, not boost them so much that they look more like something a drunk monkey drew with fluorescent marker pens.

So, the first time you dive into this section, have fun but do not go nuts. Slide those sliders this way and that and see what happens. After a while you will get a feel for what works.

So, the first time you dive into this section, have fun but do not go nuts. Slide those sliders this way and that and see what happens. After a while you will get a feel for what works.

Adjusting the colours of your image will also let you reduce the effects of any light pollution it suffers. While some Smartscope owners are blessed with skies as black as squid ink, most of us live in towns and cities lit up like the mothership in Close Encounters . But you can reduce the orange cast on your images by decreasing the depths of its reds and boosting its blues via this Adjust Colours feature – an absolute godsend.

Levels: another very useful tool. Put simply, changing the ‘Levels’ of your image is a way to make it look punchier by stretching its brightness, so your photo uses the full range from real black to real white. Whites can be made whiter and blacks blacker just by sliding the middle triangle at the bottom of the graph on the top to the left or the right respectively.

Next we come to ‘Adjust Curves’. This is where image processing gets serious and complicated, which is exactly why we are not going to touch Curves in this absolute beginners guide. Manipulating Curves is such sorcery there are probably special classes at Hogwarts dedicated to it. Adjusting curves is essentially another way of changing the richness of the colours in your images. It is incredibly powerful but remember the old saying, “with great power comes great responsibility”. So, by all means dive in and see what sliding them around does but conquering Curves properly is something we will look at another time.

Get ready to sharpen

Now we move on to ‘Sharpen’. Sharpening an image does not actually add anything; it does not magically pull invisible details out of thin air. What it does is trick your eyes into thinking the photo is sharper by making the edges of objects look crisper and more defined. Sounds fantastic? Yes, but over-sharpening an image will surround everything with a migraine-inducing halo, and drown it in so much hideous grain it will look like your Smartscope lens was covered in sand when you took the image. Just increase the sharpness by small amounts until your subject looks clearer than it did, but is not transformed into a work of modern art.

FastStone Image Viewer offers two options. ‘Sharpen’ is very simple, and lets you sharpen your image with a single slide right. But it will push your image from ‘sharper’ to ‘ruined’ easily. So, use the ‘USM Sharpening’ option instead, by changing the ‘Amount’ and ‘Radius’ each a little bit at a time until you achieve a satisfactory result.

There is also the ‘Blur’ option. Ignore it. There will never be a reason why anyone would want to make an image of a catherine wheel galaxy millions of light years away even more blurry than Nature already has.

The last tool we are going to look at in this beginners guide is another of the most useful because it fights the most evil and most persistent enemy astrophotographers face: noise. Every image, even those taken from a deep desert, has noise, just because it was taken by a humming, buzzing box of technology collecting light using electronic sensors and chips. By using the ‘Reduce Noise’ function you can smooth out a lot of this background noise, leaving your image looking clearer and less fuzzy. But, like Sharpening, you have to use this sparingly. Overdo it and your image will lose all detail and will just look like an oily puddle.

And as far as the basics go – that is it. Starting to process your images might sound scary, but it really is not. Do not overthink it, just dive in, apply your common sense and see what happens. After some trial and error you will be able to turn your OK images into portraits of the Universe to be proud of. And do not forget to send some ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots to us at yourspace@astronomynow.com.

Stuart Atkinson is the author of 18 astronomy books, including a biography of Felicette, the first and only cat to go into space.