Debate: Should astrophotography editing be limited to basic color correction?

Last month I posted a photo of M42 that I processed heavily with Photoshop, and someone commented that it was 'more digital art than photography'. But three years ago I submitted a similar image that won a local competition with the same level of editing. Where do you draw the line between enhancing an image and creating something that's no longer a real photograph?

4 comments

4 Comments

shane1707d ago

Oh man, here we go again with the "is it real photography" gatekeeping. Like yeah, I totally just pointed my telescope at the sky and M42 magically appeared with all its hydrogen alpha detail popping. No, I actually spent 8 hours stacking 200 subs and another 3 hours in post trying to pull out faint dust lanes without blowing out the core. Next someone's gonna say my 15 minute exposure of the Veil Nebula is "digital art" because I stretched the histogram. Might as well just tape my phone to a pair of binoculars and call it a day.

grantc807d ago

Start by telling them to save that processed image as a 16-bit TIFF before they do anything else. I ran into the same nonsense a few years ago when I posted my Rosette Nebula shot from a Bortle 6 backyard. Someone told me it wasn't "real" because I used a dual narrowband filter and did gradient reduction in Photoshop. I just linked them to the raw stacked file and the final image side by side. That usually shuts them up. Or better yet, invite them over for a live session next clear night and let them watch you spend four hours guiding and dithering subframes.

skyler_kelly697d ago

If you can't do it in camera without heavy processing, maybe it really is digital art.

aliceharris7d ago

Oh man, I read an article last week that actually said the same gatekeeping thing about Milky Way shots.