Tonight, the clouds over Madrid broke a bit and I managed to take some photographs of the night sky.

I shot using the RAW mode because I wanted to used UFRaw to massage out some more details. [JPG images store only 8 bits (256 intensity levels) for each of the three colours Red, Green and Blue. RAW mode stores more bits of information per colour channel (for my camera, it is 12 bits or 4096 intensity levels). This allows one the possibly of eking out a bit more detail from the image.] I use UFRaw because I don't have Photoshop and GIMP does not handle RAW image files - but UFRaw will export to GIMP once you are done. As a bonus, UFRaw also allows you to apply lens corrections to you images.

Using UFRaw, I was able to pump up the number of visible stars without having the clouds get in the way too much. I did apply some wavelet denoising (after tweaking the image, it was quite noisy, the wavelet denoising smoothes out the noise).

While there were lots of stars and some clouds mixed in, it wasn't exactly the inspiring deep space style photos we are used to seeing from NASA.

I played around with adjusting the colours and hues - not much came of that. I tried copying the image to various layers and then tried tweaking the colours on each layer - again, not much came from that.

Eventually, I created an additional layer and generated some plasma clouds in that layer (I used a very low turbulence setting of 0.2). Blending this with the stars proved to be very, very satisfactory. [The layer blend mode used was color.]

The final result.

The original photo – not very inspiring.

Using UFRaw, I was able to increase the brightness of teh image and bring out a lot more stars and cloud detail. But, this is still pretty bland.

Exotic sounding plasma clouds which I blended in with the above image to give it that “ooh! aah!” factor. As the first image attests, it comes out very nice.

While I know that NASA (and ESA) touch up most of their images, given my results today, I hope they are not adding "pop" to their images by adding plasma clouds or something similar. After all, it is one thing to remap electromagnetic radiation to various colours, it is something else entirely to gray they image and then blended it with a false colour map.

A side-by-side comparison of the Orion Nebula (source unknown, I found it on my hard drive; a quick search with tineye shows many references to it - however, I can't identify which is the original) with a GIMPed version by me (if you own the original, or know who does, let me know and I will happily credit it).

The image on the right side is the original, the image on the left is my “reimaged version. I took the original original image and desaturated the colour, then I blended in my plasma clouds. I think my version is quite a bit punchier.