Hi,
I did some search here, and didn’t find any posts or articles on this topic. how to process Fuji RAW file for night sky or milky way?
thanks,
Jason
@seafan this question is too vague. As before, start by reading RawPedia, then provide a sample raw file here if you want specific help.
thanks for your reply. I tried to upload the Fuji RAF raw file, but it says it’s not authorized format? I could convert it to TIFF file, but the problem I’m having now is the TIFF file looks very different from the RAW file in RT.
Thanks for catching that. I’ve added .raf files to the list of allowed uploads.
I’ll get the ball rolling. Here’s a quick edit using mostly the initial tone curve, and the dark sky background for point white balance estimation
3 Likes
Well you process it like every other raw, I guess?
Or what is the specific problem with Fuji raws?
For Astrophotgraphy tips have a look at any post by @Jonas_Wagner or also the recent post by @harry_durgin:
Anyway, thanks for the raw. I did a little flashy version, and this picture is troublesome on the edge were there’s some noise or color smear going on. Any of the professional astrophotographers (@Jonas_Wagner 
) know how to deal with that?
(Apart from lowering the ISO)
2 Likes
That’s beautiful. Nice job.
Hey, @seafan were you trying to do stacking in RawTherapee? That seems to be what everyone on the /r/astrophotography subreddit does. (They don’t do the stackign in RawTherapee, but they do stacking). Is there a good FOSS stacking app?
Hugin works quite nicely.
I’m interested in (but not very experienced in) night sky photography, and will watch the comments in this thread and others like it to pick up tips on processing. In a raw night sky photo all the information is in the first few bins of the histogram. Precise editing of the tone curve near the (x, y) origin is crucial. RawTherapee’s ability to edit tone curve (x, y) values directly is a great help here. Editing tone curve “handles” using a mouse is fast, but these edits are not subtle enough at the scale of most linear histogram displays. Darktable provides an alternative logarithmic histogram display scale for the base curve that is helpful in these cases, but if either program provided a zoomed histogram editing display that would be great.
[quote=“McCap, post:10, topic:3130”]
Anyway, thanks for the raw. I did a little flashy version, and this picture is troublesome on the edge were there’s some noise or color smear going on. Any of the professional astrophotographers (@Jonas_Wagner 
) know how to deal with that?
[/quote]I’m definitely not a professional. The issue that I think you mean is the noise that is being amplified by the saturation boost. So the first step to get rid of it is to try to tweak the denoising. If that doesn’t help (and for the low frequency ‘blotchy’ color noise it often doesn’t) you can try attenuating the frequency band the noise is appearing in.
So for example with the DT equalizer off:
And on:
As mentioned by others stacking is a really good way to improve the quality of astro images.
If you stack 2-4 frames you should get comparable if not better results from an aps-c sized sensor to a similar full frame sensor.
Regarding the topic, I think it will be difficult to get a really nice result out of this file. It’s the northern night sky (which has less clearly visible features than the milkyway core in the south to begin with. It’s taken with an APS-C camera at F4.
I do like the composition so here is a quick shot with DT:
DSCF0153.RAF.xmp (14.1 KB)
and RT:
DSCF0153-8.jpg.out.pp3 (9.4 KB)
I had a really hard time working in RT because of the limited noise reduction at less than 100% magnification. 
dngimage-stars-DSCF0153.RAF.pp3 (12.0 KB)
A quick PP using: curves, film simulation, color control and white balance adjustment.
Beautiful view!
2 Likes