Hi, I’m using RawTherapee to process my RAW photos and I’ve been trying to get the right look for my milky way photo. However, I feel that there is something that I’m not getting right. There’s a lot of purple splotches in the image
Can anyone help me or guide me on the best way to process night photos?
I’m sharing my photo here, along with the pp3 file and the final JPEG file
Night photos
Thank you
The best solution is in my opinion to take more photos and to then stack them. That way to get a cleaner signal to begin with. Anyways had a quick play with it in darktable.
DSC_0892 - Copy.NEF.xmp (15.0 KB)
Here is the part that reduces the color noise:
hello Chintan,
Since you specifically mentioned purple haze, I used the CH module of LAB to get rid of it and then used final touchup and residual image modules of wavelet on top of your pp3 file to get following:
DSC_0892 - Copy.jpg.out.pp3 (11.3 KB)
Maybe that was a bit to desaturated (looks like the denoise profiled wavelets removed a lot more saturation in the final output than in the preview) here with some more saturation and tweaks:
I really like this edit, can you show me how you did it? In rawtherapee
I’ll try that the next time I get a chance. But with this photo, it’s actually the first image in a sequence of 90 images meant for a short timelapse
Well, your idea seems to work but it worked too much where almost all colour was lost. Let me play around with those settings and see what I can come up with
It’s done in darktable no rawtherapee:
DSC_0892 - Copy.NEF.xmp (34.5 KB)
I gave it a go. I used a technique I learned from a Lonely Speck YouTube tutorial for processing Milky Way photos and mixed in little color picker trick I learned from @harry_durgin.
Sorry, I used darktable for the edit. First I turned saturation and vibrance up all the way then used the color picker tool and switched it from point to area and selected an area with the worst purple. In the color picker tool you can see the RGB values for the area. Then I used the white balance module to adjust the red, green and blue until the values were withing a few points of each other.
The rest was using parametric masks to reduce noise in the darkest parts of the image. Finally, I used more parametric masks with curves, levels and saturation to get to the final image.
Here’s a link to the xmp file if you want to have a look. It’s from the latest stable version of darktable. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxhiLCtCYWVSWlJ3c2tpV0NlNDQ/view?usp=sharing
Well, unfortunately Darktable isn’t available in Windows
How about this then?
DSC_0892 - Copy.NEF.pp3 (11.0 KB)
(Although I still like that of @Jonas_Wagner better, to be honest 
)
So here is an attempt with RT:
I think I spent about 10x more time on that than the DT one and I like the results significantly less.
I like RT a lot. I use it to develop the base images of a lot of my edits, I used it on all of my sisters wedding photos.
But as soon as heavy noise reduction & complex editing is required it doesn’t work for me. Because of the lack of previews of the noise reduction (when zoomed out) the wysiwyg nature completely breaks down and everything turns into a giant guessing game (unless there is a way to force full previews which I don’t know about?). The lack of masking/local edits is also a serious restriction when edition such photos. I generally want to bring out the color and detail of the milky way a bit more, what I don’t want is to magnify all of the noise in the image with it.
Maybe try Darktable in a VM?
this is on the to-do list. hopefully for 5.3 - if I find the time (or someone else gets to it before 
)
Have you tried this ? (I haven’t)
I think the darktable folks are not too keen on that build…
On the other hand, I wonder if we could ask politely and see if @houz might have some insight (or something we could test with)? 
Bunch of negative nellys on that thread, geez.
One more tentative. This time I was specifically trying to emulate the Darktable result of @Jonas_Wagner, but only using RT. Still not quite 100% there, but closer…
All I can tell you right now is that 2.4.0 will have Windows support and that I am pushing for a release this autumn. We might be able to have a development release (kind of a preview) earlier but there won’t be any promises.
Yeah I have seen few pretty harsh responses from darktable folks Re OS Windows support on darktable users mailing list… but looking at houz’s response above it looks like the things have changed.
I was talking about the pl32.on thread…
