Editing photos?

[heaven31]

Just wanted to ask a quick question.
When you all post your NLC pics, do you post them as they are or do you edit them (contrast etc) to bring out the detail in the display?

Also, if you do edit them then submit them to say, Space Weather or some other site, do you have to state that they have been edited and what exactly has been done?


I usually post the pics as they are or with maybe some very slight adjustments but I always have a play round with them and make bigger adjustments and sometimes it can make for a pretty great pic, specially with a bit of colour tint added but then it's not a true documentation of what I actually saw.

Is it normal to edit or should they just be left as is?
Just wondering


Jo x

[André]

That's a very good question.
I usually edit my pictures before showing them online. The First step is the conversion of the RAW file into a jpg. There are so many adjustments possible, that there hardly is an "honest" version. You always manipulate brightness, contrast, colour and so on. It doesn'n matter if this is done inside of the camera (with some presets) or later on the computer.
Usualy I sharpen the images to get a better contrast. Especially for NLC images I think it can be a great improvement if you sharpen them.

I don't see the images we take as scientific data. We just want to show what we saw, and to do this you need to adjust your images.

Usualy I write some lines about the processing when I send images to SW or put them somewhere, so that people know how far to trust these. But in general I have the feeling that especially SW doesn't care to much about it.

Just my 2p

André

[tmcewan]

This is a good question. I normally don't tweak anything but do resize, put a location and time stamp on the image and then compress for web use or for creating time-lapse animations. Heavily tweaked images always look rather false to me, however, as John mentioned, processing can no doubt be useful in drawing out faint features.

BTW, I can recommend IrfanView for batch processing, time stamping etc. Free and very configurable.

Tom

[markt]

I just resize them, that's all.

[Jay]

i just resize, although on my photo program it has an auto correct button, which seems to make the NLC stand out better, maybe i will use that next time!