one of the best parts of astrophotography is sharing the hobby with other people
just as addicted as you are and one of my favorite people to talk to and collaborate with is Helena
from Helena's Astrophotography here on YouTube we always have a lot of fun chatting and these
videos that we make are hard to edit down because we always have really great long conversations
that go into all the details including the art of astrophotography. Helena and I first collaborated
on a photo in 2020 when we combined our data on the Cygnus wall and in this video you're
going to see a behind-the-scenes look at us collaborating on our latest image together
and so i hope you really enjoy if you're not subscribed to Helena's Astrophotography here
on youtube you should be because i think you'll really enjoy her videos like I do. Hey Helena!
Hi Nico, how's it going? Good we're gonna do another challenge object right and number two what
have you picked so last time you picked Cygnus wall and that was super super fun and i thought
that i would pick a target that is accessible equally to both of us for a long period of time
so we have enough time to gather our data obviously due to weather conditions and stuff so
i have chosen the elephant trunk nebula which i thought was a really really nice target for
both of us and i've looked up the field of views that we're going to be working with so my longer
focal length and your shorter focal length and it actually works out really nice nice yeah the and
that's an exciting one since you're new to mono because it's one of those objects that's like
actually sort of hard in color because it's just like it doesn't have like great separation until
you add the narrow band channels and then you really see like yeah the elephant trunks sort
of like pop out from the blue background but like that's really hard to get i think with the color
camera yeah mono was completely new to me so i think because last time you were working with mono
and now i think that we're both working with mono it's a really good chance for me to learn more
about it seeing as i've literally just started so it is quite good and i'm going to be shooting
hydrogen alpha and we were talking about you may be shooting sulfur and you were saying because i
assumed that adding sulfur was just going to make it into a Hubble palette image with you know the
normal ha, s2, o3 but you were saying that sulfur could possibly add in some
more detail and i was really intrigued by that yeah i've been playing around um you know that i
have this big mosaic in cygnus and that's sort of like i get so much data for that
that it but that's sort of like my testing ground for like playing around with different
ideas and i've been playing around with sort of more complex palettes and adding sulfur in
to both the red and the blue in different ways more like a h-o-o or a natural color palette
yeah i think that'll be something that's really nice to show to the people on youtube because
those watching may not be so familiar with sulfur being able to add detail especially if they're
going from one shot color imaging so i think that would be a really nice thing to show if we
end up getting sulfur data in the editing process yeah and i'll also get 03 um but that's the thing
that'll probably make this collaboration maybe stretch out a bit uh because i wait nowadays i
wait till the new moon and i try to travel to a dark site to get o3 because um i live right in
the city and the there's a lot of led lights here which are are white leds and so they they extend
into the blue spectrum and i've just found that um with the deep reds like ha and s2 which are at 656
and 672 nanometers those lights don't really affect those very much because they're not they're
not very strong in the deep reds but they're very strong in the three spectrum at 500 nanometers so
i've just been found even though it's narrow band i go to a dark side and and treat it almost like
i would be shooting rgb and it'll be fun that we're using the same camera it was funny like
i switched to that camera and then and then you did a couple months later yeah because we've both
been reviewing it and then obviously i did my first light and i kind of fell in love with it
i'm not gonna lie and i think that's partially just because how good the camera is but also
because it was my first time going into monochrome and i was like i cannot wait to use this more so
yeah really glad that we're using the same camera it's going to be really cool
hi helena hi nico how's it going good so for viewers it's now october 17th so we started
this collaboration a long time ago in terms of our first conversation we did we've not done
too badly though i feel like four months is yeah pretty good yeah i mean we're both in uh
areas of the the world where cloud cover can last for months it feels like sometimes
feels like it never ends sometimes it's just like oh do i move to get a clear sky or do i
have to stay here yeah we were talking just about before we hit record that i just got
spoiled by going to a star party in oklahoma and yeah it definitely made me think like
i want to move out somewhere like that eventually because it's just like we got four nights of clear
skies it was amazing so it's always the way it goes when you travel it's clear then when
you come home it's always cloudy and you're like it's the curse so we both got our data sets on the
elephant's trunk i captured hydrogen alpha and you captured oxygen three and sulfur yeah and i think
in the first conversation we talked about like ratios a little bit and so we ended up with um
i got a about four and a four and a little bit uh of each o3 and s2 and you got three of ha which i
think is a pretty good ratio like because ha is stronger and so it works out pretty well and you
you don't need as much ha obviously because it comes through a lot more than o3 and s2 and we
also and last time we talked about you were saying how sulfur can sometimes add more detail because
the original plan in my head anyway was to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make that really pretty hoa
palette which i think works really nice on nebulae especially and then i added in the sulfur that you
captures as well and pics insight just for fun and i was like oh let's see what this looks like
and then h0 was out the window i was like right this is so stunning and it added like such a
much larger level of detail than i thought it was gonna like i thought i knew it was gonna
add some detail but wow that was stunning awesome are you ready to reveal yours
yes awesome so i went hubble palette and originally i was like no i'm not gonna be like
everyone else i'm not gonna do humble palette um but i remember we had a conversation and you said
that you felt like uh it looked the best in hubble palette and then i totally agree to be honest
um i really love how like the gold kind of merged into the blue and the gold's obviously
goldy brown orangey i don't really know what that color is to be honest is representing the
hydrogen and obviously the blue is representing the oxygen and you can see like the dimension and
that comes from your sulfur data like it was utterly insane one thing i did as well was i
um so i selected i have like an action set in photoshop and i selected the brighter stars
and then i inverted that to then select the smaller stars and i brought the smaller stars
back a little bit to kind of push you can see here that there's a train of these brighter stars that
kind of go through the trunk from top to bottom and it kind of catches your eye a little bit
i think it's more when it's actually tilted the other way um but i brought back the smaller stars
a little bit i could probably even do a little bit more um to bring out that train of kind of whitish
stars i thought that was pretty cool i think that's probably my favorite part of the photo but
yeah i'm really pleased with how it turned out and i i love your crop the the this it's like um
you have the transition to the really blue part like right in the middle which is something like
i was definitely experimenting with a lot too and then you cut off at the bottom you you you
cut off like the really dark part so that it's like you you feel like you're just sort of like
very immersed in the scene um right yeah yeah i kind of i'm i did that so that i didn't know the
hydrogen hydroponic kind of looks like a c it's kind of like a sea of dust and then it goes up
and so i was really pleased with how that turned out actually did you do um star net at all on this
or is it or just combine and and curves and stuff i didn't actually do star in it i did do starnet
when i was messing around i was doing an h-o-o version which i wasn't a fan of and but i didn't
end up doing star night actually just purely because i felt the only minimizing that i was
doing was bringing those small stars back and when i edited the neb so how i edited the colors was i
used a color masks in pics insight and i went into each individual like colour channel and i edited
them in curves with a colour mask and it wasn't really affecting the stars it wasn't bloating
them out so i didn't i didn't see the need for using starnet i could have i probably should have
um but i didn't in this case something else i did actually um i put the so the way i
combined it was through pixel math and i put all the color channels through pixelmath and
it came through and it was like really heavily saturated and it looked amazing but um for me
like i tend to go with more of a pastel look i haven't really developed a style with mono yet
um but i tend to go for kind of those more subtle colors and so i kind of dialed that
back with curves and some colour masks and ended up with this so that's the story behind it really
oh my
i love these colors thank you yeah they work so well together they're like the
oh i've got so many things going through my mind like the way the blue drips onto the pink
that's insane no i love the colors i tried to actually go when i did ho i tried to go for like
a more pinkish tint you aced that that is stunning thank you yeah it took me it took me a few tries i
think this is my third one and the i'll show you the first one just to give you an idea of like
how just subtle changes can make all the difference um the other thing that i was trying
to do with this edit is something i don't do very often which is is colorful stars with narrow band
data i was gonna comment on that yeah and i it's not something i do very often because i think
that often the colorful stars look out of place or distract from like the beauty of the of the nebula
kind of stuff but um i was just i was just really trying to push myself with this edit to see if i
could make it sort of all fit together um and it and it's so they definitely don't distract in this
thank you like they look so natural i love the oranges and the yellows coming through the stars
and the definition and you know um you how you've got that elephant strung and then you've kind of
got that middle-ish pinkish bit with a lot going on that's how i'm going to describe it that looks
so sharp yeah i like what so i used i i did a i did a lot of processing there's actually more
than i typically do but it just it just like i said earlier it just seems like the data could
handle it like going starless like running running like my style of sharpening which is i think we've
talked about before which is a high pass filter in photoshop on the starless then like adding the
like adding a pseudo luminance so like putting all of the narrow band channels together but making it
loom and adding that as a luminance layer sharpening it again then like taking out
all of the stars from what is now like everything combined and then putting these new stars on top
and then sharpening it one more time and it just like every time i was like this is not gonna work
it's gonna fall apart and then it just like kept going and i was like oh it just still looks okay
oh i love it okay before i show just like a basic hol let me show you my first uh my
first revision here which is that was my first revision and it's so you still have the pink
but it's just i just felt like it's not complex it's still stunning though like it's still awesome
but like i really love what you did with the last one it really separated them out like a
lot better and brought the trunks so much more forward yeah so we were talking about
um what we've we've been talking about a lot like how the the sulfur adds so let's
just look at the channels here for a second so here's your h-a very clean let there's even i
neither of us use the stuff down here but look at there's even cool stuff like down here
way in the shadows yeah i didn't even notice i'm gonna go back and do a crop and do a second photo
and then here's my o3 and part of the reason it's hard to use that is because
in my o3 there's a lot of big stars down here and so it gets very noisy down there because
you get all the halos from the big stars with no nebulosity and it's sort of but you can see that
is still strong though you can see the difference you can definitely see a big difference here like
all of this highlighting on the trunk is in the h a outline yeah and here you just get the dark
and then the o3 background it's so cool and then here's the s2 and so you can see that's
really different from the ha too look at that very different still very poppy yeah i'm not
here with the words today but very different and like you said that this thing right here and the
thing in the background look at how much contrast you get in the s2 on that oh ah that's so cool
see without the sulfur that wouldn't that wouldn't look as like sharp as it does all right so let's
put together an uh hoo just to show here i'm gonna turn this to yeah let's do it mode rgb color
i think it's also interesting um that you processed mostly in photoshop and i
processed mostly in pixel insight i used both but we processed in different programs and i love that
okay there's just your basic hoo and so then what i would do to this from here
is in photoshop is um there's this adjustment called selective color and with this you can this
is a lot like what you were talking about with color masking and pix insight where it's just like
i can pick all these different colors and do cool things with them like if you take out a lot of um
the yellow from the blues and the cyan without effect you know you can see you can really
radically change the red just by adding cyan to it or not like so you really have a lot of
control over like how much things that you want to pop or popping or or changing sort of like their
tone like here's like making the reds yellow it's like it's really easy to do um so i love
this selective color thing especially when working with with starless images like this because then
you just don't have to worry about like what's happening with the stars you can just sort of go
crazy with the color so thank you Helena for for suggesting this collaboration you know this is
our our second one we did a cygnus wall one which you can watch uh from it was over a year ago now
and then uh this one has been great too yeah it's been so amazing and it's been so great to see like
the same data from different people with different processing techniques coming together and creating
two very different images and i just think that shows different processing styles and it's one
of the things i love about astro so yeah thank you for working with me on it it's been amazing