How To Combine Your LRGB Data: A PixInsight Tutorial

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This tutorial will teach you how to combine your RGB data into a color image and then overlay your Luminance data to create a final image that is both detailed AND colorful.

[@DrewJEvans44]

Fantastic straightforward tutorial on a rather complex process. Keep up the great work man!

[@dustinfleming7083]

Best tutorial i have seen so far. Good job man.

[@davidalemazkour9869]

Thank you for your walkthrough. I have watched a few times to get my process flow down.

[@kantoskan4314]

Hey, man. This was really helpful to me. Just got a mono setup and imaged M33 but couldn't get the LRGB to work right. Your video made it easy...I learned several things. Well done and thank you!

[@spudwebster]

Quick fast and to the point! Keep 'em coming!

[@rockymountainastro1239]

Great to hear! Will do

[@franckjobard1285]

Very easy and fast processing! Thanks a lot!

[@buzzsawddog]

Thanks for taking the time to talk about this! It was quick and to the point. I like that you said oh we can do this that and the other but stuck to your LRGB combine theme.

[@rockymountainastro1239]

Thanks so much for the insight. So glad I could be of help (:

[@viksohal]

Very nice tutorial. Thanks for posting that.

[@christopherdeaver5372]

Thanks for the video. Great tips.

[@rockymountainastro1239]

Thanks so much!

[@edmizzimizzi]

Thanks, very helpful, Ed from Waterdown, Ontario

[@MoultonDave]

Interesting to see the method, in comparison to PS. I can see advantages in pixinsight . Perfect presentation and just long enough to get the workflow across 👍

[@rockymountainastro1239]

I did like color combining in photoshop! Rather simple process. Thanks for the feedback :)

[@HeavenlyBackyardAstronomy]

Great tutorial. It's amazing as to how many processing tools that are in PixInsight. I might know, at best, 10% of its capabilities (Patrick Prokop ... Savannah, GA).

[@rockymountainastro1239]

Yes, there are so many! When you really star to understand PixInsight (lots of practice and re processing) you will start to get creative. You can really manipulate the data you capture ANYWAY you want to but it takes some critical thinking about what it is you want to do and how you can achieve it. You can become more creative the more you know about the software!

[@DamianVines]

Really great stuff. Do you have a video showing your process for calibrating, registering, de-noising, integrating... Would be nice to make sure the R,G, and B or Ha or Oiii are good before moving on.

[@rockymountainastro1239]

I do not actually! I have really been meaning to upload more videos but life throw lemons at ya! Im currently trying to make lemonade haha. Hopefully I can make some more videos here soon. Feel free to ask anything youd like. Im happy to help

[@DamianVines]

I’ve done ok, but I always want to be sure my subs are as good as they could be. What is your hardware and what are you shooting your subs at, gain, offset, temp, etc, and what Bortle sky are you in? I’d be curious to see or know what your ADU target for your background sky is when shooting. Do you tend toward long subs and less of them or shorter subs and lot of them. ;) I’m in a Bortle 5 and I’m shooting the N.A. Neb with a ZWO ASI183mm Pro at 100mm gain175, offset 10, -15c, 900 sec for narrowband and 180 sec for broadband. Cheers man!

[@rockymountainastro1239]

@@DamianVines So for my 8rc I shoot at gain 139 for both broadband and NB. I am in bortles 4 skies. I shoot 900s subs for NB and 600s subs for LRGB. For my newt I shoot gain 0 for LRGB and gain 139 for NB. Shooting with the Newt is a bit harder in broadband bcsc the stars and galactic cores saturate easily. I usually shoot 300-600s though and mix in some 30s subs

[@04Stefan07]

Great tutorial. Would there be much difference if you don't stretch the RGB images before combining them?

[@rockymountainastro1239]

I have since been doing just that. I prefer to combine when they are linear and then do a photometric color calibration. This has been giving me great results :)

[@jowaldo]

I just was at a dark sky site and imaged Andromeda. Just because, I captured, LRGB and Ha. In general for a case like this, would it be better to only include L, or Ha? or both to the RGB do you think?

[@rockymountainastro1239]

So the best method I found was to blend your ha data with your red data and then combine as you normally would. I usually upload my red and ha data into photoshop, copy and paste my ha image over my red image and use blending mode "lighten" and put the opacity around 60-70%. Save that as your new Red channel and then combine with your blue and green as you normally would and use your lum data as your detailed layer.

[@jowaldo]

@@rockymountainastro1239 Awesome, thanks! I'll give that a shot!

[@dgv646]

Dude the important part is to do star alignment, the rest is easy. How do you so the star alignment??

[@rockymountainastro1239]

Under the process called "Star alignment" I choose my Luminance image as my reference photo and then simply apply a new instance to your Red, green, and blue master files individually and they should align! Once you set your reference image, drag and drop the little triangle bottom left of the process box to each of your RGB master files.

[@Nick-we7lf]

No one seems to have a video on how to combine each channel for L R G and B. Why is that ? I have no idea how to do this, but all videos seem to skip that.

[@rockymountainastro1239]

Is there a part that I skipped or is this the part you were looking for?? lol

[@Nick-we7lf]

@@rockymountainastro1239 Batch processing. Everyone seems to want to skip this part. Particularly 2.5.x version. No one likes to cover that part along with the dark and flat frames. May seem simple for some genius like you, but i am total noob and have no clue. So please consider a total NOOB LRGB video from ground ZERO. Thx

[@rockymountainastro1239]

@@Nick-we7lf Well I use deep sky stacker . I assume that people have their data stacked and calibrated when starting this video. There are several other videos on KZbin about batch preprocessing and calibrating. This video is not about that.

[@ericlazbin1930]

Great Video. Just wanted to let you know that the verb form of Convolution is "to convolve" not "convolute".