Maintain Astro Image Quality With Better Exporting

[@dumbthumbs79]

As usual, another excellent video from you with superbly explained info I've seen nowhere else! If you have any more techniques for exporting specifically for printing, I think that would be very useful. I've had great success exporting landscape and wildlife photos to online printing services, but terrible results with astrophotography.

[@SKYST0RY]

Astrophotography requires specialized printing services, techniques adapted to low light images and the color schemes we encounter. If there is an astronomy club in your area, I'd ask them. Any ordinary printing shop won't do the job.

[@JeffHorne]

Curious for your thoughts on PNG

[@SKYST0RY]

Insofar as I understand, it's a good lossless file format, though mostly designed for web display. To contain all data, a file format like tiff is preferable. I use pngs mostly for photo manipulation for web purposes, such as creating transparencies.

[@markw4095]

This is timely as I'm thinking about getting a photo editing monitor and sending files out to a print lab to get metal prints. I was wondering what monitor and calibrator (if any) you use? Have you had prints made before? I see most labs I checked need either sRGB or Adobe RGB and was wondering if the color space difference when viewing a print is worth the price difference to get a monitor that supports Adobe RGB. Any recommendations? Also - would you care to do a video on soft proofing sometime if that's something you do? Thanks as always!

[@SKYST0RY]

These are good questions but printing is outside my area of expertise. I mean, I could walk you through soft proofing in something like Affinity or PhotoLab 8, but it would be rudimentary. Robin Whalley has made two excellent soft proofing videos for both Affinity Photo and PhotoLab which can be found on KZbin. Search: "What You Should Know About Soft Proofing in DxO PhotoLab" and "How to Soft Proof in Affinity Photo".

[@markw4095]

@@SKYST0RY I'll check out Robin's videos - thanks!

[@janelubenskyi1177]

I would prefer to save in Tiff 32 bit floating point in Affinity Photo….hopefully the next version will not disappoint…because otherwise I love the layer based post processing for most of my work after the I trial work in Pixinsight….

[@SKYST0RY]

You can save in 32 bit floating point with tiff files. I just don't see much difference between them and 16 bit images. They are slow to work with due to the massive file size, so I work around them.

[@janelubenskyi1177]

@@SKYST0RY …but I do not see a choice when saving for 32 bit Tiff floating point…could you specify exactly how to choice that in Affinity Photo 2 please?

[@SKYST0RY]

@@janelubenskyi1177 In the Export menu, select the tiff format. In the Advanced area, select Pixel Format and select 32 bit. It is 32 bit floating point even though it doesn't say it. You need Affinity Photo v2 to have the 32 bit option.

[@rschellie]

You speak about exporting your images but you have never created a video showing what data do you save and your back-up strategy. Do you save every sub or only your master files. Do you save your images as .tif files or do you save the raw files? How do you deal with calibration photos, do you just save a master file or do you save each calibration photo with each night you took exposures?

[@SKYST0RY]

A lot of good, technical questions. At this time, I save everything except the calibration frames. I only keep the masters from those. Every year, I fill a 14 TB hard drive with data (two actually, since I backup to a second drive). I just keep the data on external drives since RAIDS and NAS are somewhat outdated. Finished images are backed up to Astrobin.

[@rschellie]

@@SKYST0RY That is a huge amount of data t be storing each year.

[@SKYST0RY]

@@rschellie True. I need to find time to purge the subs. It's on the winter to-do list, one day when the snow is flying. But the observatory is remarkably productive. I also hate to purge information because new ways come out to process data that yield better results, then I have to shoot it all over again.

[@janelubenskyi1177]

Very important to know….thank you.