Pro-Level Frequency Separation For Multi-Layer Sharpness & Color Enhancement

[@rschellie]

I am totally enjoying your content. Most channels use Photoshop to process images but I use Affinity Photo. I photograph wildlife and only do basic editing but the stuff you are teaching will help there too. I look forward to your future videos on the way you process your images.

[@SKYST0RY]

No real need for PhotoShop. It's absurdly overpriced and AP delivers 99% as much.

[@gianlucavalentini2259]

Very complicated process, but deserves learning. Perhaps you could take a look at the new frequency separation tool that SetiAstro developed for use in Pixinsight and make a video on that tool too. But I need to get back into AP and that means reminiscing all my rusty photoshop skills. Long way to go. Thanks for your very cool and useful videos.

[@billblanshan3021]

Excellent video! That's basically how wavelets work. In the past I manually created my high frequency maps using affinity photo but using a bilateral blur versus a gaussian because it focuses more towards the edges. If you're interested, I actually have a pixel math script that does exactly what you're doing and could share it with you. Regards, Bill

[@SKYST0RY]

Interesting. I'll have to experiment with that. Is the script for use with PixInsight?

[@physmc1]

Nice, I didn't realized that bilateral was on Pixinsight. One major advantage of bilateral is that it does not introduce halos, as opposed to Gaussian filters.

[@SKYST0RY]

Affinity Photo has a bilateral blur tool. I never even used it before. Now I am going to have to see what kind of outcomes I can get out of it.

[@billblanshan3021]

@SKYST0RY The bilateral tool within frequency separation doesn't work all that great but give it a try, what I did in the past was create my own high frequency image from scratch using a bilater blur. but it's a little difficult to explain here but let me try .. 1) clone your background image twice. Call the middle one High frequency map and the top one Sharpened. Turn the Sharpened layer off for now so we can see the changes done on the high frequency map first. 2) on your high frequency map image (middle), invert it. 3) change the blend mode on your high frequency map image to vivid light. 4) while in your high frequency map layer , add a live filter for bilateral filter. Using live filters will help you adjust the sharpening in real time. You will see the high frequency map being created. 5) now turn on the Sharpened image layer and set the blend mode to overlay and you will see the sharpening effect happening. To adjust the sharpening detail you can adjust the bilateral blur value but try and keep the radius as small as possible because large radiuses make the image look bad. 6} to increase the sharpening effect you can create a curves adjustment while the high frequency map layer is selected and this will place a curve in between the Sharpened image and the High frequency map image, thus allowing us to adjust the strength of the high-frequency map only. Because this high frequency map is values above and below 0.5 you can create an s curve to increase and decrease the high frequency map values and you will see the sharpening effect more. I don't use linear light because it's linear and when you start adding your high frequency filters together and then place them back onto the image it can cause clipping so I prefer Overlay to prevent clipping. This method will sharpen an image but it doesn't add much contrast. But contrast can be modified after using curves. Yes, my pixelmath is done in pixinsight. I don't think I can send you my email address here because of KZbin but you can contact me from my KZbin channel page, AnotherAstroChannel and look me up on Instagram and I can communicate with you that way.

[@billblanshan3021]

@@physmc1 Not in Pixinsight but in Affinity Photo. I wished it was in Pixinsight though, making something simular to BiLateral blur in Pixinsight is a pain.

[@MarkMcKeeToronto]

Hello, and thanks for all your great content. Do you ever attend Star Fest?

[@SKYST0RY]

I have livestock so I rarely can get away for more than a day.

[@MarkMcKeeToronto]

@@SKYST0RYI see, you may know it’s happening this coming week, Trevor Jones will be giving a talk as well as many others. Perhaps next year you would consider attending? Maybe even extolling your wisdom in a seminar?

[@SKYST0RY]

@@MarkMcKeeToronto I would love to go. It is just extremely hard to find people these days who know how to look after goats. That's the problem with having a farm. The land owns you lol

[@MarkMcKeeToronto]

@@SKYST0RY if I can find a goat herder to take care of things, would you consider it?

[@SKYST0RY]

@@MarkMcKeeToronto I appreciate it but I couldn't make it this year regardless. With under a week to prepare, I wouldn't have time to move my work schedule even. Sounds like it'll be fun, though. Perhaps a project for next year.

[@Thommy78]

Thanks for sharing 💕

[@FLANOsFOTOs]

I really need to take another look at HFS. Thanks for demonstrating this. I also love the animation touch to the end image. How are the singleton stars animated?

[@SKYST0RY]

I used a universe planetarium called Space Engine to generate CGI stars then screen composited them over the image.

[@FLANOsFOTOs]

@@SKYST0RY Thank you. I love that look!

[@janelubenskyi1177]

Hi …amazing detail and colour pulled out…is this technique better than what LHT does in Pixinsight along with MLT?

[@SKYST0RY]

I couldn't say. PI is pretty good but I find it clunky, so once I have finished stacking, aligning, color balancing and running the RC Astro tools on my images, I export to Affinity Photo for the heavy duty editing.

[@AmatureAstronomer]

Sophistcated.

[@vidholf]

For OSC, would it make sense to take a Luminance plate by creating a desaturated copy of the OSC plate - and then proceeding with HFS?

[@SKYST0RY]

Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, it will not help because you will not derive any additional information by doing so.