Scratching my head

[ApathyGates]

Ok, so I've been following A LOT of different people in all various types of star trails. The main consistancy I've seen so far, si that everyones pictures are nice, beautiful, colors are vibrant, trails are thick and not pixely....

...and mine look like this:



About 300 photos, all stacked with a plugin in photoshop. Now when I view this picture in photoshop on my dell ultrasharp, I see ZERO issues. After uploading it, I view at work/home on normal monitors and I see pixels that aren't supposed to be there...

...but this isn't the big issue.

My big issue is why oh WHY are my trails just looking like....JUNK?!? Am I missing something post-processing? It's seriously doing my head in.

[Nebulo]

Originally Posted by ApathyGates

Ok, so I've been following A LOT of different people in all various types of star trails. The main consistancy I've seen so far, si that everyones pictures are nice, beautiful, colors are vibrant, trails are thick and not pixely....

...and mine look like this:

image

About 300 photos, all stacked with a plugin in photoshop. Now when I view this picture in photoshop on my dell ultrasharp, I see ZERO issues. After uploading it, I view at work/home on normal monitors and I see pixels that aren't supposed to be there...

...but this isn't the big issue.

My big issue is why oh WHY are my trails just looking like....JUNK?!? Am I missing something post-processing? It's seriously doing my head in.

To begin with, it looks like you're using the wrong layer blending mode in the stacking progress which elevates the highlights at the cost of virtually all dark areas.

Beyond that, or if that's not the case, we need more info on settings, plugin used etc. and it'd help to get an example image of what they look like before stacking.

Can't help on the errant pixels I'm afraid.

[theSeekerr]

Looks like you might have long exposure noise reduction (dark frame subtraction) turned on - if you take an exposure of a particular length, then a dark frame of the same length, you'll get "dotty" startrails because of the time gap between images.

[kingbob86]

It could just be moire from being downsized so much but it does look a bit like there's gaps in the trails. If you want thicker trails to avoid moire you need to defocus the stars a bit. Have you tried any other stacking software? I've had good success with startrails.exe

[hlokk]

It looks like some kind of raster thing, perhaps when resized? Does the image look good in the web browser of your ultrasharp? What about jpg on the ultrasharp too (if you open it in paint you know it wont resize it). If you save it lossless like PNG, how does it look on other monitors.

If uploading to FB or an image hosting site, sometimes they can resize them/tweak things, but it appears to be on your webpage.

Try zooming in 200% in photoshop and seeing how the pixel lines look, and see if that matches with other monitors (after trying above steps). It could be that if the monitor is higher res you notice things less. My screen has a quite high dpi though and I can see the aliased lines though, hence why thinking it may be something in your output process? (if it does indeed look fine in photoshop).

[TwinII]

It would be good to know exactly the process you use to stack your trails. I think your images are probably under exposed - there is not a lot of details in the dark areas and hence you're not seeing many stars.

Try using the statistics --> maximum setting in photoshop to stack your trails and see how that goes.