Backyard Voyager

Astrophotography -- Solar Image Processing with Registax
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Cameran Ashraf is a 26 year old graduate student studying geography at cal state fullerton . He took his first astrophoto as a child and, over the years, has become one of the best solar photographers I've seen. You can find out more about Cameran and see his images at his homepage: Cameran Ashraf

Processing Solar Images with Registax

1. Aligned everything with Registax (usually stack 100 frames, resample with Mitchell at 1.5), no wavelets- save as 16 bit TIFF.

2. Open ImagesPlus

3. Go to Restoration > Iterative Restoration > Adaptive Lucy-Richardson

a. Everything as default, 20 iterations
b. Save as 8 bits TIFF

4. Open Photoshop

    a. Open your image

    b. Crop the area you want

    c. Once you've cropped, go to Layer > duplicate layer

    Then go to Image>adjustments>invert

    Then go to the layers box and select “difference” as the blend mode

  1. Then go to layer > flatten image
  2. Ok now create another layer (layer>duplicate layer)
  3. Then go to filter>other>high pass
  4. Set the radius to something like between 5-7
  5. Then go to the layers box and select “soft light”

  6. Layer>flatten image again
  7. Layer >duplicate layer again
  8. Filter>other>high pass set it to around 3 then in the layer box set the opacity to about 85% and the blend to soft light
  9. Layer>flatten image
  10. One last time layer >duplicate layer
  11. Filter >other> high pass and set it to 1.0 and in the layer box do vivid light, opacity at around 50%
  12. Layer >flatten image again
  13. Should have something like this:

    14. So you went from this:

    To this:

    After colorizing using Image > Adjustments > Color Balance:

    Please remember : The numbers I've used are a guide - try your own and experiment! Everyone has their vision of what the sun should look like, so have fun and keep trying new techniques!

    This method is a collection of various solar and lunar processing methods I picked up. Thanks to Hiram Villarreal and Tony Gondola for the inspiration for these techniques.

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