Are we too quick to edit out the flaws in our astro photos?

I was at a local astronomy club meetup last month in Tucson and this older guy named Dave pointed at my Andromeda photo on my laptop. He said 'that's nice but the stars look fake.' He was right, I had used a lot of heavy processing to smooth out the noise and sharpen everything. I told him I was just trying to make it look clean and professional. But he argued that the imperfections like slight trailing or uneven color are what make an image feel real and honest. It stuck with me because I see so many processed photos online that look perfect but almost artificial. So I'm wondering, do you guys prefer a raw photo with its flaws or a heavily edited one that looks polished? Where do you draw the line between making it look good and losing the reality of what we actually captured through the telescope?

3 comments

3 Comments

lily_cooper4d ago

Oh man, Dave sounds like my kind of person. I did the same thing with my Orion Nebula shot last winter, spent hours in Photoshop scrubbing out every bit of chromatic aberration and noise until it looked like a CGI render, not a real photo. What's the point of spending all that time at the eyepiece if you're just going to erase every sign it was actually taken through a telescope? I've started keeping a completely unprocessed version on my hard drive now, just so I remember what I actually saw that night.

williamhenderson4d ago

Ha, sounds like Dave is the kind of guy who'd say my star photos look like plastic fruit. I'm probably in the same boat as him though, I’ve definitely ruined a few shots trying to make them "perfect" and they just end up looking like a bad painting.

paige1664d ago

Ever notice how nobody complains about editing out airplane contrails or satellite streaks? Those are real too, but nobody's preaching authenticity about those.