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Creating those pretty multicolor pictures

jcely wrote on Oct 24, 2009

Are the "photogenic" multicolored pictures created in iraf? Or do people just go to external software like photoshop or gimp for that?

Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Oct 24, 2009

Some of each: Basic CCD reductions, cosmic ray removal, image registration and such are done with things like IRAF, but the pretty-picture things like color balance and visual manipulation are done in PhotoShop/GIMP-like tools.

A very basic form of color combination can be done in IRAF using the EXPORT task to combine e.g. RGB images into a color GIF (see the help page examples for details), but these usually aren't going to be press-release type images.

-Mike

jcely wrote on Oct 24, 2009

thanks mike
I understand the cosmic ray removel/processing stuff i was just wondering about the multi-filter combining. Thanks for the quick reply-i'll look to photoshop.

Justin

Andrew Farrow wrote on Oct 24, 2009

The Aladin software from CDS can do this.

http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml

Thomas de Boer wrote on Oct 24, 2009

Just as a first look you can use ds9 -rgb to overlay different filtered images and give them false colors.

Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Oct 24, 2009

Just to complete the thread, see also astro-ph/0412138v1 entitled

"Image-Processing Techniques for the Creation of Presentation-Quality Astronomical Images"

by Rector et al. You can google the astro-ph number for a direct link to the paper.

Jason Quinn wrote on Oct 24, 2009

fitz

Just to complete the thread, see also astro-ph/0412138v1 entitled

"Image-Processing Techniques for the Creation of Presentation-Quality Astronomical Images"

by Rector et al. You can google the astro-ph number for a direct link to the paper.


Woah. Great paper. Thanks. It took me quite a bit to come up with the way that I use to generate color images but it only works with 3 images. This way allows up to 8.

jcely wrote on Oct 24, 2009

Thanks everyone- very helpful.

That paper is great!

Last post on Oct 24, 2009