I heard a guy at the star party say 'processing is cheating' and it got me thinking

I was at the star party out at the Cherry Springs dark sky park last month, and this older guy was showing off his film shots of the Milky Way. Someone asked about stacking and noise reduction, and he just said, 'Real astronomy photos come straight from the camera. All that processing is just cheating.' It stuck with me because my own shots of the Orion Nebula are a mess without at least some basic levels adjustment in a free program like Siril. I get wanting to keep things pure, but modern sensors pick up so much data that you almost have to process it to see what's really there, right? On the other hand, maybe there's a line where you turn a real object into digital art. Where do you all draw that line for your own photos?

2 comments

2 Comments

king.lisa2d ago

My first decent shot of the Andromeda Galaxy was just a faint gray smudge straight out of the camera. I spent hours in GIMP just trying to get the core to show up. How is bringing out what the sensor already caught cheating?

valthomas2d ago

Yeah exactly, @king.lisa. It's like saying using a telescope is cheating because your eyes can't see it that way. The data is right there on the sensor, just too faint. Stretching the levels in GIMP is no different than turning up the volume on a quiet song. I had the same thing with Orion's Nebula, just a tiny green blob until I pulled the curves. Calling that cheating is wild.