Hey fellow reading warriors. Yeah, the lighting is bad. I know we're just gonna have to be okay with it Cuz that's just where the sun's at right now Welcome to today's video today. I'm gonna be talking about some of the books that I've recently read that all kind of feature around the theme of dance Notice that there have been quite a few books published that kind of Go around the theme of dance and even one of the books that I'm gonna mention here today It was even turned into a Netflix TV show and I was like, wow, that's just a lot of dance books coming out And I grew up dancing I started dancing ballet tap and jazz when I was six years old and I quit dancing when I was 18 But before that I had taken up contemporary and hip-hop as well So I am somewhat trained, you know, I danced for 12 years And so I thought it would be really interesting to read these books as someone who has Trained as a dancer and so I read these books and I'm going to talk about them So the first book that I read was I want to be where you are and that is by Christina forest and I Very much enjoyed this book, but I gave it a 3.5 kind of 4 out of 5 stars So it is definitely a contemporary is about a girl who wants to audition for a dance school and her mom is very much like No, and so when her mom finally goes on vacation with her boyfriend She decides to run off and go to an audition However, she catches a little hiccup right at the beginning where her neighbor who she does not really Like or have good feelings towards Says hey, I'm coming with you and you're gonna drop me off on your way, and she's like Oh, no, so I I did enjoy this book. I thought it was a very nice light fun read This book was just a very nice light read. The thing is I felt like not a lot of it was actually very Centered towards dance. Yes, the whole premise of the book was her trying to get to a dance audition But she spent very little time in the book Dancing or really talking about dancing Other than I need to get to this audition and then when she did talk about it All she talked about or all she did when she finally get did get to rehearse before the audition Was her good technique and all the good things about her technique Which is which is a good thing But as a dancer everyone knows what they can improve upon and nobody's perfect You always have something to improve upon and I feel like she just never mentioned Anything for her to improve anything that she was working towards. She was just I have good technique I'm gonna get into the dance school Which it's either going to be a harsh awakening for her When if she were to get there or if she weren't to get in that's also a harsh awakening Because it's just nobody is that perfect especially not Before you get into a dance school because making it into a dance school does not guarantee you a career by any means And if it does get if you do get a career because of your dance school, you're going right into the core There's no way you're going into a principal ballerina position, but just So I felt like this book was slightly unrealistic in terms of how she viewed herself that being said I did really like the Description of dance I thought the description was really cool because it would say the name of the moves so me as a dancer I know exactly what that looks like and I could replicate it But it also described kind of the movements a little bit without being super like this is this exactly and then it's that like It had a good kind of overall description of the dance moves as well So that if you were a non dancer and you didn't know the names of the steps You could be like oh I kind of have an idea of what that looks like so I can imagine it and keep reading Without trying to like over explain every single dance step. So that was something I also really appreciated I wasn't a super big fan of the title because it really It so this is also a romance and it's an enemies to lovers And I don't like the title in terms of the romance just because of how the romance how slow it was But it also doesn't really make sense from a dancer aspect So I just feel like the title of the book didn't really like Make too much sense But speaking about the romance one thing I really admired about it was that the love interest Was kind of your typical guy until you get to know him and then he Kind of breaks down those ideas of masculinity and toxic masculinity by allowing himself to be vulnerable and to be emotional Which was really cool to see this like all tough guy kind of finally getting vulnerable with someone which was kind of refreshing Rather than having that dark mysterious toxic masculinity love interest character But again, it's contemporary. So like what else were we gonna get? I feel like the climax of this book was there were kind of two climaxes One was very early and one was extremely late Um, and I wish there was more detail on the addition. I really liked the audition I enjoyed reading that a lot, but I wish there was just a little bit more on it All right I do not want to spoil the ending of this book Obviously, most of my reviews are spoiler free and if they are not then I make a very clear notion that there are spoilers But I will say the ending of this was pretty nice because it was realistic without like Being crazy or super sad or super happy But one thing that did bother me is that in every single Book that is like this the parents are always opposed to it They're always not on the side of the kid And then they always come around at the end And that's not too much of a spoiler because I feel like that's such a big trope that you know It's just gonna happen anyway It bothers me. It's getting to a point where it's like, okay, this is driving me nuts. I am sick and tired of this But overall, I thought this was a really good fun book about dance If you don't know a lot about it, you're gonna have no problem getting through it and it's it's a very short light read I read this in like a day Or so I read it within like 24 hours Um because the writing was just that nice and easy to fly through and you could really relate To the character and all of her stress and anxiety, especially coming off of an injury. It's like Oh my word. It's the scariest thing as a dancer to get an injury and then have to keep dancing and be like Am I gonna be the same? Am I gonna be as good? Am I gonna be? Oh So that was really cool Like I said, I had quite a few issues with it, which is why I'm thinking 3.5 stars But like on good reads where you can't do that. It's a four star. So I recommend this book The next book that I ended up picking up and I listened to this one over audiobook But I do have the physical copy that is Love Boat Taipei and this is by Abigail Hingwen and oh my goodness Oh, this was such a good read. So I Would first off what's really cool is that at the beginning of the book the author knows that both her and her husband Were in the Love Boat program in Taipei um So if you don't know what that is it's basically this program for parents who are from A chinese speaking country china taipei and they send their and they may not live there anymore They a lot of the kids are from the united states or canada or just not speaking Not the same culture and so these parents will send their kids to this camp the summer camp where they can Make sure they're learning the language learning the culture, you know just being very in touch with their heritage But as you go on you kind of find out that Love Boat Has this nickname for a reason and either students or their parents send these students to Love Boat To find a future's spouse so This book is about a girl living in the united states who Wants to dance that's all she wants to do. She just wants to dance. She wants to go to school for dance She wants to try and be a dancer and her parents again like to choke or like Uh-huh No, you're gonna be a doctor Because your father and I worked way too hard to send you to medical school to be a doctor and she's like but I wanted dance And so her parents surprise her with a trip over to Love Boat in Taipei She doesn't speak any mandarin. She doesn't she's not very in touch with her culture in that way and so she gets thrust upon this Love Boat and she's trying to figure out How to continue dancing and how to convince her parents to let her dance. She's also felt like she's been very Um confined by the rules of her parents like her parents have so many rules So she decides that it will also be the summer of break and some rules and let me tell you She breaks some rules not a spoiler. She just does This was a very Very fun read. I like I just did not want to put it down The dance aspect was very interesting because it was very prevalent at the beginning as you see her dancing at her school And then when she goes to Love Boat, she spends a lot of time trying to find a dance academy in Taipei that she can afford to continue dancing over the summer And then there is obviously a lot of dancing at the end and this has a romance in it It is a friends to lovers, but there's also a love triangle in here and almost a love square It doesn't quite go like square, but there are multiple people and If you've watched my channel, you know my opinions of love triangles like I I hate them. They they drive me up the wall I can't deal with them But what was nice and refreshing about this one was that I feel like in most love triangles There's that one guy who's like slightly out of line and a little more possessive or a little more like Not as nice to her because he feels he has a right to her Instead of the other guy and the other guy's just like I just love her and I want to be with her So I I always feel like that's very clear in the love triangle And that's why I hate them But I feel like that was not so much the case in this book um Like neither guy really had like a right to the girl and they were not super like forceful with her or anything um And so that was kind of refreshing But they're the characters were all just so lovable and you really grew with them and It was very much a character driven book there. It's there is some plot to it, but like It's very character driven. You know once the characters are all sent to love boat It kind of just is their story of what they're doing What they're trying to do in spite of their parents or for their parents and it's very interesting and then the dance in this book was Just very much description Um, so if you are a non dancer You're gonna read it just find if you are a dancer. You might try and be like, okay Judging by the movements. I think it's these specific movements and try and put it together in your head Like it's it's not very specific um But it was it was a lot of fun to read that ending though. Hold my word. I again no spoilers, but like If you read this comment down below because I would love to discuss this ending with someone because oh my word things happened Alrighty and then the last book that I have read for this video slash for the dance theme is tiny pretty things and this is by Sona Charaporta and Danielle Clayton And this is the book that is the first in duology and that duology has been transformed into a Netflix tv show Now I have not watched the netflix tv show because I wanted to read the books first But now that I'm reading the books. I would like to watch the show and Um seeing how like accurate it is and actually like see the dancing and all that stuff Um, I am currently through halfway through the second book in the duology shiny broken things Um, I listened to both these books on audio and like I said, I'm halfway through it I'm hoping to finish it quickly because oh my word. I cannot put them down I read this so once I got started I read this so quickly And I'm reading through the second one so quickly because it's just oh It's oh my word. I just want to finish it. Um, so I thought it was really good. Um The so this takes place It goes back and forth between characters different characters point of views And the nice thing about the audiobook is that they do switch up narrators depending on which point of view you're reading So that was fun. They have like a little cast for it And so you follow gg who is a black girl from california who gets accepted into the new york ballet academy Which is like huge and then there is bet Who is a white girl whose older sister went to the academy Graduated and has become a dancer with the new york ballet The only thing i'm gonna mention is it seems like her sister became a principal dancer rather than like As I mentioned earlier, the realistic thing is once you graduate from an academy and you audition to get into a company You're gonna go into the core. No one is so amazing that they instantly become a principal dancer and Because you either a already have your principal dancers or b you're gonna upgrade someone from the core who's been with the company so that aspect of it kind of seemed like How is her sister getting these lead roles in the new york ballet after only being with them for a little bit Anyway, that's like that's like the one biggest critique. I think I have um But then you also follow the perspective of june who is a korean american and they all go to this academy And one thing that I would love to point out is so obviously it's a very diverse cast And they don't ignore that diversity they don't discuss the issues in ballet of The ideal dancer being a specific body type of a white girl blonde hair blue eyes, especially for the russians So it's unlike the other books where both of them were main characters of color their race wasn't necessarily brought into How that affects them as a dancer in the united states versus here it very much is so um because Because ballet has been taken over not taken over but like Russians kind of adopt a ballet after it was invented like in france and they made their own style There are different styles of ballet and they've created their own and it's and it's very strict very hard to do But the russians are very particular with how they do their ballets and there are a lot of beautiful russian ballets And that is still very privileged in ballet culture here in the united states And so we're we're still working on trying to get more ballerinas of colors and not white ballerinas Go misty copeland. I love you And so that's a really cool issue that is definitely looked at in this book, especially when the black girl gets the main lead Oh, that's so exciting But then the korean girl is sitting there like Am i ever gonna get a lead because i'm korean and like when they do the nutcracker It's very much like your ethnicity kind of tells you what role you get because there's like the arrow coffee and there's the chinese dance and so You you see that and it's very sad to read but it's also Sadly realistic, which is really disappointing um but Anyway, i'm getting ahead of myself But yeah, so it follows these characters and how they're in their second to last year in the academy And the book is kind of broken up between semesters so it And that's that was a little bit jarring when i first read it So at the very beginning it's the fall semester You have the cast list for the nutcracker and then you follow the events the dramas the rehearsals that happen And then right at the end of the performance Is the end of the first act and you go to the second act which is now the spring performance and i believe they do Giselle And which is also a gorgeous ballet um Sorry don't mean to fangirl about the ballets But and then it starts off at the ballet and then almost immediately the cast list is up And it's very jarring you don't hear anything about anyone's break. It's just ballet to ballet And then in the second book you get their final year where they are supposed to get ready for auditioning for different companies And figuring out figuring out where they're going next in life in terms of hopefully a dance career Or getting ready for a dance career But it really hits on a lot of other issues as well, for example And one of the trigger warnings could be um eating disorders Because those happen to be very common in ballerinas as they have such immense pressure to keep A perfect kind of body keep very thin make sure they're not like top heavy or bottom heavy And it it's so stressful that a lot of times it does lead to eating disorders and that is represented in some of the characters um So just keep that in mind. It's it's like very sad to watch and it makes you look at food in a new way But it's also like very realistic. It's it's what happens a lot of times and it's really really sad um But then this is also a very drama filled book and again, if you've been watching my channel, you know I'm not one for like drama for the sake of drama But I feel like this drama is different because it isn't just drama for the sake of drama it's not drama because people are not communicating because people are Doing dumb things and like it's it's not drama for the sake of drama. It's drama because Oh my word, if you were not cast a good part You feel like you're screwed like it's so much of it stems from the ballet and the cast and how well you're doing in the ballet um that it can spark drama and pranks a lot of pranks that tend to get a little more on the serious side until Really bad things start happening and you're like, oh my word. I can't believe it. But as a dancer, I'm like This is the new york ballet academy I can kind of see where you're coming from where it's like You you want you need to make sure you're the best you need to make sure And and that's not to say that they don't work hard in their technique Obviously they do because they still have the need to earn it but So that's why it's like it's a little bit bigger But I just I couldn't put it down and so I'm really excited to watch the tv show and I'm debating on filming watching um the tv show after reading these and kind of giving my thoughts about like the book to tv show adaptation But there are two other things I will say one it that it does such a good job of setting people up for different pranks Who you don't know who actually did it, but you're like, oh it could have been this person Oh, it could or it could have been that person Oh, and you just kind of keep going back and forth.  The other thing I will say though listening to the audiobook the so the teachers have russian accents because they are russian and It was really difficult listening to the audiobooks because Some of the voice actors or the narrators did really good russian accents and some Did not like and I'm not saying like I'm an american looking for that asian accent the russian accent that you see on the tv Like I'm not looking for the like americanized russian accent I'm looking for an actual genuine russian accent. I did live in a russian speaking country for a year So I am somewhat familiar with russian accents But there was there was one narrator who when they always did the russian teacher I was like that's not even close to a russian accent. And so that was kind of jarring and kind of like But obviously if you're reading the book, you know, like physically reading it That shouldn't be too much of a problem. You can narrate it however you want but Yeah, oh my goodness and like oh just the the when people are cast as understudies And the repercussions that they face either from parents or from teachers or from themselves because they did not get They didn't get a solo act or they were the understudy, but they didn't actually get the role and what that means it just Everyone breaks my heart And it's such a fun one thing I will say is that this book very much Says the names of the movements and does not describe them very much So I would understand it just fine But if you're a non dancer, you might have to look up some of the terms or watch videos Or honestly, I would just encourage you to like Watch the ballets that they do because it's fun and pretty and it would be very helpful for you to know like What's a solo act what who the main characters are etc and so forth? But this book is very much written So dancers understand but as a non dancer I don't know how well other non dancers would necessarily understand each every movement that they describe Um, but it's not too bad in here. Like it's not just consistent dance terminology um So like I'm sure I'm sure you'll be fine, but Yeah So that is it Those are the three books that I've read that all sent her around the theme of dance and like I said for tiny pretty things I am currently reading the second one in the duology for it I wanted to include it in this video, but this video needs to go up today So I just didn't quite have enough time, but I will be reading it soon um And I feel like the order in which I talked about the books is the order in progression of How much dance is talked about and how much dances the theme of the book um But yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed this video If you did leave it a thumbs up to let me know you enjoyed it comment down below Any questions if you've read any of these books or if you have any dance experience I would love to be any fellow dancers out there. Um Otherwise until I see you all in the next video. I wish you a happy reading


Okay, so we're back inside and the first thing we have to do to actually start Processing our files is actually get them onto the computer organized and I mean actually going to start with the camera because in playback mode on the camera, it's really easy to actually understand which files are which because Most cameras have an info button that then gives you some metadata about the file in playback mode and That way I can just quickly see not only Visually what kind of file it is so obviously the ones with stars will be lights and the ones that's all Bright like this is a flat, but when it comes to the files that are completely black like bias and darks It's hard to differentiate those without the metadata so looking in the upper left hand corner here, it tells us the shutter speed and so a Dark would have a shutter speed that's the same as the light to two seconds Well a bias frame would have a shutter speed That's one eight thousandths of a second, which is the fastest shutter speed this camera can do So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to open up Notepad on my windows computer here. There's also a program called text edit on Mac both of these are just quick note taking Applications and I'm going to type in lights darks Bias flats because that's the order that I took these files in and I'm just going to take note here of the File names the range Of each type so we can see the first light here is Ends in eight three one the file name. So I'm just going to type in eight three one Dash and then I'm going to press the zoom out button and Just use my scroll wheel here to scroll down Until we see something that doesn't look like a light frame meaning we don't see the Milky Way anymore It'll turn probably completely black eventually Took a lot of light frames There we go. Okay, so you can see starting with one one three five This is a completely black frame and because it's two seconds. I know that it's a dark. So the the last light frame is one one one two And then I guess I deleted some files Probably because the clouds came in and then the first dark frame is One one three five Okay, now I'll just keep scrolling Until up there in the upper left hand side of the screen it changes from Two seconds to one eight thousands of a second and then I know this is my last dark frame So one one eight zero and my first bias frame is one one eight one Okay, and then I'll just keep scrolling Until we get to the flats It's like I took about a hundred bias frames There we go 1280 is the last bias frame and then my first flat frame is 1437 I know that's a huge jump there in numbers I Deleted some things from the card just to make this a little bit easier So then I'll just keep scrolling whoops And my last flat frame is one four six five Okay, so now I have everything all of the information that I need to organize these files because I have the file names and The numbers here and what type of file they are and so now what I can do is I can just remove the memory card from the camera and Take my memory card reader here And this is a nice USB 3 memory card reader that's nice and fast for transferring the files to the computer It's made by Kingston And it also has slots for other type of memory cards if you have camera with CF or something else Okay, and it says blah blah blah I don't care It opens up that in the file explorer if you're on Mac this would be Finder and If it if it does if the memory card opens up in some other program some photos application just close out of that We don't need it What we're gonna do now with this window open over here and our notepad file here is We're going to copy the files off of the memory card onto the computer But before we do that, let's make some empty folders to transfer them to So I'm gonna make a new folder on the desktop just right-click and choose new folder. I'll call this lagoon And then inside my lagoon folder, I'm gonna make four sub folders just the same way right-click new folder And I'm gonna make one for lights one for darks one for bias and One for flats Okay, now with these two windows open Here's my memory card. I'm gonna go in here into my picture files and Here's my empty folders on my desktop I'm gonna start with lights and so lights go from 831 to 1 1 1 2 So I'm gonna open up my lights folder Over here on my memory card. I'm gonna click on the first file 831 and scroll down Till I get to 1 1 1 2 There it is and hold down shift and click and so shift click Makes it so you can grab the whole list of files Then I'll just left-click and drag to drag these 282 files over to my lights folder and let go and it copies them Okay, the copying is done. So now I'm gonna go back a folder just by clicking on lagoon and Next I'll go into darks So I'll click on the darks folder It says the folders empty, then I'll just copy over from 11 35 to 11 80 So I'll click once on 11 35 scroll down Shift click on 11 80 copy those to my darks folder. Well, that's going I can look the next it's bias 11 81 to 12 80 So open up my bias folder Click on 11 81 scroll down to 12 80 Shift click and click and drag a hundred bias files Okay, and then finally flats is everything else here So we'll just copy those over to the flats folder And then we'll be done Okay, all done. The only other thing I want to say about File organization here is That if you are using deep sky stacker When it stacks together all of these bias frames to make a master bias it leaves that master bias file In this folder.  There's a master bias File in there that then you can reuse for project after project.  So that's why I shot a hundred bias frames just to get a really good Master bias file and then we don't have to actually shoot those bias frames again We can reuse that master bias file over and over again Okay, I'll close out of this stuff and now let's go ahead and open up deep sky stacker here Okay, this is deep sky stacker 4.2.3 the 64 bit version the first thing I'm gonna do here is go down here to settings and go to stacking settings and Right here where it says temporary file files where it says temporary files folder You can see that I have mine set up to an external drive the D drive Which is just a an external hard drive. I have connected but yours might be on the local drive and That's fine as long as you have plenty of hard drive space But if you don't for some reason I would recommend setting this up To where you want it to go where you have plenty of space because these temp files can get really really big like Since we're stacking hundreds and hundreds of frames these these temp files can get up to like 60 gigabytes now They are temp files. I mean they're temporary They only are there when you have the program open and then when you close the program They're deleted from your hard drive, but still you need the space So if you're working off a fairly small like startup drive like an SSD You may want to pick a different location for this temporary files folder like I did Okay, with that said we can now open up our picture files. This means our lights and so I'm just going to navigate here to the desktop and then to my lagoon folder into my lights sub folder and I'll just click on any of them and then press control a to select all and click open Okay, it brings them in For some reason deep sky stacker has this quirk where I think it's because you could just bring in all of your frames All at once and it let it try to figure out which are your light dark and flat and bias But I really wouldn't recommend that because I might mess something up So what I usually do is I just bring in my light frames first But none of them are checked right now. So then I go over here and just click check all Okay, then it tells me I have 282 light frames Okay, then I can click over here on the left hand side under open picture files where it says dark files Just go to my darks folder and again click Press control a and open up all my dark files And it tells me I have 46 of those Then I'll open up my flat files Open those 29 and finally my bias files Open Okay, we're not using dark flats You usually only need to use dark flats if you're shooting really really long flats like 30 seconds or something like that If you're using a slow scope or something like that But we we shot very quick flats So I'm not worried about dark current noise and we don't need to correct the flats with dark flats Anyways, we have all of this set up now We can now go on to This red highlighted thing down here that says register checked pictures Okay Let's start With the main window here under actions So we have register already registered pictures. These are not already registered so we can leave that unchecked We have automatic detection of hot pixels. It's fine to leave that checked We have stack after registering. I'm gonna go ahead and check that I want to just do this all in one process Sometimes you break it up and you might want to register first and then Look at the scores and do different things with that, but let's just keep this simple and stack after registering I have 282 frames. So I'm going to tell it to select the best 95% of pictures and stack those so it's gonna throw out the worst of the five the worst five percent of the pictures Which I'm fine with I think there's some which have maybe some passing clouds or somewhere Maybe I'm I'm reframing and the stars are Streaked and it deep sky stacker will do a good job of finding those kinds of things and throwing them out because they won't be Considered in the best 95% Okay, I'm gonna go over here to advanced and just make sure that my star detection threshold is okay I don't remember what the default is, but let's just start at 20% and then press compute and the number of stars and It found 117 if I bring that star detection threshold down Like that You can see that it finds slightly more stars and if I bring it up It will find fewer stars So at 36% it's only finding 59 stars which Might work probably would work, but I usually like to get over a hundred stars So I'm going to bring that back over to 17% And that gives me a hundred and forty seven stars as long as you're seeing like something between let's say 50 and 3,000 stars, it's probably gonna work just fine if you're seeing like 20,000 stars or zero stars then those are outliers and I think something is going wrong So then you would really want to examine your files, especially the zero stars That would mean that you're probably didn't get focus right because if it's not finding any stars Then then it's not going to be able to stack your pictures so I Then you're gonna have to take a look at your files You could open them up in Photoshop or something like that ahead of time and see what the issue is But usually this works just fine and you might even be able to just leave it on the default But I always like to check it Okay, and then I'm gonna click on recommended settings And what I like to do in here is just sort of scroll through And see if there is anything that is popping up in red that usually indicates this is something you should address I mean it says you are stacking 280 to two light frames here That's sort of in red but I mean where you're seeing all these green statements What the green indicates is that those are settings that it considers Already set and that are Appropriate if you're seeing something in red Then that means something that you haven't set or that you maybe should pay attention to before you start the process But for the most part the default values in deep sky stacker work pretty well If we go into stacking parameters Um, there's some different options in here standard mode mosaic mode intersection mode You definitely don't want mosaic mode. That would mean that you get uh, that's for if you are Basically taking a mosaic of the night sky. We also can think of this as a panorama Something like that where you're you're putting together a bunch of different pictures to make a bigger picture of the night sky But what we want to do is actually stack the pictures all together to To average out the noise in the picture and for that you can either use standard mode or intersection mode Basically to the difference is just that standard mode isn't going to Crop away anything it's going to leave in the rough edges and intersection mode Will automatically apply a crop, but I don't necessarily trust it So I always just leave this on standard mode and do the cropping myself afterwards Okay, um, you want to use all available processors down here at the bottom Don't want to turn on any, um drizzle or aligning of rgb channels usually, um This thing, you know the different, uh clipping modes work just fine in the defaults I have the lights on kappa sigma clipping with a kappa of two and then Darks flats and bias are all on median kappa sigma clipping I have alignment set to automatic The intermediate files this is sort of interesting you can either choose tiff or fits so that if you were working with other Astronomy programs you might choose fits which is the more standard for astronomy programs But since we're going to be working mostly with just deep sky stacker and photoshop Tiff files are just fine This is interesting If you are finding that even with your calibration frames Your darks are mostly supposed are the ones that are really supposed to take care of hot pixels But if you find that you you stack and you calibrate and stack and everything and then Your result still has a lot of hot pixels. You might want to try this Cosmetic correction right here where it can try to detect the hot pixels that are remaining automatically and Change the value of those so that they're not as noticeable Okay, we want to create an output file the autosave.tiff. It's fine So basically my point here, uh is that I'm just using all of the defaults I'm on standard mode for result And I'm going to go ahead and click okay And click okay again And it gives us a final, um, summary of everything that, uh We've Told it here You can see that I did 200. I have 282 light frames at iso 1600 Um, you can see my bias darks and flats are also all that ios iso 1600 Because we have 282 light frames at two seconds each That's a total exposure turtle integration of nine minutes 24 seconds Um And the process will temporarily use 31.2 gigabytes on the d drive So you can imagine if we instead had over 500 frames This may take up something like 60 gigabytes. So you can see these temporary files really do add up So just make sure you have enough space Before you start. I don't think it will actually let you start the process if you don't have enough space Um, but remember if you if you want to set that temporary drive to some other place Just go down here to settings and uh, you can you can set that temporary drive wherever you wish Okay, this all looks fine. I'm going to go ahead and click okay again And now it's the waiting game. Um, basically this can take Hours, uh, it really just depends on how Modern your computer's processor is how many threads it has that kind of thing. Um, I don't believe Deep Sky stacker has any gpu acceleration So it's really just using your cpu and the really again the most important thing is uh, is just if it's a more modern More powerful processor. Um, this will go faster. I'm just using um A Lenovo think pad. It's a few years old. So I know this is going to take my computer Hours to finish, but that's fine. Um, I'll sometimes, you know Take a break and do something else or leave it overnight and then uh, pick it up in the morning so, um I'm going to fast forward or skip this part of the video and uh, we'll see what it looks like when it's all done Okay, it did take a few hours. I actually just uh waited overnight and this is the next morning and we have a finished picture here. This has been Calibrated registered and stacked now. It doesn't look like much right now, but this is completely normal This is actually what you want to see. You don't want it to look, uh, bright at this point You want it to look black with only a few white dots This is because it's unstretched or in a linear form still and then we're going to do the stretching and all of the Linear to non-linear curve work Not here in deep sky stacker, which is a fairly crude way to do it But in another program like gimp or photoshop or et cetera um So to it actually is already saved. Um, so if you look right up here, um, it tells you where it's saved So it's saved in my lights folder is autosave.tiff The only issue with this autosave.tiff file is that it is a 32 bit floating point file and some programs I know gimp, um, and even some versions of photoshop, um, won't Play well with that 32 bit file. So what I would recommend You do just to make sure that you have compatibility with the programs we'll use next is go over here to the processing Section on the left hand side and go down to save picture to file And this lets you save off a 16 bit tiff file 16 bits per channel, which is what we want Um The default settings here are the ones you want compression set to none and under options You want embed adjustments in the saved image But do not apply them. You want that checked And so then I'll just save it as lagoon dss for deep sky stacker and click save And then we can see here on my desktop This is what I'm going to bring in to the next program lagoon dash dss.tiff Um, and then while we're here, I'll just mention really briefly if you do want to reuse your master bias frame in future projects what you can do is in that folder at the bottom you should see something called master offset iso whatever dot tiff and this is what you would save to reuse And you don't have to reshoot bias frames because they're technically the same Every time as long as you shot them correctly Okay, that's it for deep sky stacker. We'll move on to the next section, which is the fun creative part of Processing and really bringing this data to life Okay, I switched over to my mac just because that's where I happened to have gimp installed and I've brought over the Stacked file from deep sky stacker and so I'm just going to open up Uh, the GNU image manipulation program. I'm on version 10.2.10. Sorry, and I would recommend version 2.10 Especially if you're doing extra photography because it supports 16 bit files Well, I think earlier versions did not So we're just going to go ahead and do file open And I'm going to pick my tiff file here from the desktop Okay, and uh for some reason when it opens, uh, it doesn't fit to view at least on my version of gimp here So I'm just going to go to view Zoom and do fit image in window There we go. So now we can see the whole image right here um If we if you want to zoom in at any point while processing, um, it's just the plus button And on most keyboards you do have to hold down shift and then hit the equals button to get to plus And then it's just the the dash or minus key to zoom out So shift equals or plus to zoom in and minus to zoom out Okay, um And then you can always of course use the menus up here I'm going to try to avoid doing, um, many Keyboard shortcuts just because they might be a little bit different if you're on windows mac or linux um Only other thing i'll mention here is I have my, um systems set up, uh, just like gimp comes out of the box um, but uh, we're going to be using histograms a lot so Up here at the top you'll see brushes patterns fonts document history histogram I'm just going to switch over to histogram and if you don't see histogram just go into, um Windows dockable dialogues and Find histogram in here right there And uh, just open it up and and dock it over here to the right side because we're going to be using it a lot Especially here at the beginning Okay, um, so by default the histogram will be set to value the first thing that I want you to do is switch it to Rgb, um, and it doesn't look like much changed But what we'll see is that we can then see the red green and blue channels separately Rather than just one, uh histogram bump. We'll see the three channels, um as separate, uh Mountains or peaks And uh, then the next thing we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this tiff layer down here in the layers panel So i'm just going to right click on it and choose duplicate layer And if you ever want to rename a layer you can just double click and uh Type something else in so i'm going to type in first stretch And then uh, we're going to go ahead and stretch it So we're going to do that using the levels command and that's under the colors menu So go up here to the top of your screen and click on colors And uh go down to levels Okay, and for a first stretch we can just use, um The default channel which should be set to value and just take your mid-tone slider And drag it over Until you see some Background here in the picture, uh, basically you should start seeing if you did shoot the lagoon a little bit of the the milky way come out Um, so just just stretch it until you see a little bit of the milky way and then hit okay Okay, and now I want us to look at our our histogram up here because it really illustrates that we do have a color balance issue where, um, the green and the blue Mountains are basically perfectly aligned while the red mountain is is over here to the left So the first thing that I want to do is try to color balance this a little bit, um, because Uh, right now it's a little bit out of whack And when you look at the picture you can tell because it looks sort of teal like a blue green Rather than a more, uh, neutral color like Over here should be just basically like a black sky and here in the middle should be the the brilliant, uh yellowish gold of the milky way Okay, so let's um instead of using color balance I'm we're going to do this with levels because we we're going to be stretching and color balancing at the same time So just go to colors levels again This time though, I want you to change the channel from value to red And then bring it over here a little bit Um, so it's not covering up the histogram because this is a live preview I think uh, that's another change in newer versions of gimp. That's very handy to be able to have a Make an adjustment and see a live preview over here So we're going to take this mid-tone slider and drag it over a bit And you can see the the the histogram immediately Changed because it's reacting to this which has is in preview mode And we went too far because then now the red It's uh, you can tell obviously in the in the picture It looks sort of a rubyish red and then the the red peak here has surpassed the blue and green peaks So i'm going to back off a little bit Okay, and at this point Um, you can see that they're pretty well aligned We at least over here on the shadow side of the peak they they seem to be perfectly aligned over here on the highlights We do have a little bit More red, but what I'd recommend is we'll just leave that alone for now because um It may be just the red nebulae already peeking out like the lagoon down here and in other places So let's go ahead and hit okay And It looks pretty boring. It looks pretty gray, but that actually is indicating that you have a better color balance So if it if the background and and the The whole picture just takes on a certain color that means that your your colors are are out of whack Um, so let's go ahead and brighten it up a bit though so we can see what we're doing So i'm just going to go to levels again And once again take this uh mid-tone slider and drag it over But this time i'm also going to take the shadow slider And drag it to the right a bit And this will add contrast so So far we've just been um Stretching in one direction basically just uh bringing it up but The other part of stretching is we want to basically widen out the image add dynamic range by Stretching out this uh this peak so basically having more shadows and more highlights and the way to do that is to Move the shadow slider to the right and the mid-tone slider to the left and then you're adding um or stretching out the image by uh Making the dark parts of the image darker and the the bright parts of the image brighter um And adding contrast And basically what I do is I just use this levels command a few times until Uh the picture looks like something that I would want to work with um with the other tools And basically I'm I'm there right now. So um, this is looking pretty good if I zoom in a little bit You can see that the lagoon and the triphid are coming out Those are the main deep sky objects I was interested in capturing and you can see we do have some nice detail already And the the stars are looking pretty good too. I can see that we do have some star color But in this zoomed in view what I'm going to do next is I want to add some saturation because um right now it looks pretty washed out Um very low color. So I'm going to go to back to that colors menu and choose saturation And just increase the scale here While looking at my image Okay, I increased it to 1.65 if I turn the preview off and on That's before very gray And that's after and you can see that the image is is popping out a little bit more and some of these bright um Stars though have you know a really nice color like orange and blues and reds Okay, I'm going to go ahead and apply that and then I'm just going to do another Actually at this point instead of doing levels. I'm going to use curves um the basic difference between uh levels and curves is a Levels command is basically just like taking a dot right here in the middle of the curve and pushing it straight up um and taking a dot down here at the The bottom and pushing it straight to the right Um Well with the curves command as opposed to the levels you can place your points anywhere. So I could take a point here And bring it down like that Take a point Right there just above it and take it up like that And you have to be careful with this because you can get into a sort of unnatural look very quickly if you if you do If you do something too Dramatic you can see how that looks really gross uh like It it just it's killing a lot of detail somehow because I've just done something too unnatural in the curve So I'm going to go ahead and reset it So be careful with curves. You always want to make pretty uh subtle adjustments, especially early on like this But it can give you a little bit more power here And basically what I like to do Is Just add in some contrast with a slight s curve So it's basically just like we want to take this shadow point down a little bit Just take a point there and bring it down And then take a point up here on this side of the histogram And bring it up a little bit But I don't necessarily want to bring this too far up or I'll start clipping Highlights pretty quickly So I'm just going to control that with a couple more points up here Okay, I'm going to go ahead and say okay Let me zoom back out and see how this looks It's looking really nice, um at least in this half This half is really wonky and the reason is is because of registration artifacts Basically the idea is that Because of the drift of the image over time We need to crop this away because this is very low signal high noise area that Is only in some of the many hundreds of shots that we took But but not very many and that's why it just looks really strange. So let's go ahead and crop now I'm just going to grab my crop tool here over from the tool bar It's right there And I'm just going to crop, you know by By the look of it where I think that we have fairly good signal Which I think is right here Sort of in the middle but a little bit to the right of middle and what I really want to include is the lagoon And I want the top of the image to be the the eagle So we have eagle omega triphid and lagoon all in one picture Okay, so I'm going to try that And I'll go ahead and zoom in a little bit Yeah, I think that's looking really good And So we could just you know continue doing more saturation more curves and basically get this picture pretty close to Finished very quickly now I'm going to show you something a little bit special which is which can really add some pop to an image like this Which is a technique for separating the stars from the rest of the image from the the milky way background in the nebulae and then Enhancing the milky way and the nebulae without the stars and then adding the stars back in and it just really gives it something a little extra And I'm going to use a free program to do that called star net plus plus It's not something you can add into gimp. You have to use it as a standalone program. So Since it's a standalone program We have to save off what we have right here is a 16 bit tiff and bring it into the command line program of star net and then it will make the starless version and then we'll bring it back in All right, there's one thing we do have to do before we save it off as a tiff to bring into star net Which is get rid of this alpha channel. Unfortunately, we can't just delete it. We do have to actually Flatten the image. So to do that we just go to image flatten image Everything is now one layer and over here in the channels You should just see red green and blue and no alpha channel And then we can go up here to file export as and go ahead and save it We do file export as the default option seems to be tiff. So that's good But if it isn't just type in dot tiff right there And then i'm going to call this lagoon for star net and export to my desktop I'm going to turn off save layers. We don't need that. I just want the A single layer click export Okay, and there we go. We have lagoon for star net right there Okay, so from google i'm just going to Search for star net plus plus like that And the first search result here is this source forge net download site and that's what you want to go to And then go over here to files And if you do have pics insight you can get the pics insight module, but Assuming you don't have pics insight. We're going to just get the standalone version And so you would just go into version 1.1 here and then pick your operating system So if you're on windows pick windows Or win if you're on mac pick this mac os and if you're on linux pick the linux one And i'll just click on that And then it will start downloading here Okay, it's finished downloading So i'm just going to Open up those Open up the zip folder and put it on my desktop And if you look at the read me this is where it's going to give us instructions on how to use it Okay, and basically we just have to look at this little Shell file here This is just a little command that's given And if we open that up i'm just going to open it with a text editor, but you can open it with Any kind of text editor it doesn't matter All we're going to do is just change this right here to the name of our file. So i'm going to choose i'm going to say lagoon for star net And then i want the output to just be Lagoon starless And then the last thing here is i'm just going to change the stride number to 32 What that means is that it will take a little bit longer to process than with a stride of 64 But it will give us a better result for for removing the stars. Um, especially with Wide field images like this one I'm going to go ahead and save that script Close out of that Okay with That done we've edited the script It's 32 bit stride. It has the right file name We can go ahead and run the script the way we do that is through a command line Program, so i'm just going to use the built-in command line program on mac which is terminal And to run it we have to do two things we first have to move to this directory, so i'm just going to type in cd Space to do change directory command and then drag this folder over So cd space and then go to the folder Hit enter we're now inside the folder and from there i can run this command just by dragging it over And hit enter again Okay, and then it starts its thing It Reads the file it tells me yep, it's a 16 bit file with three channels. Here's the height and the width Here's the CPU i'm using with tensorflow And then This is the number of tiles that it's going to break the file up into and then it's going to look at each one And remove stars from those tiles and then recombine the image and then down here It tells me how long it's going to take for that to happen a percentage as it's going And you can see it just went from zero to one percent So it does take quite a while probably at least an hour maybe two On an image of this size Okay Now that that's done i'm going to go ahead and open up the lagoon starless image Back up here into gimp and the first thing that i'm going to do with this starless image is just apply a curves adjustment using colors And the cool thing is we'll be able to stretch it much further because we don't have the stars to worry about And i'm just going to apply a slight uh saturation bump to it too All right, that looks good Um And then we are just going to take our star image here So we'll do edit copy visible And paste it onto this image i'll just do Paste in place and then i'm just going to click this little create a new layer button here They call it pasted layer. I could rename it stars I'm going to change the mode from normal to screen Okay, and you can see that made the image a lot brighter We now do have the stars in addition to this enhanced starless version Let me go ahead and zoom in a little bit There we go Um, so now it's just really just resetting the the black point. Um, so i'm just going to uh Make a New layer from visible Just by going to layer new from visible And on this new visible layer. I'm just going to do colors curves And bring in the black point here a little bit And hit okay, and that's it. I think this image is done and it's really nice looking Um, if I zoom in here You can see I think this lagoon and trifid looks, uh, quite nice considering this is under 10 minutes of total integration Of course, if we wanted it to not look as noisy as it does when you zoom in you would just want to get more A total integration so more pictures But for under 10 minutes untracked, I think this looks pretty good, uh for a nice core Milky Way shot And finally to save if you wanted to come back into, uh Gimp, you would just want to do file save as and save it in gimp's, um Default format which is xcf so I could just call it lagoon dot xcf and that way, uh, you have a nice master that you can come back to and Continue editing if you change your mind about any of your choices um And for saving to the web, um, usually you want a smaller file that's compressed. So I usually use, uh jpeg so I'll just do export as and Switch the file ending To jpeg jpg and click export And it gives me a few options. I'll do 100 for the quality and click export Okay, and then if I look on my desktop here, there it is I can bring that open into preview And view it full screen Okay, and there is our final result out of, uh Gimp, um if you Want to see a comparison I did, um To, uh, modified camera. You could check out the photoshop version of this I'm not going to do that for every program, but I think this came out really well Um, I really like the colors and details, uh with this gimp process of the stock 60d Uh 10 minute total exposure using two second exposures with a canon nifty 50 untracked if you have any questions about this process, uh, please ask them in the comments and, uh Till next time. This is nico carver from nebula photos dot com Clear skies