Foton Pharming from FRO

BLENDING OLD COLOUR AND NEW B&W IMAGES





For several of my astro-images, I have scanned my old lo-res colour film prints and set them as the colour channel with new hi-res GSTAR images.
This method is used to save time and sanity by not having to shoot separate Red, Green and Blue filtered images for multi-field mosaics.
For this following example, the hi-res image is made from a mosaic of 16 overlapping fields... getting a mosaic of matching RGB images would be a load of work and pretty well impossible to match the colour balance evenly across the whole field (I have tried before!).
It is always stated when this blending method has been used.

Old colour print scanned into computer.
It was shot way back on 14 Sep 1988 on Hypered Gold 400 film for 20 minutes through a 25 cm f/5.8 reflector.

Cropped and scaled to align with the mosaic field.

GSTAR-EX B&W image, 16 sector mosaic with a 31 cm f/5 reflector.

Hi-res mosaic set as Luminance layer over the lo-res film image.
The colour information really brings the nebula out from the background star field.

This image is reduced from the original by 50% for this web page. (shows larger on bigger screen)