Sunday, November 29, 2015

Quick Nebula Processing with Instagram's Surprisingly Powerful 'Structure' Tool

I spent hours in Photoshop working on my first processing pass of this Orion nebula photo I took last year. It was my pride and joy and I even printed out a hard copy of it to have framed. While I still love the look of the photo, I tried punching it up a bit for a new Instagram post - and I was pleasantly surprised how powerful the 'structure' Instagram tool was for enhancing the dust clouds in this nebula photo. It does go a little beyond the more natural look I'm going for in my nebula processing, but it didn't take it too far into cartoon world.

nebula astrophoto edit in instagram
Orion nebula photo from this post, before and after a super quick Instagram edit with the 'structure' tool
While Instagram really isn't suited to do the heavy lifting for astrophotography processing, this quick tweak was definitely a little icing on the cake before posting the image to social media. I used the editing tools 'structure' and added some saturation and darkened the edges with vignetting. It took like 30 seconds!

orion nebula in instagram
Instagram has the right amount of editing tools, very powerful tweaks and not overwhelming options

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