Just realized i was overexposing every night sky photo for 6 months

I was looking through my old astro shots and noticed all the stars were blown out, just white blobs instead of points. Turns out i had my ISO cranked to 6400 every single time because i thought more light = better picture. Found a video from a dude who does deep sky photography in Arizona where he showed a stacked image workflow using DeepSkyStacker, that free program. He was shooting at ISO 800 and pulling way more detail than my noisy garbage. I downloaded the software and reprocessed some of my old RAW files and it actually saved a few of them. The difference in star sharpness between 6400 and 800 is wild, like night and day literally. Anyone else waste months on a bad setting before someone showed you the easy fix?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamie_carter8711h ago

That's a solid point about pulling faint signal, but the real trick is matching ISO to your camera's read noise curve rather than just cranking it up. Some sensors actually perform worse at 3200 than 800 because the added noise drowns out the faint stuff you're trying to catch.

burns.jenny13h ago

Wait, isn't ISO 6400 kind of the point for capturing faint nebulae and dust lanes though? I mean sure, if you're just trying to get clean star points for a static landscape shot, dropping to 800 makes total sense. But for deep sky stuff like the Orion Nebula or Andromeda, you actually need that higher ISO to catch the really dim gas clouds (especially if you're stacking a ton of short exposures without a tracker). My buddy shoots at 3200 and his stacked images look way better than my 800 attempts because he's pulling out all this faint detail I just can't get. There's a trade-off between noise and signal, you know? You might be leaving a lot of cool stuff on the table by going that low.