Cigar Galaxy (Final Edit)
The Cigar Galaxy (or Messier 82) has given me the most challenging headaches out of any other picture I’ve edited. As previously described, this Cigar Galaxy is made by combining black and white stills in Photoshop. To accomplish this, I used S-Curves for contrast then a soft brush to colorize the image. I remain discouraged due to the iconic center of the galaxy not being able to be seen. Due to my obsessive nature, I could not get over my failure to emphasize the starburst. Clearly, this was not my fault as I concluded through research that the Hydrogen alpha’s deep-red wavelength was unable to be captured by the telescope, but I had to do something to compensate. In this final edit, I emphasized the brightness and glow around the center of the galaxy to replace the burst that is typically there as well as slightly coloring the center to show where the burst would typically be. Other than that, I emphasized the stars, but personally I think I preferred my initial edit. I’m just glad I turned this image into something I think would fit in with sci-fi set pieces, because I could totally envision a starship battle circling this galaxy at the speed of sound. In an ideal world, I would do a final stack of my work in progress version and this version and take the best features of both for one image. This may be something I have to revisit in the future for my own completion satisfaction.
