Last week Alexis Madrigal wrote a fascinating article on Wired.com about terrestrial astrophotography; that is to say, photos of the night sky taken from the ground.
Most such photos that you can find online are vividly colored, as if they were photos of nebulae. But they weren’t like that to begin with: most of them started out as black and white exposures, and the colors were assigned to different layers during digital processing. Does this mean the photos are falsified?
No, writes Madrigal: the sky really does look like that, “just not to your eyes, which are pretty poor sensors, compared with purpose-built astrophotographic equipment. […] Most astrophotographers have an ethic: They won’t add color or lasso just a part of an image for editing. They can only bring things out of the data, not add them. The photos are often processed in Photoshop, but what they do is the opposite of falsifying the visual record. Astrophotographers are using digital-editing tools to find the truth in the noisy data that are the heavens.”
To show how these images are created, Madrigal takes a beautiful finished photo by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, and has the photographer walk him through the process of creating it. Here’s the link.
