I don't know about you but I do not want to spend a lot of time in front a computer processing my solar images.  But at the same time I want my images to look good so I can share them other people.   If we are honest with ourselves we can admit that part of the enjoyment of this hobby is listening to the "WOW" or "That’s so cool" from those viewing our images.

I have found only a few good tutorials on the web which discuss and show how to process solar images.  And while I have learned from them I noticed that they leave some parts out of the processing for you to figure out.  Maybe it was clear to them, or perhaps they just wanted to keep some things to themselves so they stand out among the many solar photographers.  I don't know but in any case I am grateful to them for what they published because it gave me a starting point.

Before I begin I should set your expectations.  This is a processing tutorial and I will be working on solar disk details only and not prominences.  I make this distinction because usually prominences are processed differently.  I am not an expert at solar photography and there are many ways to process images.   My hope is that you might find something useful in this tutorial to help you process better solar images or to improve your workflow.

I use Registax 5.1 and Photoshop CS3 for processing images.  Registax is used for stacking frames from my AVIs, adjusting wavelets, and stretching the histogram.  Photoshop is used for adjusting levels, adding false color, and increasing detail.  It sounds like a lot of time consuming work, and in the beginning it was, but now that I have a basic workflow in place it is much faster.  I can now process an image in minutes as compared to hours before I learned what basic dials to adjust in each program.

Both programs have a lot of capabilities which I will not be covering.  I have not experimented with all the bells and whistles that each program provides for enhancing images.  If you want in-depth knowledge of the programs I would suggest their respective websites for general or specific topic tutorials.

You will want to save these 2 files (Right click over the url and select Save Target As): TIF PSD [NOTE: File size is 7M and 14M]

I have also included a PDF for those individuals that might not use either of these programs.

So with that in mind lets begin ... NEXT