Photoshop to make your planets pop!

[Scotty Bishop]

I went ahead and grabbed all the new planetary data yesterday and I decided to go ahead and process out Mars. After running it through waveSharp 0.2 for wavelets I still needed to finish things up, so of course I turned to Photoshop as I do with all of my solar and DSO work.

I started out by taking the images into camera raw, adjusting clarity, contrast, shadows, blacks, whites, highlights, and then sharpness and noise. After that I used a plugin called HLVG to eliminate the green that seemed to be in there a bit more than I liked, then used hue/saturation, and I used photo filters to get things where I wanted. I had to use the healing brush to get rid of sharpening artifacts and then the smidge tool in a few places to finish cleaning that up. After that I worked both the sharpen and blur tools and did a little but with dodge and burn. I then did a final pass of noise reduction and I am pretty happy with what I got.