I keep a folder of Astrophotography images that I've sourced on Instagram and similar places. I use it as a reference to show other people what I think looks good, false or natural... beautiful or terrible. I find that many of those images don't use foreground scenes that were in the same place or location where they took their picture of the Milky Way. Some were shot in sunlight and then edited to look cooler so they give the impression that those hills and mountains were shot at night. Some foregrounds and landscapes were shot in other countries compared to the sky they inserted. Most are simply fantasy pieces made with a legitimate or (more commonly) a bootleg copy of Photoshop. There are even "experts" who teach their photography classes how to insert these fake background/foregrounds into a Milky Way scene. Some asto-photographers (like R Clarke) complain bitterly about the false-color White Balance used (like Tungsten WB).
But the Milky Way can't be seen in color by the naked eye. We can just barely detect the colors in some stars. The Milky Way (which I was out photographing just last night) appears grey-white to our eyes. Even colorful nebulae are invisible to the naked eye with only the faint outline of those brighter structures being visible against the darker night sky surrounding it.
Most photographers don't have an Equatorial Tracking Mount to track the stars with - and therefore can't expose the Milky Way properly for their pictures. Many of these images are shot with cheaper, narrow aperture lenses that are great for landscapes but useless for the night sky. So that leaves them to edit the pictures they make with programs like Photoshop. Unfortunately, most of these photographers have little knowledge of what the Milky Way should look like... how bright the core should be.. or the right colors to be using. And as more and more of these 'fantastic' images are posted online, it becomes a game of "one-upmanship" as each photographer, desperate for "likes" for their photographs, pushes the acceptable limits. They cross the border between tasteful and scientifically accurate and mutilate their images. To make matter worse, they often use existing images they find online to base their own "Milky Way" edits on. Which results in an accelerated race to make even more garish shots of the Milky Way. Now, as more people attempt to perfect their first Milky Way images, they look online for inspiration, only to discover that their own meager (but probably accurate) results don't compare with the glowing neon spectacular "PIXAR-like" posters they see on Google.
Earlier this week I posted some pictures on an an Amateur Astrophotography forum elsewhere online. I'd just bought the new Canon EOS Ra (astro-modified) camera and a new type of optically corrected 85mm RF lens that enabled me to capture the nebula, dust lanes and colorful details of the core of the Milky Way with a single 6-second JPEG image. I could not expose for longer than 6 seconds because the 85mm lens would have resulted in in star streaks. But one member of that forum was utterly furious. He called me a liar... repeatedly. He said nobody could possibly get those details and colors without "stacking" images first. He even started digging through my online history and posting it in the forum if he felt it supported his cause. So I asked him to wait a few hours and then uploaded a video to YouTube... because I had actually used a second camera to film my experience with the new camera and lens. When I returned to the forum, he had removed his comments and appear to have withdrawn (much to everyone else's disappointment). Yet I think that his frustration is perhaps in line with that of the rest of us when we see images receive praise online that are so over-processed and even "false". In the case of my images, I'm riding some new lens equipment and modified camera technology that allows me to capture what I need in a single exposure without tracking and without stacking. To be fair, if I did track and stack, I'd probably captures even more DR and details. But for people who have spent years or even a couple of decades stacking hundreds of hours of exposure time with tens of dozens of individual pictures that needed to be stacked, processed and edited in special software to create a similar shot to what I caught in 6 seconds... those people will be annoyed. As for the guy who called me a liar and felt it necessary to try and "shame me" for what he mistakenly thought were "doctored images", his reaction was similar to my own when I see people making outrageous claims about their magical night shots that we can plainly see don't exhibit natural fade towards the horizon or demonstrate clear anti-aliasing near the horizon where they've barely succeeded in cutting out the trees or mountains. The only time it really annoys me is when a manufacturer like Canon features those Frankenstein shots, drawing more praise than criticism for what is essentially nothing but a Photoshopped image.
I guess the only thing people can do now is to gently remind others when they spot a "Photoshopped image" instead of an actual photograph. Try to be polite (or at least tactful) if you're speaking with someone who you firmly believe has overworked their images. Unfortunately, to take offense often results in giving offense. But I wouldn't mind seeing more people commenting with the words "OMG! I Loooooove Photoshop TOO!" whenever I see the comments under one of those ridiculously over-cranked Milky Way shots in Instagram.
