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The appearance of this area in Cygnus near Deneb and the North America nebula can be greatly improved by adjusting the contrast, brightness and color saturation. Hold your mouse cursor over the image to see the before and after results of the adjustments.

This single-frame image of the area in Cygnus near the North America Nebula and Deneb was shot as a JPEG image. A custom white balance was set in the camera on the sky when the image was taken to neutralize the red-brown of the sky from light pollution. It doesn't look too bad at all, but we can improve it by increasing the contrast and color saturation.

In IrfanView, go to Image > Enhance Colors or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+G.

Adjusting the contrast, brightness and color saturation can improve your images. You can make these adjustments in Irfanview's "Enhance Colors" dialog box.

For this image, the first thing we'll do it increase the contrast to +75 and apply it to the image by clicking the Apply to Original button it the dialog box.

This increases the contrast nicely, but it makes the image a little bit too dark, so we will also bump up the brightness by about 25 points by moving the brightness slider to the right.

Finally, we will add some color saturation to the image by moving the color saturation slider to the right until it reads +100.

By increasing the contrast and color saturation, we are merely enhancing what was already there and making the image more aesthetically appealing. We are not manufacturing detail that was not in the original and creating a work of fiction.

The degree to which you want to do this is a personal preference because we are just making pretty pictures here, we are not doing formal and rigorous science with our images.

Contrast Enhancement - The Bottom Line Most deep-sky objects are fairly low in contrast. Increasing the contrast in an image processing program can greatly improve their visibility.