Thirty seconds of the night

Twenty-odd years ago, in the early days of photo-sharing on the Web, I was, like so many others, infatuated with exaggerated colour and noise in my pictures. I liked that stuff. But that was then. . . In the intervening years, I've largely lost the infatuation.

Nonetheless, in more recent years, I've been intrigued with the over-saturated look of many pictures that people now post to sites like this one. "Intrigued" doesn't mean I *like* their processing; in fact I usually don't. But I have wondered how they do it.

I expect their effects are mostly pre-packaged stuff in cameras or post-processing software. Myself: I'm not one to use pre-packaged effects. How would I try to do the same?

In trying to figure that out, I used the raw file of a flat, noisy, thirty-second exposure (even with that, still underexposed) of the view of the NW sky about two weeks ago. I adjusted brightness levels in order to get a more garish picture. If you look at the noise in the lower half you'll see some very bright pixels. I've left them. When looked at that closely, the noise in the sky was likewise sparkling with every colour of the rainbow; it was more distracting, so I desaturated that part of the picture.

And this was the result of that much processing.

By the way, the three lines are satellites passing by.