I put together a video on how I go about digitizing my astronomy sketches in Gimp. These same methods can be used in Photoshop if that is your image editor of choice. I start off by taking a picture of the drawing with my cellphone in a well lit room to avoid any shadows, or having too dim of a picture to work with. I bring that image into Gimp and invert it and remove any saturation to remove any color artifacts from when I took the image. The next step is to create a layer to represent the ocular field of view to make it feel more like you're looking through an eyepiece. Then it is followed by creating a background layer and color it to represent the night sky. You want to keep that as realistic as possible so you don't want to make it a dark black, even in very dark skies the night sky background won't be that dark, so adjust it to whatever best represents your view at the eyepiece. Then another layer is created where the stars will be placed and we will be changing brush sizes throughout to get the right star size for the stars in the sketch.

After placing the stars in the stars layer we then use the dodge and burn tool to adjust the brightness of the stars for a more 3d look to give it more depth. Not all stars are the same brightness and depending on the detail you have in your sketch some of the stars may have been really hard to see without averted vision, so you will want to dim them. Some stars may have been brighter than others, so we will use dodge to brighten them a bit more than others. This stage requires you to have either represented the stars brightness well on your sketch, or for you to remember which stars were very dim, and which ones were brighter.

You can see a time-lapse of this sketch done here: [ Ссылка ]

This sketch is of M35 which was done at the eyepiece on the night of December 28, 2019. I drew it on regular white printer paper with a clipboard, an HB pencil, and a booklight that I attached a red bag to in order to preserve my dark adapted eyes the best I can in a light polluted area.

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The lower than planned sound file in the background during two of the sped up portions of the video is:
Prelude No. 20 by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license ([ Ссылка ])
Source: [ Ссылка ]
Artist: [ Ссылка ]
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