Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Ward
My guess is it takes a while before your palette can appreciate a good red or single malt.....
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I re-read your post Peter and it got me thinking. It is an excellent analogy. You've nailed it on the head. People who feel the need to selectively process areas of an image or enhance colors in macro structures are not looking at the same things a more experienced imager would and that stems from a lack of knowledge about what they are imaging.
Mike Berthon-Jones said it loud and clear multiple times. There are things that are supposed to look sharp and clearly defined while others are meant to look wispy and fuzzy in the same field. There is a scientific reason behind it. So you can't enhance arbitrarily everything the same way because you assume parts of your nebulosity are too soft. And that knowledge comes with time and experience.
When you do away with selective processing by masking and apply the same settings to your whole field you very quickly realise where the sharp features pop up naturally. Another down side of selective processing is that you miss other areas of your field then it becomes very obvious that you brought up details only in one part of your field.
An example would be a super sharp galaxy with dust lanes while stars and another smaller galaxy off center would be blurry, or in a neb like NGC3372, a sharp keyhole and ridge with everything else equally sharp or blurry when there is a great variety of other fronts in the same field if you know where to look.