I often take a bunch of short subs along with my "normal" ones and then use HDRComposition in PixInsight to combine the integrated "short" and "long" images. This is an attempt to avoid those stars we've all seen which have a thin ring of colour surrounding a bleached white core where the star has saturated the CCD sensor.
When processing my recent image of Omega Centauri (
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...d.php?t=107621) I used this HDR technique and also did some 3D plots showing the star profiles with and without HDR. On the off chance that anybody is interested, here they are...
The first and third plots are two sample areas from an integration of 5 minute luminance exposures. The second and fourth plots are the same areas from a HDR combination of two integrations, the first of 0.5 second subs and the second of 5 minute subs. It's pretty easy to tell that the star profiles in the HDR version look much better!
Cheers,
Rick.