Tarantula Nebula in SHO

[that_guy]

This was probably one of the hardest targets to process in my opinion. Partly because I was impatient and only had limited subs to work with and partly because I still have no idea how to process narrowband images properly. I find myself having to look at the tutorials every time I process a new images. When does processing become natural :shrug:?.

Anyways, here's my rendition of tarantula in SHO hubble palette (I think).
32x 180s Ha
28x 180s Oiii
33x 180s Sii
@ gain 300, I should have lowered it to 200 as someone mentioned that there's no point in going over it. But, I forgot :P

Astrobin link here (https://www.astrobin.com/full/6dbngj/0/?nc=all)

EDIT: I've done the processing from scratch and in my opinion miles better than the first rendition. Much cleaner. next time I need to take shorter exposure to blend with the image to get a better dynamically ranged imgae!

[Nikolas]

That nebulosity is stunning
As for the extra highlights in your photo you can fix that by opening it up in photoshop and making a second layer, then make top layer invisible, select bottom layer and using camera raw filter slide the highlights down to the left as far as you dare and select ok
then select the top layer, make it visible and then make a layer mask. Using the paintbrush paint over the highlighted area to bring out the less highlighted image underneath without doing anything else to the image. If the image is too differentiated then use a gaussian blur fairly high up in order to blend it all in and then flatten the image.
I hope you don't mind the image I played around with it, if you want me too I'll remove it.

[that_guy]

Don't mind it one bit Nik. I stopped my subscription of PS simply due to not wanting to give Adobe $12 every month. Now that I have another look at it on my laptop monitor (that is significantly brighter than my old desktop monitor, the image does look a tad bit clipped in the highlights. I could give it another swish in the ol' HDR multiscale transformation but I'm afraid that if I stare at pixinsight again I'll be stuck in the processing loop until I'm bat crazy!

[Nikolas]

I'm lucky my work subsidises photoshop with an education license. Pixinsite to me is like learning mandarin while ear-muffed and blindfolded and handcuffed to a pitbull

[multiweb]

Very tidy picture. Really nice details and separation in the colors. :thumbsup:

[that_guy]

another go at processing from scratch. It looks a bit cleaner and less patchy which I like!

[Nikolas]

They are both very good images, I like the contrast in the second one better