Suppressing brown milky way from images?

[Gastraea]

Hi All
I as looking for advice on how best to make nebula and the like POP out from the yellow brown mess that is the milky way.
In the attached photo admittedly I have tried to accentuate the issue, but is there any common image processing technique people use? Or do you just play around with levels and try to make the best of it?

I have an L-enhance filter I have yet to use in anger so perhaps blending in an image taken with that will help :shrug:

I guess I could remove the stars with starnet++ airbrush out the background but that seems like faking it.

Anyway any suggestions are welcome

https://photos.app.goo.gl/9iN2i6CQFpLzvRW49

[h0ughy]

well that brown stuff and golden colour from the stars is the interstellar dust. you really havnt got enough data there to push it, but its easy to criticize. sky glow when taking the image also has an impact

[AdamJL]

The lagoon nebula is very close to the densest part of the Milky Way in Sagittarius. When you shoot widefield, you’re collecting light from a lot of dust and stars in the area. You could selectively desaturate or recolour that section in Photoshop with layers but you’ll never NOT capture that data with a widefield image of that part of the sky

[RyanJones]

Hi John,

As the others have said, the brown is part of the scene and I would say if you’re doing wide field it’s best off left in. If you really do want to remove it and you’re using photoshop you can do an inverse selection of the nebulae so you’re just selecting the rest. Take that selection and make a new image and paste it in. Use blur tools over and over again until you can’t see any detail left in the image, just a blury colour. Then select all of that image and paste it in a layer in your original image with the blending technique set on subtract. You won’t want it to be blended 100% so adjust the opacity up and down until you’re happy with the result. Hope that helps.

Cheers

Ryan

[multiweb]

+1 Thats's the way it's meant to look. If you try to starnet++ a widefield milky way shot you're gonna smoke your computer. :lol:

[Gastraea]

Thanks for your advice all.
I used the L-enchance filter tonight and OMG. A huge difference I'm in love LOL

https://photos.app.goo.gl/qHbmJsZYMwXKt2cn8

[gregbradley]

The link doesn't work.

Greg.

[Gastraea]

Odd, I tested both links on other PC's and they worked

[AdamJL]

The link works fine.

I've clicked on my phone, desktop and laptop.