Rodney was kind enough to share his data with me to do a quick & dirty Hubblesque process in PixInsight. The result is here:
http://www.astrobin.com/full/248149/None/
The processing steps were...
Create luminance:
- Noise weighted integration of Ha/Oiii/Sii masters (no rejection)
- Light linear masked noise reduction with MultiscaleLinearTransform
- HistogramTransformation stretch
- Apply star mask: slight MorphologicalTransformation Erosion to reduce stars
- Apply HDR mask (clipped luminance with stars removed): LocalHistogramEqualization (add a little contrast)
Create colour:
- LRGBCombine Sii=Red, Ha=Green, Oiii=Blue
- Unlinked histogram stretch
- ACDNR heavy noise reduction
- Magenta ColorMask: Curves Blue/Red/Saturation reduction (applied twice)
- Green ColorMask: Curves Green reduction, Red boost
- Cyan ColorMask: Curves Blue boost
- Yellow ColorMask: Curves Red boost
- Curves Hue - map Cyan to Blue
- Magenta ColorMask: Curves Red reduction
Final image:
- LRGBCombine Luminance and Colour
- Clipped luminance mask: Curves a* tweak
- DaskStructureEnhance script
I probably could have done the colour mangling a little more simply with more time and effort but I did what I normally do and just tweaked away until I was mostly happy.
Happy to explain the steps in more detail if anybody is interested, perhaps in another thread rather than polluting this one too much. This is pretty similar to my usual workflow except that normally I'd remove the stars before doing the colour combine. It's a bit painful but avoids magenta stars and lets you beat up the colour data very heavily to produce nice rich colours.
Cheers,
Rick.