|
Clipping the histogram does lose infomation from an image. At the left end the histogram shows the number of pixels that carry information for the dark pixels eg near 'black' sky between objects. Conversly the right end generally shows the number of pixels which carry infomation about the blown out centers of overexposed stars. In between hopefully is information of extended objects ie nebula and dim stars. In a bid to get maximum detail and contrast in nebula sometimes the data can be stretched beyond the dynamic range of the picture type that is 8bit (256 levels) for JPG say and 16bit (65,536 levels) for Tiff. Obviously this happens far more easily for jpg than tiff. That is why you should always work with 16bit and only convert to jpg for the final image.
For some objects some clipping has an advantage but generally degrades the image if taken to far. For instance it can clean up a slightly noisy 'black sky'. If there is a lot of noise eliminating it by clipping loses real information from the objects in the image.
I can't see any real advantage to do it other than that mentioned.
Bert
|