Much improved Bert. Well done. The colours may not be as vibrant as the original, but it certainly provides a more aesthetic view of this grand object. Thanks for sharing your HDR workflow. I was going to ask if you used intersect or union for Registar (crop/pad). I guess that if there is any pure black border in the sub frames, this would negatively image the final result. Perhaps once refined, you may feel this is a worthy article to publish. Would be interesting to hear your opinion of the CS2 HDR (detailed here -
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/index.p...63,294,0,0,1,0) and the EasyHDR process.
Looking at the image again, if you desired to keep the original nebulosity colour tones, but remap the stars back to a more aesthetic color. You could simply use the colour range tool, then make your adjustments on the selection only. For selecting stars in an image, here's an alternative way to the colour range tool;
Star Selection- Make a grayscale copy of the image. I'll call this image #2.
- High-pass filter image #2 with a radius of one pixel.
- Apply a Gaussian blur to image #2 with a radius of one pixel.
- Invoke Image->Adjust->Threshold.
- Adjust the Threshold Level one click at a time until just the stars are white and everything else is black.
- In the original image, in the Channels Palette, create a new channel. Name it "Stars." Choose "color indicates masked areas."
- Paste image #2 into this channel.
- Make just the RGB channels visible (i.e. make the Stars channel invisible).
- Discard image #2.
- In the original image, invoke Select->Load Selection. Choose the Stars channel you just created.
- Invoke Select->Expand and expand the selection by a few pixels (e.g., three).
- Done!!
I think this process came from Russ Croman, but not entirely sure of the source.