[gregbradley]

Love it. Superb processing as usual.

As Martin mentioned it would have been nice to capture that beautiful little blue neb with the bits of pink streamers in it.

As far as CCDstack I use it and have for some time. I like the way it follows the work flow of processing an image. Martin is correct its memory programming is crapola deluxe and Stan would do well to get a copy of Images Plus and see how it handles memory so well.

With regards to normalising the RGB before combining, my experience is it depends on which brand filters you are using.

When I used Astrodons I didn't use it and using it seem to worsen results.

When I use Astronomik or Baader filters I sometimes use it when I get an odd/off colour combine and it corrects it. So for me it depends on the result of the colour combine if I get odd results or if it looks fine.

I have normally used 1:1:1 combines and that worked fine. Again Marcus probably is being more hi-tech than me and it would depend on the camera and the filters on how close they are to a 1:1:1 combine. Astrodon and Baader market on the basis that they are 1:1:1 and they seem to work out that way on a practical basis. Any slight difference is picked up when doing your Photoshoping anyway.

I always normalise luminance (not renormalise if there is such a thing - normalise means to make the bright and dimmer areas into a similar range so sometimes it can make say a dim green sub too bright if you got less exposure time with one colour due to clouds). I don't know if it really is that important though. Probably more so if the subs varied a lot in quality due to clouds or dawn or some such otherwise if they are much the same I wouldn't expect it really does virtually anything.

I don't use deconvolution too much as it oftens gives a vey harsh result. I suppose it is a tool to use lightly and not get too caried away with it. Certainly not the 100 iterations it seems to be set for as default. Perhaps more like 10? Not sure which one works better and under what conditions - the 2 types of deconvolution in the program.

That new align tool in CCDstack though is absolutely a gem. It does such an incredible job and seems to not be slow like Martin points out it has been in the past (plus the standard program's auto align virtually never works except on really small files).

As far as saturation in CCDstack I tend not to use it as I feel there is more control in Photoshop but occassionally I have increased it if the image looked a bit pale.

More importantly save your final image as a TIFF and RAW not scaled. Scaling will cause you to lose some control. Far better result to save as a RAW and then use curves/levels to bring up your image moving the black point as needed to reduce the noise and get your bell shaped histogram.


Also watch CCDstack DDP it seems defaulted to slightly black clip. It may pay to be selective when using it and not use the auto button too much.You'll end up with a histogram not bell shaped and too hard to the left.


Cheers,

Greg.