After cowering in a corner trembling and sucking my thumb for a good couple of months
, I finally plucked up the courage to play with layers in Photoshop, and thought that my first attempt at the Orion Nebula might be a good place to start. After a few hours of tweaking selections & feather settings, I ended up processing in 3 regions, then blurred/sharpened the background to reduce noise a bit.
It kinda worked, so I'm out of the corner for now.
Captured on Jan 4th with 450D / ED80.
4 x 3min stack @ ISO800 with single dark
Stacked in DSS and tweaked in PS cs3.
I also captured a swag of frames at shorter exposures (1min & 30sec), but did not ending up using them when layering. I could not work out why people bother with shorter exposures when layering, rather than just processing copies of the long exposure data stack for dim, medium and bright image regions. Would appreciate if someone could help me out here.
Having lots for fun ... tips welcome.
Jeff