Here's an old hyperstar shot I've never processed ... until today. See what the rain makes you do?
I've been experimenting a lot lately with different techniques to separate stars from nebulosity so I can tweak the contrast and details on one or the other independently. Actually that's my excuse. It's mainly because of the weather...
For this one I got rid of all the stars with multiple passes of dust and scratches filter in PS. Then used a difference layer with the original to create a star mask and copied the stars from the original into another layer. Then I started playing with curves,levels, highpass filters with various masks and intensities then a bit of Topaz Lab micro-contrast. So there's a bit of everything in it. It's much better than the original anyway so I was pretty happy with the result and thought I'd post it, because there's always room for
another M42 right?
