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Hi Paul, You seem to be struggling with this one. With your other images the processing seemed easier.
If you follow the philosophy that the ideal processing makes an image look like it is natural (not everyone would follow that philosophy) then
this one has missed. It has a distinct artificial look. Also perhaps a too solid look for a nebula.
I also believe (rightly or wrongly) that the best images are the ones where the least processing was done because the data was so good. The worse the data the more it needs processing. The more processing, the harder to hide the fact you've been there.
If I look over some of my images I would think the same about some of them. Its easy to do.
The nebula boundaries are too sharp when in fact there would be whispy lighter nebula streaming out from the edges. Possibly also the central bright area has lost some of its landmark brightness in the bringing out of the central area detail although that may be a matter of taste and I don't mind how you've treated that.
I think where it has missed is earlier in the processing. If you did DDP then its black clipped the background quite heavily and later attempts to bring it back don't work as that data was lost early on. It results in too stark a contrast between areas of nebula and areas of no nebula. The fainter out nebula is missing and there is a fair bit of it with the Lagoon.
Also if you did deconvolution it was done too hard making the stars look a bit harsh. I personally have gone off deconvolution and feel it is a lightly done type tool at least for stars.
Having said that it is still a very striking image and I can see why you want to continue to work on it as you collected some great data. There's a great image in there. But I think you have to rebuild it from the RAW data back up again rather than Photoshop the later damaged data.
Greg.
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