[David Fitz-Henr]

Originally Posted by Larryp

Beautiful image, David!

Thanks Larry!

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Colours looks great. I find adding yellow into the cyan or blues in selective colour is what is lacking to get that lovely galaxy blue that can elusive.

That is a fab 6744, so detailed. Its not an easy target. The background looks a lot better but there is some residual blue/red splotch. Perhaps select out the non galaxy areas and use colour balance tool and turn down blue and red in the lower bands.

Greg.

Originally Posted by RickS

That's a great looking NGC 6744, David! I remember struggling with the background when I imaged it a while back.

Cheers,
Rick.

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Still blue and red blotches in the background (did you say you fixed the problem?). However the detail is sublime. Awesome detail. Get that background right and you will have a winner.

Originally Posted by alpal

Hi David,
The red & blue patches are still there in the background.
I loaded it into Photoshop but I couldn't fix it because the black point is clipped.
I would have to start processing it from scratch to keep the background correct.

Thanks for the feedback Greg / Rick / Paul / Alan. I've had another go at neutralising the background (looks better now) and have also slightly enhanced some of the fainter galaxy detail. There is some slight black clipping as Alan says and after talking with Marc (multiweb) offline it seems I have not left enough range at the foot of the histogram during the initial stretching (I reset the blackpoint after each stretch to the foot of the histogram as I have read that was the approach to use; however I found that subsequent colour adjustments can then lead to some black clipping). The mottling effect in the background was introduced when I used Reduce Noise tool in PS and I think that I set the colour noise reduction too aggressively (and too early perhaps). Anyway, it's been a good exercise to revisit this image as I have learned a lot each time I did it. I'm quite pleased with how well the actual galaxy now looks, and I may have one more go at reprocessing the whole thing from scratch in a few weeks