Gee, Matt, you've come a long way, despite the atrocious seeing reputation of Canberra. Those are big Jupiter's with good detail. The second one just looks more pleasing to the eye, especially when viewed side by side.
i wouldnt be able to say which is more color accurate- but the second definitely shows more detail and contrast- even though they are the same 'images'- the second process has a better 'focus' (for lack of better words)
First of all, thanks for the replies. I agree. My preference is for the one on the right. Which is a bit of a surprise.
Here's the thing; the one on the right is a straight run through Registax with some very mild wavelets. That's all.
The one on the left was given the full treatment. virtualdubbed into BMPs... RGBSplit and ppmcentre (using the great new GUIs) ... each channel thru registax, stacked, mild wavelets... AstraImage ... LR decon, recombine ... in to photoshop.
The works!!!!!!!!!!! and yet ...
Go figure???
I'm not sure if it made any difference but I did perfrom the RGBSplit before the ppmcentre.
I wouldn't call it a mistake - it's not the way I'd do it, but the result should not be any different in terms of the quality of frames.
Interesting results you have, and yes surprising. I just performed my routine on one of Adam's (hitchiker) runs from the LPI, and I'm waiting to see his original version again but i'm quite confident still that the processing routine I use will produce a better image most times.
In this case, it didn't.. it could be the seeing, it could be the settings used, the colour is slightly different - the first one is too yellow where as the second one has a nice dose of blue.
What I mean is, the amount of LR deconvolution applied, amount of wavelets applied etc. Every image has to be treated on its merits and sometimes it needs more or less "treatment".
I hope you don't mind, I took your two images into AstraImage, side by side.
I performed almost exactly the same processing on them.
The top left is your original left image. The top right is your original top right image.
The images below are the same images after my processing.
- Split into RGB
- left image: LR 2 @ 1.1
- right image: LR 3 @ 1.1
- recombine
- gamma adjust 0.8
- take into photoshop
- curves adjust on centre of image
- slight/light unsharp mask
- colour balance blue channel +7 (got rid of the yellow hue).
- Save as web
It doesn't necessarily suggest the image on the right is slightly better, but I felt from looking at it, it could stand up to more sharpening (through deconvolution).
When I looked at them side by side, I feel the image on the left is actually a bit sharper (it's had more processing of it, already), but it lacked colour depth, contrast and was too yellow. Maybe that's why people (myself included) favoured the right one initially.
Because the left image had already had deconvolution applied to it, I went light on it so as not to oversharpen it and introduce any artifacts. It may have stood up to 3 iterations, but I didn't try it. I did 2, it looked good, so I stopped there Sometimes there's no method to my madness
wow mike- you really brought that out- you just had the JPG i assume, can you just run the LR decon on a finished image like this?
Yep, I just used the two jpeg's in the first post above. To run LR deconvolution on a finished image, you have to split it into the individual colour channels first. LR deconvolution (in Astraimage) only works on greyscale images.
Potentially the image would be even better if I had the original avi's to process (hint hint Matt)
Sometimes there's no method to my madness 
