This is the first of my Astrofest processed photos. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to process it.
I ended up saturating it, then desaturating it, then saturating again (hence twice cooked). In the process I tried to get rid of the incredible starfield using erosion. I don't know. Somehow shooting this target at astrofest with that much time dedicated to it resulted in a bit of a boring image with a nebula which didn't really stand out against the milky way.
Looks good, Chris. I think it's just one of those targets that's a bit boring in RGB. Some people succeed in making it pop but I think it takes a lot of processing skill and time...
Very nicely done. Do a star reduction on the field. That will accentuate the nebulosity. Same issue with M17. Because they're both in a very dense region of the milkyway the starfield is always overwhelming.
I need to figure out how to better control star reduction. I've applied it twice already on this image before I posted it.
When I do it further the image becomes somewhat unrealistic and the star reduction starts to look unnatural. I'll keep having a play. Maybe if I only do a reduction on the smallest targets...
