Not bad Alchemy. A quick way of testing the quality of your data is to perform a quick DDP stretch on the combined image. This will show the noise in the dim areas that may need attention (noise reduction) or alternatively more exposure time.
Here's a PS tip for you which I use now and then depending on the target object. I call it Selective Contrast Masking (SCM).
It makes the image look sharpened/deconvoluted when in fact all you've done is selectively altered the contrast to bring up the highlights or drop the shadows. Other than deconvolution, I don't use any form of sharpening in my typical work flow. Unsharp masking etc, only works well if you've got really clean data which in my experience is not easy to obtain under a few hours of acquisition. Anyway, this is what I do...
When you're close to the end of your image processing routine and have flatten all layers, do the following.
- Create a new layer by dragging background layer to new layer icon in the layers pane (duplicate it in other words).
- Optionally, name the new layer. I typically call it SCM
- With the new layer highlighted, go to Filter > Other > Hipass (~6 pixels) - experiment here. 5 or 6 does it for me.
- Switch layer mode from normal to overlay
- Now create a layer mask for the SCM layer - This is very important. You might think the overlayed SCM looks pretty good at this point as its done some tricky "stuff" to the image, but watch what it does to your stars and noise etc. Not nice. Hence you need to create a mask to selectively highlight regions/details.
- Layer > Add layer mask > hide all
- select brush tool B
- use brush (white) to selectively unhide areas in the mask
- use brush (black) to revert to hidden if needed
- Once satisfied – Layer Flatten Layers and save
- Enjoy!
You can obviously alter the opacity of the SCM so your images don't look too "plastic". Be careful you don't over do it. This will be all for now - not giving away all my image processing tricks - even if its Christmas.
