God I am struggling with this. ADVICE desperately needed.
6 hours luminance with 2 h each colour channel. Shot from my backyard in the suburbs on the Sunshine Coast. taken with TEC 140 and SBIG STT 8300m on AP 1100.
Sorry. Lum subs were 15 minutes binning 1x1 and colour channels were 10 minutes binning 2x2 as I read somewhere that the 2x2 binning long subs would bring out the dust.
The dynamic range looks too flattened. By that I mean the bright areas are dulled down like the glob and the bright core stars in the blue neb.
So work with curves and levels to restore the dynamic range.
Colourwise there is a fair bit of green light pollution. I would run HLVG free plug in at strong level to correct or if you have PI use ACDNR.
The blues need to be brought up as the reflection neb should be more colourful than that.
Then work with the colour in general. There are some too heavy red halos around some stars. That may require the saturation of red/yellow reduced or decon on the red master image to reduce the size of the red component as perhaps it was out of focus slightly, taken at a low angle or seeing worsened when doing the red channel.
Mark,ok so a punchy pic is the in thing these days yeah....but don't think for a minute that you haven't done a very good job here! It's a very good image dude
Looks like pretty good data and you've had plenty of useful advice already, Mark. I'd just add one thing: you really don't need to bin LRGB with that set up, especially under relatively bright skies.
Have applied the advice as best I can. This is a total of 12 hours and 30 minutes 7 being luminance and 1h 50m each colour channel. Removed the green with the free action thanks and did some layered masking to enhance the nebula.
Great shot Mark, and the second treatment works nicely. Doesn't seem to loose detail, and the colour improves (esp. in the cluster at the top right).
Lovely image.
