Hope you don't mind but I tried a bit of Noise Reduction and MorphologicalTransformation with PixInsight. Gives a little more clarity to the nebulosity. The effect is a little restricted because it was a .jpg but might be of interest to you. Again, I hope I haven't overstepped the mark by altering someone else's image!
Thanks Bob & Dave - will hopefully get some more processing time this week, but it looks like work will intervene again...
Thanks for the processing example Charles. I assume you're using morphological transformation for star size reduction. I do like the Ha shots, because the stars are usually smaller than luminance shots, but the additional reduction doesn't go astray.
Very nice, David! I agree about the stars needing to be tamed. I've spent the last three nights trying different ways to do that on one of my images and still haven't decided what works best
Just compared it to previous efforts. The lite-star versions were usually Ha blends. The object is within a fairly dense starfield, so they might be par for the course!
I've been trying some different techniques, but if I push it to far, the image gets soft or the tiny stars start to merge into little lines that looks like crazing on an old china plate.
I don't have such a dense star field but I have a bunch of largish stars that I'd like to de-emphasise so that my galaxies (NGC 4038 and NGC 4039) stand out more. I have devised many clever, but ultimately unsuccessful ways to do this so far I can achieve the desired result but that usually causes some other less desirable side-effect. Still, I'm learning lots of new tricks for combining masks in PixelMath. I have a feeling I might finally get close with another night of playing... I could get there by blending a couple of different versions of the image in Photoshop but I'd rather not "cheat" if I can avoid it.
I played a bit with PI tonight and tried Rogelio's star reduction technique. His method for making masks was better than what I'd been doing previously.
Will try again over the weekend and hopefully produce something better.
I can achieve the desired result but that usually causes some other less desirable side-effect. Still, I'm learning lots of new tricks for combining masks in PixelMath. I have a feeling I might finally get close with another night of playing... I could get there by blending a couple of different versions of the image in Photoshop but I'd rather not "cheat" if I can avoid it.
