At last we're happy with this. Inspired by Fred V, we went starless, separating each channel into stars and background. Colour balanced and wavelet sharpened the background. Then dropped in the original H-alpha stars as white.
To go starless, we used a dual approach: (1) model the bright core as radially symmetric about a centroid, and remove that. (2) Use multiple linear regression (3rd order polynomial with cross products) to model what should be "under" the star from the background, and feather heavily. (speaking of which, the 3 chooks are still laying an egg a day each).
The nebulosity is pretty much as before, but the stars are far less intrusive. They're all there, but smaller, fainter, and slightly better resolved.
Time to put our pen down on this one.
Original image here.
One vague possibility with this sort of approach is to try to guestimate the star's plausible temperature and therefore colour from the OIII to H-alpha ratio. Something for one of those rare rainy days perhaps.
Best,
M & T
Your previous algorithm appeared to handle the stars better in general, whether it is that algorithm or another one that does that I am unsure. The brighter ones appear more bloated, some of the magenta ones (moreso towards the north west) have halos and there are some smaller stars throughout the image that appear to have been saturated but have no lightness to them (more like small red splotches).
Actually went to reprocess my M8 data recently to get closer to your colour calibration but I think I may have accidentally deleted everything except the Ha data :/
