You have don'e a cracking job mate!
Okay DSS is the best program i have found for stacking RAW Canon Fit files its fast its decent it works without too much issue. As for the binning thing you where talking about :S I dunno ide leve it as it is just a simple stack Photoshop is more than capable of bringing out those colours without a hitch.
How.? well its iterative you will find that it takes a fair while to learn how to use PS properly I have been using it since year 8 and that was PS2 i believe it was in 1995.
Vibrance, Levels and Curves are your friend but be aware they can be your enemy another good one is Shadows and highlights.
Start with levels.
Crop the image slightly to make sure you have gotten rid of all the stacking artifacts around the edge.
Under the RGB (which is default) start trimming back the white point and black point. be careful with both the sliders as too far with either one of them will cost you data once you have slightly trimmed each end, the middle slider or as i like to call the grey point, i bring it upto the start of the bell curve or just a little bit off. When you do this you will see the image brighten significantly, apply start again I normally find that it takes me about 5-6 iterations before it stops moving around.
Open up the Histogram and show all colours there should be 4 RGB, then R , G, B. Go back into Levels and where it says RGB up the top click the drop down box, you will see each individual channel. This allows you to balance the colours and boost individual channels in a linear fashion. Apply the same technique as you did previously but keep your eyes on the histogram as you do it and don't freak out about the colour untill you have adjusted all 3....
Okay so now you have streched your image to fit the full 16bit gamut tootle into the Curves section, Start with the RGB and look for a curve, generally following a slight boost in the main histogram (above the straight diagonal line) at about the middle of that box, lift the line even higher, but then flatten it out at the top. I know that sounds nigh on impossible to follow but i cannot think of any other way to discribe it. I will post a tutorial soon about it.
Now once you have done that little exercise remembering iterations are the best way to keeping star colours
Move to vibrance this is a very powerful tool that now comes up in the main menu where Levels and Curves hang out. you have two sliders that come up in a pop up window. Vibrance, and Saturation play around with them a bit untill you get the feel. remember sometimes less is better and iterations work wonders.
Have a look at shadows and highlights after as sometimes your stars have gotten very bright and over powering you can tone them down to a fair degree with that tool.
So 3 top tips
ITERATIONS little iterations allow you to fine adjust and preserve
Levels Start with RGB and then move to individual channels
Vibrance It brings your image back to life!
Hopefully soon ill get that tute done with images and discriptions for everybody to follow.
Brendan
