Hi,
I‘ve started imaging some dark nebulae lately and postprocessing has been a challenge. Not little of that is due to my skies, probably (Bortle 6), but I still think there‘s more going on. The areas of improvement I‘m looking for are specifically:
My latest example:
LDN 673
What I‘ld like to get:
https://astrob.in/363cpr/0/
I‘ve started imaging some dark nebulae lately and postprocessing has been a challenge. Not little of that is due to my skies, probably (Bortle 6), but I still think there‘s more going on. The areas of improvement I‘m looking for are specifically:
- Color calibration and gradient reduction: With those dense star fields and nebulae everywhere, how do I select background for normalization and equalization? I‘m currently using the darkest parts of the image but that kills possible colors and some contrast of the dark nebulae.
- Color balance/saturation (probably related): If I turn up saturation, I get very red images. I‘ve fixed it by applying SCNR in red with 0.25x. This, to me, seems like a crutch.
- Contrast: I find it very difficult to control star halos (that the Epsilons tend to produce) and at the same time get good contrast in the darker parts of the image. Do I need to manually paint masks? Automatic mask creation (range, L, or color masks) haven‘t proved too successful.
My latest example:
LDN 673
What I‘ld like to get:
https://astrob.in/363cpr/0/
