Processing challenge, Needle Galaxy captured with zoom lens

Hi, can you share the Fits file instead of the Tiff?

Hi! here's my processing of your image. For me, the hardest part was to get rid of the gradients in the background. Chrominance Noise reduction was a good help, also I needed to remove all stars to work better in the background. These are the steps I used.

Dynamic Crop
Dynamic Background Correction
Background Neutralization
Resample
Histogram
Auto Histogram
SCNR
ACNR (Chrominance only)
Background Neutralization
Star Xterminator
Clone Stamp
Pixelmath (Add stars again)
Star Mask
Morphologial Star reduction
NoiseXterminator
Color Saturation
Curves Transformation
Range Selection
Exponential Transformation
Blurxterminator
NoiseXterminator

No crops, as can be seen by that vertical line to the left

I think you wanna merge all the versions together again, right?

so I think you can easily crop that out if you want

here's my steps:

1. Autostretch, to see what's immediately wrong with the image
2. There was gradients (tougher sharp ones actually), so I tried GradientCorrection, didn't help as much as I'd like, tried DBE, still not good, but helped, then I tried Graxpert, which helped the most with it's AI gradient removal.
3. Brought back into PI, tried SPCC, but it said something like "not enough data points" and didn't work, so I just accepted the colors as it was
4. Ran BXT at .92 with the nonstellar and .50 for the stars (image is still linear)
5. Ran Starnet
6. Applied Arcsinh stretch to the Stars, and a very slight curve stretch with curves transformation
7. Increased blue saturation about 100 percent, and reds/oranges by about 30 for the Stars
8. Applied ExponentialTransformation using SMI function with an order of 1.00, and a smoothing of 38, with the Lightness Mask box checked, to the stars. (this basically gives all the stars a small and faint halo)
9. Now I moved to Starless, applied Arcsinh stretch and Arcsinh black point increase, with a slight HistogramTransformation curve stretch.
10. Reduced orange saturation for the Starless, and increased blue saturation a bit (there was not much blue details I could bring out though; not sure how Markus did it)
11. Combined Starless and Stars: ---------------------- Stars + Starless - Stars * Starless --------------------- (which gives screening effect)
12. Now at the very end, I applied NXT: .60 for Denoise, 0 for Detail.
13. Sometime around step 11-12, I Solved the image using an image scale of 0.427"/px, and a pixel size of 2.4um, so I now used TypeCat script to detect the faintest galaxies and put that info in the Annotation which I did afterwards.



Annotation:


I can PM the full res TIFF if you, (the OP), wants.

I've only been working from my laptop which haven't had any PI updates done in a while, so very little/gentle noise reduction has been done, no NXT. Also, no SPCC as I just decided to throw the AutoColor script at it and manually adjust the histogram afterwards.

I've cropped all the stacking artefacts as they serve no purpose for the final result, I also resampled it by a factor of 2 with IntegerResample. All stretching has been done with HistogramTransformation as that is my preferred method.