Heart Nebula feedback needed

Here's my constructive criticism.  The first thing that jumps out at me is that the image appears to be monochrome red with mostly white stars, which is usually not the most appealing palette.  You may want to look through the archives on Astrobin at Heart Nebula photos, sort them by Likes, and look at some of the IOTD and Top Picks winners of the past.  You can get an idea of what filter combinations people have used to produce more colorful images that gained some recognition from the community.

The stars in the corners of your image have some distortions with your setup.  You have some issues with optics, or with back-focus or tilt adjustments.  Most of us have some of these issues, but you want to work hard on eliminating them to the best of your ability.

There are some deconvolution artifacts , particularly along the lower border of your image.

Hope these suggestions are helpful!

Thanks!

When do you use deconvolution? What scale/aperture. Thanks for the feedback.

Rob Calfee:
When do you use deconvolution? What scale/aperture. Thanks for the feedback.

I wouldn't do unless you are sampling the airy disk/seeing which at your image scale just isn't going to happen. But that doesn't stop most people from using it. Still, I find that this gives the image a very artificial look but YMMV. I guess you can forget about stars colours with L-extreme filter but you should be able to produce a false colour rendering if the OIII signal is significant enough.

Ian McIntyre:
I recently attempted my first multiple night session. My target was a wide field of the Elephant Trunk nebula. I went ahead and produced a version of the first night by itself. It wasn't great, but it was view worthy. When I tried to incorporate the second night the colors got all fouled up. Not sure what the issue was. Point is, I can attest to the challenges of integrating multiple nights

Not sure what the issue you guys have with multiple nights. I used to do multiple night across several years and not to flinch an eyelid. So I'll be courious to understand what these issue might be. Is it a software issue or is it related to the data?

I don't see the "monochrome" as a huge issue. It's the heart nebula… it's pretty darn red, that's just the way it is.
Yes, the star colour could be better to make the image pop, and the middle of the heart nebula could be more white/blue-ish. But it is a great image already.

I haven't seen the raw data, there might be more that you can pull out in the processing by using different settings, or focussing on different parts/layers of the image individually to pull out some more colours. 

But, it is for a very large part because of the filter. 
The "optolong l-extreme". It is a great filter for sure, but it has very tight passes in Ha and Oiii. So, usually it does lack a bit of colour if something isn't either red or blue. 

One thing I've been trying to experiment with is adding some more filter data then just my L-Extreme.
I use an "Optolong L-Pro" to take like 10-20 frames of 30 seconds each or so, to create a layer from the L-Pro that I will use for the stars. instead of white, the stars are then the yellows and blues that they are supposed to be and I layer those into on top of the L-Extreme.