I would appreciate a critique of my M33 image, which was awarded as IOTD a few days ago. To my eyes, the image is far from excellent, and yet it was my first IOTD. In particular, I noticed several artifacts caused by BlurXT + NoiseXT ("mottling" as Adam Block calls them in his video on the subject), especially in the periphery of the galactic disk. So much so that to get a decent result I had to lower the BXT sharpening to 0.25. Subsequently, I had some difficulty blending L with RGB, in fact I even considered not using luminance at all. In the end, I produced the LRGB with ImageBlend and a blending percentage of 0.6. I treated the HA similarly, blending only a minimal percentage. All this, with an additional difficulty: it was impossible to work on a starless image, since SXT extracted large portions of the galaxy. Therefore, the entire workflow took place with the stars present (and in fact many are bloated). Ultimately, I don't think this is my best image at all, but I'd appreciate your opinion on it.📷 M33
[RCC] My very first IOTD
I don’t mind your stars at all. I often will not remove them from Galaxy images just because removing them tends to be destructive. On an object like M33 that has so many resolved stars, the last thing I want to do is minimize them.
On the rest, all I can say is Shhhhhh!
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I don’t tend to do star removal for galaxies either. It tends to remove the knots and other features. Also, I don’t mind doing a greater stretch on the stars than usual since you can really bring out the super faint fuzzies in the background.
You image had a great composition rather than the normal diagonal M33, and nice framing as well. I think that was what they were looking at rather than jumping to a 100% view right away.
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