(RCC) Tips for sharpening, noise reduction, color balancing etc

Hi,

I am not sure I can provide specific details to such a broad question, however, your overall image looks great to me. There is only so much we can do with such faint objects. Noise is always going to be an issue, which can be mitigated with more time, but you are still going to see it. Obviously noise reduction techniques help too, but the best way is to get more integration time. Sharpness will have plenty of factors. Seeing, transparency, focus etc…So there are factors outside of your control. Sharpening is nothing more than boosting contrast at the pixels around the edges of the structure. 

Like I said, overall your image looks great, if anything while pixel peeping I can see the stares on the left side look elongated from left to right. May have to do with tilt? Something to look into possibly, but even I do not get obsessive about my stars. It may not be worth fussing with.

I am sorry I do not have much more to add, people have a wide range of editing techniques. If anything maybe lighten up the black point a tad? Great image overall though. Keep it up. 

Dan

Yes, it is a great picture.  When one looks at ones own pictures they seem poor,  but I bet if the same picture was posted by someone else you would think that the same photo was excellent.  There is always a compromise by just fiddling.

Also for me it is a good image.
Maybe you could enhance the star colors by using an appropriate mask and then using in PI Curves Transformation set on Saturation.
For enhancing dark structures you could try Multiscale Linear Tranform with a value of bias not so high (for example +0.1/+0.2) in order to avoid noise.
For all these operations it would be better work separately on stars only and nebula only by using Starnet or, much better, StarXTerminator and then combine the two images with Pixelmath.Topaz Denoise is excellent, but is better to use on starless images otherwise it introduces artifacts especially on the faintest stars.