Telescope Reviews: 180mm Nikkor with 52mm step down ring.

Well,
I am using Pixinsight....

here's my rough process...however, your data was so good that the whole thing was a piece of cake...

Pixinsight Image Processing Workflow
LINEAR
1. DSS: Save as 32-bit floating point TIFF
2. Insert TIFF from DSS
3. RGBWS R:G:B 1:1:1
4. STF
5. Dynamic Crop
6. DBE
7. Background Neutralization
8. Color Calibration
9. SCNR
10. Morphological Transformation tools (Morphological Selection) with mask [http://blog.deepskycolors.com/archive/2011/09/08/star-size-reduction-via-Morphological-.html], Make stars of RGB smaller to avoid color halos
11. ATWT small star sharpening
12. GREYCstoration
13. ACDNR for chrominance with mask

NON-LINEAR LUMINANCE
14. Luminance Mask - extract the Luminance channel, and apply a Histo to it to that
gives a strong Luminance Mas k, to protect the dim areas
15. Make stars smaller
16. Deconvolution (Dynamic Point Spread Function Process Generates a Synthetic PSF Image-Use Synthetic PSF Image-Use Deringing Support Image-Use Luminance Mask) [http://www.drakevisual.com/deconvolution]
17. Noise Reduction (MMT- on the first 2 or 3 wavelet layers of the image, to good effect. I mask the image first with the Luminance Clone so that noise reduction is restricted to the background)
18. Mas ked HDRWT - now that the image is no longer linear, HDRWT has 'more range' to work with, and can thus be more effective - applied to Layer 3
19. Mas ked HDRWT #2 - as before, default values , except that it is applied toLayer 4
20. Mas ked HDRWT #3- as before, default values , except that it is applied to Layer 5 (sometimes this is 'too harsh', and I need to decide which two layers to apply HDRWT to – experimentation usually required)
21. Enhance Dark Structures
22. New Luminance Mask - extract a mas k to protect the brightest areas, using Luminance
channel, ATW, Histo, etc - this is not an easy step to define, or explain, and it may even have to be applied earlier in the overall process as well
23. Mas ked HISTO /Lum-CURVE - (this may also have to be done earlier as well) here I would be trying to increase the brightness of the faintest regions , without blowing out brighter regions - this HAS to be 'subtle'
24. Sharpen Luminance

NON-LINEAR CHROMINANCE

25. Sequential MaskedStretch (0.1/0.2/0.3, 200 repeats) with shadows clipping
26. ATW/ACDNR for Chrominance for small scale noise with no mask
27. ATW/ACDNR for Chrominance with lightness mask
28. Masked Sat-CURVE - trying to bring out the colours of the dimmest areas- again, subtlety is important
29. Inverted Masked Sat-CURVE - this time looking at colour in the brighter areas, remembering that over-saturation will look bad
30. SCNR - looking at the whole image, several s mall iterations may be needed to balance out color casts
31. ACDNR#2 - a recheck of ACDNR to make sure that no low-level noise has crept back in

LRGB COMBINATION

32. HISTO adjustment to Luminance and Chrominance
33. CURVES (Contrast enhancement with Curves - protect background with mask)
34. Sharpen (ATW-protect background with mask)
35. Noise Reduction with ACDNR or MMT (invert mask- MMT should be used with a mask to protect the high SNR areas)
36. HDR Multiscale Transform to bring out structure and enhance contrast. MMT should be used with a mask to protect the high SNR areas, and HDRMT with the mask inverted to protect the low SNR areas
37. Multiscale Processing (http://www.astro-imaging.com/Tutorial/PixInsight/M33/en.html)
38. Tone Mapping
39. Reduce size of large stars (MT)
40. HISTO

Edited by dp297 (12/07/12 03:38 PM)