The general area around Cygnus is the only area of the sky I can image from my backyard in Portland but, happily, it is rich with targets. Being in the city and around Bortle 7 or higher the limiting factor is the strength of the OIII component, which here is just strong enough to make the cut.
While looking for an old Don Goldman presentation on comparisons of different filter bandwidths I found one he did at CEDIC 2015 that also included a really nice Photoshop method of creating SHO images. I tried it on this and found it quite easy and fruitful. Don's contribution to our field has really been transformative I think. Here's the link to his excellent presentation:
http://www.cedic.at/arc/c15/dwn/CEDIC15_W05_Don_Goldman.pdfI simply did an STF/Hist Trans auto stretch on each channel master and then saved them as Tiffs. From there it was all Photoshop starting with Don's clipping mask method for SHO. I combined the three masters to create a Luminance channel and then added a little extra Ha to bring the star sizes and noise down. Testing that against a pure Ha for luminance showed the Ha only definitely lost some of the details in the image. So the Ha heavy psuedo-luminance won.
I did use Starnet to create a star mask. I also tried the full Topaz Denoise AI with the stars masked and found it did a great job at noise reduction. No funny details were created so I'll take it.
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