Description: While working on this image to push my Pixinsight skills forward, I realized that my working copy in PI had a great deal of tiny details in a small galaxy. I blended this in using Photoshop.
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Description: I realized when I had enhanced the small galaxy in my previous revision, I had probably done it on a version without the previous contrast enhancement. Better contrast enhancements applied...
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Title: Complete reintegration and reprocess from original data
Description:
Please take some time to zoom in on the higher or highest resolution versions of this image. I really worked to pull out some fine details!
This object is one of my favorites, and I've actually been a bit afraid to revisit it because I wanted to get a result that highlights its most interesting features. I *think* I've been successful.
The main thing I wanted to do was to utilize BlurX and HDRMT, tools I previously didn't have and didn't know about (respectively), to represent the tiny tendrils in the dust around the brightest part, and bright star in the middle of the brightest part, of the nebula. This is interesting stuff and I've done the best I could with my data. I think I nicely separated the small reddish wisp here as well as creating some definition for the other fine dust in this area.
Also, I wanted to bring out a bit of depth and definition in the long Ha wisp and the dust that is generally present throughout the image.
Lastly, I wanted my process to be more methodical and less haphazard and futzy as has been the case for me so much of the time. My processing is getting to be much more intentional, and successful in that intent, and that is gratifying.
As with some of my previously reprocessed images, this actually incorporates 35 hours 18 minutes of data since I am relying on weighting, rather than culling, of sub exposures.
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Description:
In order to bring out the dust in this image, I am really stretching the dark end of the histogram. This is also bringing with it a bit of noise.
One thing I don't like to do is to over noise reduce dust. I think it smooths wisps and tendrils into blurry blobby looking structures and loses detail.
After looking at this image a bunch, I realized that the red was more noisy than the other channels. I tried an experiment..
I extracted the R, G, and B channels, and then applies NoiseXTerminator to the red at 50, the blue at 20, and not at all to the green. I then recombined.
Although the image is still a bit noisy when zoomed way in, this trick did help reduce the perceived noise a lot and retained detail better than if I had just applied NoiseX to the RGB image.
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Description: Applied NoiseXTerminator with a luminance mask to protect brightest areas.
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