I had a series of clear nights finally, and I was able to return to one of our favorite objects, Melotte 15. I did quite a bit to emphasize the brilliant nebulosity here, and de-emphasize the stars. First, there's simply a lot of signal to begin with. My new scope has been great at picking up all the Ha and dimmer narrowband photons as well. But pushing the OIII channel means starts have a big blue halo. In addition, more stars showed in blue than appeared in the other channels. So when I used the new StarXterminator plugin, I was left with a bunch of blue rings and another bunch of blue dots.
AI to the rescue. I made full use of Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill to clean up that mess. Cheating? Judge me all you want. Speaking of AI, I also used Topaz DenoiseAI, although we didn't need much of that.
- WeightedBatchProcessing
- Subframe Selector using (number of) Stars for weight
- Image Registration
- Local Normalization
- Image Integration
- Drizzle Integration
- Dynamic Crop
- EZ Decon on Ha
- EZ Denoise
- Arcsinh Stretch on Ha
- Pixelmath to combine into RGB R: 0.75*SII + 0.25*Ha; G: 0.75*OIII + 0.25 * SII; B: 0.1*Ha + 0.9*OIII
- LRGBCombination to apply Ha (slightly brightened with HT) to the image
- CurvesTransformation
- StarXTerminator to remove stars and place them in a separate image
- Stars: MorphologicalTransformation to reduce star sizes
- Starless: CurvesTransformation to (dramatically) improve the color contrast
- Starless: Export to Topaz DenoiseAI
- Starless: Export to Photoshop, select star residue with Quick Mask (painting dots), expand mask, invert, apply Content-Aware Fill
- Combine Starless and Stars using PixelMath: 1-((1-Starless)*(1-Stars))
Comments