The Veil threaded the narrow slot of sky visible from my back yard last night, and glory be it was clear with decent seeing.Process chain was:
- Astro Pixel Processor: Bog-standard one-click integration, light pollution tool, HSO 2 palette
- Starnet++: Starless image
- Topaz Denoise AI: Gently denoise and sharpen starless image
- Photoshop:
- Couple of Curves to enhance contrast and get the background to the right level
- Original image blended with starless in Difference mode to yield stars-only layer, saved with ctrl-cmd-E (I run a Mac).
- Original image then deselected; stars-only image blended with Screen mode, opacity lowered till stars were less distracting
- Hue/Saturation layer to strongly desaturate, masked to apply only to a few background areas where dim nebulosity appeared as a color cast
That was it. I've now done two images in a row where the processing took less than an hour instead of several grueling sessions. Waiting for that other shoe to drop.
Later: Went back and acquired 1.5 hours each of 30-second 65-gain exposures of R, G, and B for star color. Composited that with the previous image; new stuff was rotated so the upper left and lower right corners have the colorless NB stars.
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