Dark Nebulae are those places in the universe that let me feel better about the messes in my life.
We did this as HaRGB instead of LRGB because I was silly enough to think that would make it easier. The Ha would take the place of the Lum filter. And the Ha was wonderful but it took me a couple of tries to get a good result when I combined the Ha with the RGB. Then the beautiful Ha first had me not stretching the stars but the image really needed lots of stars to outline the dark nebula properly. It looked odd without them, at least to my eye and a couple of others I showed them to. So, for the first time in my image processing journey I said, "Stretch those stars more!" And, so I did.
Here's where I ended up in processing:
H:
dynamic crop
blurXterminator
starXTermintor
noiseXterminator
GHS
RGB:
dynamic crop
blurXterminator
starXTermintor
noiseXterminator
GHS
LRGBCombination in L
Histogram transformation (masked) to reduce a halo left behind from the bright star center left
LHE (masked)
histogram transformation (contrast)
curves (contrast color)
MLT (sharpening)
pixel math in stars (screen)
RGB stars:
channel combination in H stars
GHS
snsharp mask
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