I hear it now... "KG, you forgot to remove the green!" (-:
My goal with this project was to see if I could reproduce the Dumbbell nebula "from core to wings" with the true colors I see in the stretched RGB.
Luckily skies were dark enough for me to see the faint wings in the RGB data. So that gave me a good color reference.
Creating the core in the spirit of the RGB with Ha and OIII was not too difficult. Here I screen Ha-OIII-OIII with hues of 0, 217, 119 and Lightness of -42, -53, and -69.
I then overlay Ha Luminosity at 40% opacity for Ha contrast.
Next up is the wings. They're extracted from Ha and OIII using the default PI stretch followed by several applications of HDR6G11 to tone down the core.
Starnet++ is then used to remove the stars. I then use shadows, denoise and a luminance mask to help extract the wings.
To match the Ha wing to what I see in the RGB, an Ha Lighten layer with 0 hue works well.
The OIII wing is a bit tricky. That required two screen layers with hue 217, 121 and lightness -60, -75.
Finally a Starnet++ RGB star mask is screened over the top to produce what might arguably be a "true color" Dumbbell Nebula. (-:
Here's all my capture references to help clarify some of the above thoughts...
RGB, Ha and OIII references for True Color Dumbbell Project
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