Rate my picture Requests for constructive critique · Claudio Boicu · ... · 8 · 524 · 0

Hello, this is a really nice picture.
Here my bullet points:

I would give you a top pick nomination
If i zoom in maybe the noise is not perfect but absolutely not bad
The colors are nice
A defect could be the stars color, but this is not really you, it's the gear i guess
The framing is nice, maybe i would cut some area on the right to have a bit more balance between the iris and the ghost

It's really a nice picture and you have a good technique.
Keep it up.

Hi Claudio. At first glance, your image is great, and covers an impressive field. Color is good. Stars are pretty good.

At full scale, however, I think you could improve things still. 

Key point #1 is noise. You have two notably distinct noise profiles. The background sky noise (the noise in the fainter details), and a starkly different noise profile in the stronger signal areas. The SUDDEN shift from noisy to not noisy is jarring and unnatural, and I think the key area where you could improve your image quality. 

Secondarily, I am not sure how you are doing noise reduction, but however it is being done, it is creating a "rice" artifact. Your noise appears to have these short little streaks of dark scattered about. That created an unnatural noise profile. This is a characteristic of noise that, IMHO, DOES matter...as humans are great at identifying patterns, even small ones. This is why a normal (gaussian) or poisson distribution of noise is so pleasing...its structureless and well distributed. Even a uniform noise distribution, would be preferable (would only occur if you generated noise, which can sometimes be useful.) 

SO! First things first, I would try NoiseXterminator. You mentioned WBPP, so you have PixInsight. I would use PI for the entire workflow, and the workflow really shouldn't need to be all that complicated. I would do gradient extraction with PI's new gradient extraction process. Then NXT, then BXT, then stretch and process color to taste. NXT should give you a much more pleasing and normal noise profile across the entire image, without the sudden and jarring jump from noisy to near-noiseless in the strong signal areas.

thanks for all the advice, you guys pointed out some things I didn't even realise I had in my image ill try to improve on those things especially the integration time. on this target I tried to pull dust a bit too much, that's why the noise I guess. ill be getting a new camera aswell soon, the asi 294mm pro with 3 nm shot and lrgb chroma filters, so I should be getting good data.

Richard Carande:
Looks nice.  One thing I was a bit surprised at is the star quality (and I think this was mentioned stars before).  My experience with BlurXterminator, which you are using, is that it usually results in nicer stars than I see in your corners.   It's not clear to me if you are actually using BlurXterminator on a starless image or not, but in any case, I thought that should be used when the data are linear.  Maybe try using that before StarXternminator -- that should improve the stars I think.

I usually run BXT when im alredy past all the color boosting, because from all the noise reduction my image looks a bit too soft for my taste, so i sharpen nonstellar aswell with the stars, but i could try using BXT on linear next time.