Pixinsight - overcooked - but where ???

[Skipper Billy]

The following two images are from the same data -

The first one is stacked in Maxim and adjusted in Photoshop

The second is stacked and processed in Pixinsight but looks much softer than the Photoshop one - almost like its defocussed ???

I cant remember what I did to it !!

Any ideas - I have seriously overcooked something or done something wrong.

Any ideas ???

[MattJenko]

Could it be one of the noise reduction processes has done a little too much to it? I actually think the second one is sharper, despite not getting as big a colour saturation boost as the first.

[andrewluck]

If you look at the second image there's a lot more detail in the shadow areas and more contrast so I'd give it plus points for that.

It looks like you've run an HDRMultiscale process on it and these can be rather harsh. If you didn't use a star mask then try one to avoid over sharpening the stars. Alternatively, use Masked Stretch with a target value of about 0.22 instead of the Histogram stretch and see if you prefer the results. LocalHistogramEqualisation can then be used to increase the contrast (but again, you will probably need to mask the stars out).

Andrew

[Skipper Billy]

Thanks Andrew

I did use HDR Multiscale and without a star mask - I will try it again - thanks for the heads up.

David

[frugal]

Masks are everything in PixInsight. I use StarMasks, RangeSelections and combinations of the two as masks. I also use clones of the image with the black and white clipped a little bit to act as a mask over the original image. It takes a while to get your head around how and when to use the different sorts of masks, but when I finally got it, my images loooked a whole lot better.