IC1396 (reprocessedII)

Yet another reprocess after taking on board comments. Changes are:

1) Star halos were reduced or removed. I discovered that when I had imported the image from CCDstack into PS I hadn't paid attention to the pixel values of the stars. On the previous reprocessed image, the brighter stars turned out to have a pixel value of over 200, making them very difficult to colour. If you do attempt this you get halos.  I also used the smudge tool set to colour and a brush set at 40% opacity to clean up some halos. 

2) Reduced colour artifacts - on the previous image I discovered that I hadn't blurred the colour starless image sufficiently. As a consequence I produced many colour artifacts. This version incoporates an additional Gaussian Blur 4 and a Dust and Scratches radius 24 and threshold 16.

3) Allowed some green into the image which I think helps in the transition from the gold/red to the darker colours.

4) Slightly reduced the overall colour contrast.

I noticed that one side benefit of the halo reduction was that I obtained increased resolution in the starfield, for example the very bright blue star was revealed to consist of several stars.