Hello, I was able to take pictures of my first nebula a few nights ago, I am stoked. 😀 Anyway I am trying to process the stacked image that included darks, flats, and bias shots through DSS. My problem is I live in a very light polluted area, so I have to turn my settings up high on my ZWO ASI120MC-S camera (I know its not designed for this but working on a budget) which introduces some noise and I see a slight brightness to my images. I am planning on using GIMP to post-process since I can't afford Photoshop, does anyone have any suggestions on how to take care of the excess light in the photo, make the sky darker, and possibly bring out more of the color in the nebula? I am new to GIMP and have played around with exposure, brightness, and contrast but it makes everything darker which I don't care about the stars so much but it also darkens the nebula. Thank you for your time!
The image Autosave.tif is from DSS which is the one I'm trying to process through GIMP and the M57.bmp is one that I tried processing through Registax (the only issue with that is I don't know what I'm doing in there either) and its really hard to see the nebula on a phone screen..
Autosave.tif
M57.bmp