Maxim processing over exposed

[Spikey]

I'm slowly moving over to Maxim away from DSS & PHD.

I'm pretty sure this is down to stretching the image but I've tried a couple of different ways and I always end up with what looks like saturated stars with a bit of an onion ring and the cores get blown.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to avoid this or how to correct please ?

[Dave Smith]

This may not be of much help to you but the advice I have been given is that Maxim is brilliant for capture, alignment and stacking but that is better to at that point save the image as a 16bit tif and then do the processing in photoshop, which is what I now do.

Dave

[Spikey]

Tends to come out saturated after stacking Dave, I'm doing something wrong somewhere.

[Dave Smith]

Are you sure it is saturated, Maxim does do an automatic screen stretch (which isn't applied to the image). If you get the information curser and run across the image you can check tha the adu is not up to 65000.

Dave

[steppenwolf]

I'm with Dave on this - I love Maxim and find it a joy to use for capture, calibration, guiding, LRGB alignment etc. but I do very little post processing in it. The images you have shown looks rather like you have used the DDP processing tool which can lead to halos around stars, rather like over-sharpening.

I find that the best results are achieved in Maxim by capturing, calibrating and stacking followed by a gentle stretch in levels so that the left hand slider is just to the left of the dark point and the right hand slider produces just under the ideal brightness so that there is some latitude either side. I then save this image as a FITS file in IEEE Float followed by a 16bit TIF version (selecting Stretch - Linear Only - Screen Stretch). I then load the 16bit version into PhotoShop for the rest of the image processing and feel that this makes the best use of the strengths of the two programs.

Edited to say:- Ooops, doubled with you both there so I'm a little behind the discussion!

[Spikey]

It is Steve, I tried a DDP stretch on it. I'll have another crack at calibration & alignment from scratch and save as you have suggested. I've not got as far as guiding yet

Many thanks both.