B33 reprocess - which is best?

[x6gas]

I've been having some fun trying to improve my image processing using some data captured earlier in the year.

My target was the Horsehead nebula and while I got quite a lot of Ha, the R G B data I captured was poor and adversley effected by the placement of my OAG pick off prism.

Anyway, my first attempts at making a colour image were, frankly, awful. But all this cloud has a use and I've been practicing my techniques and I'm posting a few images here to show my progress mostly to prove to myself that I am making progress (and thus to keep my motivation levels!) but in part to show what can be gained from very average data but impoving (I hope!) processing skills.

In some of the stacks I used 13 hours worth of Ha (others I was much more choosy!). but only ever had 2 hours worth of RGB data.

So here is my initial effort using the Trichromy command in AstroArt 5 (don't judge the software, the inadequacy is all me!):

So that's not great. Mostly, I think, due to my failure to sort out anything half decent from the RGB data. But as I say, the poor weather has given me a chance to play!

This was my first try using Ken Crawford's tutorial. I pretty much stumbled on this colour balance and really liked the gold in contrast to the standard red...

And with a bit more tweaking this is where I get with Ken's method so far (couple of versions...you can play all day with the colours and various sharpen / blur combos!):

The great thing here is that it seems to give great control over colour. The downside is that this method of combining RGB seems to introduce all of the noise from the RGB channels into the final image and since (a) the RGB images were very poor in the first place and ( they were binned 2x2 then that's not good! So here is the version using MartinB's method as described in his SGL primer.

The noise is much easier to handle, but I found it much harder to get the colour balance and curves correct....

I'm still learning and still trying, but there is progress and at least I feel a little more in control!

[x6gas]

Sorry - forgot to say... let me know which you think is best to help my processing direction!

[Gina]

All i can say is that the latter ones are cracking images - I'd be well pleased with those As you say you can play about with the colours etc. forever.

[Chris]

I like the third one down the best:)

[x6gas]

Thanks Gina, thanks Starfox.

The biggest problem is a nasty gradient on the RGB (actually just the G and B since I'm using Ha for the R channel) that despite my best efforts leaves a bright strip across the middle of the image that is hard to suppress.

I've been following some online tutorials about star masks and can generate the mask with no problem... only trouble is I think I must be applying incorrectly as it seems it's not doing that much!

[farunj]

I also like the third one!! That's really nice!!