Help Merging Comet And Stars

[Stub Mandrel]

The automatic comet & stars function of DSS gives me big fuzzy areas around each star, so I want to merge the comet from my 'blurred stars' image and the stars from the blurred comet version.

It was easy to remove the blurred comet with the clone stamp, but I'm trying to get teh sharp comet and its tails to show through by paining on a mask, but it's not working very well.

Any tips? (PS2)

[jsmoraes]

If you have large misalignment of stars between frames the DSS will not work well. For any type of target: DSOs or Comets. 

When you ask for Comet & Stars, DSS does two operations and merge those results. Like you are trying manually.

My best way to do it manually is in Photoshop, working with mask. I do only by stars and only by comet. I use both results with mask on area of the comet to merge them. The background is only by stars and the by Comet the mask will permit show only the area of Comet.

Sometimes the result isn't good because of presence of stars near the Comet.