Jones-Emberson 1 in 52 hours (colour version)

[opticalpath]

30 minutes ago, MartinB said:

Wonderful image Adrian, I do like the uncropped version, shame to waste those nicely coloured stars which frame the nebula so nicely.  In your combining efforts did you try assigning OIII equally to green and blue?

Thanks Martin.

I did try a straightforward assignment of 100% OIII to blue and to green first but the result was not great. Steve Cannistra's bi-colour method gave better starting results: assigning OIII to blue and creating a synthetic green from a blend of OIII and Ha. It gives great flexibility to try different weightings and to assign different hues to Ha and OIII in constructing the synthetic green.  But even after that, a great deal of fine tuning of colour was needed - lots of trial and error in PS - before I was reasonably happy with the overall balance of colours. 

If doing it again (ain't gonna happen soon!) I would probably go for a very long RGB integration to try to achieve the base colours more naturally, then blend in Ha and OIII to intensify. Working with synthetic green was not ideal and needed a lot of experimentation.  I tried OIII = green and  synthetic blue, but that was even harder!

Adrian

[Barry-Wilson]

All the praise is well justified, truly wonderful image of a very difficult target.