M51 LRGB

[pyrasanth]

I found the processing of the M51 data quite challenging. The difficulty seems to be that the colours are too vibrant for me- looking like its a children's colouring book- almost cartoon like. So I used the L layer to help mute the colours which is really the opposite of what it should be doing or at least that is the effect of its application in the image. However the image is bright with the L layer being quite a heavy capture I just lack the colour data which is weak.

I think the problem was not helped by deconvolving the L layer- this was a mistake as I just got big clumps and no extra detail. I went back to each sub & applied a Starmask & a wavelet transformation & this increased the detail with no clumping. I really need to go right back to the beginning when I have more data as I'm still not happy with some of the aspects of the processing. It needs to be better but I've posted below what I have. All criticisms & suggestions gratefully received.

I don't think I will be capturing more data anytime soon on this one as the weather is bad & I'm also working on M82.