Milky Way - How to Balance Colour

[Stub Mandrel]

I am trying to balance a very wide field image of the Cygnus rift. It has a strong luminance gradient top left to bottom right, and a colour gradient bottom left to top right!

I have figured out how to get rid of both of these, just, but I am struggling to get anything resembling a realistic colour. most images show the milky way as rich oranges and browns, but all I can get are a range of garish versions from zillions of bright blue stars to a green wash.

I would have though pushing the colour balance from blue to yellow would be a big help, but all this does is make the image green, then applying HLVG turns it magenta.

Here's a stack to look at:

 

cygnus stacked.TIF

[alan4908]

Hi Neil

I use the freeware program eXcalibrator that was developed by Bob Franke (http://bf-astro.com/excalibrator/excalibrator.htm).  I use it on on the calibrated, aligned and stacked R, G, B grayscale FITS images.  It locates stars in the image from various on-line databases and then works out what the R, G, B coefficients should be for when you convert the RGB images into a colour image. If you don't get the correct colour balance at the start of the post processing process then getting it later on becomes progressively more difficult. 

Alan 

[Stub Mandrel]

Thanks Alan, I will give it a try.