M74 Galaxy - processing

[astroman001]

Here are some images of M74 combined from data taken on the 11th and 24th September. I lost my way a bit in the processing ending up with several images that I can't choose between. Comments welcome.

Taken with C14 at f/7 and OSC ST2000XCM camera.  40 x 5 min subs.

regards

Peter

[StargeezerTim]

They are all excellent...

[astroman001]

Guys, Any tips on improving the processing?

[wimvb]

Nice images. It seems you got ringing around some of the stars. I don't know what caused this, it's on different stars in the three images. How much noise reduction did you do?

The background in all three images has a colour to it, you could try to neutralize this. What software do you use for processing?

In PixInsight you would use colour calibration, in PhotoShop probably colour sliders.

Here's your third image, with some colour correction applied (doesn't work well after stretching), and with some sharpening (MultiscaleMedianTransform in PixInsight), no mask used.

[astroman001]

Thanks for the comments. The star rings are a result of trying to reduce star bloat in PS. Colour is my biggest problem when processing. I do suffer light polluted skies so that's part of the issue.