SHO monkey business

[Magnus_e]

Hi folks

So this is my first full color nb image.

It is the Monkey head nebula shoot between 13th Feb to 15th March. It has been so much cloud and fog here that I actually used a month to collect 11h 35min of monkey business! Its my first attempt at HST, and first > 10h image

I have not got to try to finish with the processing, but I have calibrated, stacked and combined the channels with a little noise reduction and a masked stretch.

Asi 1600mm-c @ -30C with Gain 139, Offset 21

300x bias

~60 darks

5h 30min Ha in 300sec subs

3h 10min O3 300sec subs

2h 55min S2 300sec subs.

Whit a lot more Ha then O3 and S2 I cheated and ran scnr green, but I'm for now happy with the color balance. I will try to do some more processing when I get time and bring out some more signal, and color, but feel free to let me know what you think about the image at this point.

 

[gnomus]

I don't think SCNR green is cheating - at least I hope it isn't!  I think your result is splendid and I would counsel against doing too much additional processing.  If it was mine, I might be tempted to try boosting contrast just a bit (Noel's Local Contrast Enhancement applied  just where you want it is great for this).  And then maybe a slight boost in saturation using whatever your favourite method is for doing this.

Great result, I'd say.

[Magnus_e]

Thanks for the feedback

I have been trying to stop my processing before I over process lately. I find it a better work flow to stop early and then rather go back an add to it later.

I can see the  clouds are actually clearing. Wonder if that lasts. Off to dso-browser and see if  I can find anything bright and fast, or I might start on the LRGB Leo triplet I've been thinking abut. I was off target last year with my dslr and made a Leo doublet

[Magnus_e]

So now I have made a version that I do like a lot.

I did not do much, and used very low amounts on all the tools I used.

Started off by masking to only reveal the dso. Then applied a Local histogram equalization. Added some more saturation, and removed the mask to add slightly more saturation to the entire image. Then I added a star mask and ran the process to shrink stars by an amount of 0.4

Let me know if the changes made it better

[gnomus]

I like it a lot.  And you have avoided overprocessing.  There is a script in PI called Dark Structure Enhance (or something like that).  Sometimes it will be too much, but you can always run it on a clone and then blend the clone and the original,using PixelMath.  Finally a little tweak of sharpening with the MLT process might be worth looking at.  Don't sharpen stars - apply using a Range Selection mask from which you have subtracted your StarMask.

[Magnus_e]

51 minutes ago, gnomus said:

I like it a lot.  And you have avoided overprocessing.  There is a script in PI called Dark Structure Enhance (or something like that).  Sometimes it will be too much, but you can always run it on a clone and then blend the clone and the original,using PixelMath.  Finally a little tweak of sharpening with the MLT process might be worth looking at.  Don't sharpen stars - apply using a Range Selection mask from which you have subtracted your StarMask.

I'll have a look into that later tonight

[Magnus_e]

So here is quite possibly the final version.

I used DarkStructureEnhance at ammount 0.30 on a clone. Then I cloned the original and added a dso mask to the new clone and used PixelMath to blend in 40% of the edited image.

I have not used pixelmath to blend images before, but i used (original*0.6)+(edited*0.4) and dropped that process over on the masked result image.

Then I used MLT on a new clone with 6 layers, and blended in 20% to a new result image.

 

All in all quite happy with this project. No I just have to find out how to get more detail in my images. Mine do often seam a little out of focus compared to the really good ones posted here

 

[gnomus]

Very nice.

[Guest]

Very nice outcome..