Lagoon Nebula (M8) SHO reprocess

[glowingturnip]

Ok, I know it's not the right season at all for the Lagoon, but I fancied a reprocess of this data.  It was my first go at SHO narrowband, and I've got plenty of data, but my experiences processing narrowband since led me to think that I should be able to pull out much more detail than I had before, so here goes:

 

16 each of 600s Ha, Sii and Oiii taken over 3 nights in summer 2018, darks flats and bias, equipment as per sig, Pixinsight.

 

For comparison, here's the first version and the thread on it:

 

 

 

What do people think - improvement ?  Anything more I could be doing with it ?

Hope you enjoy,

Stuart

[MartinB]

The image was already very good but the rework benefits form subtle colour and contrast enhancement.  It is an exquisite image Stuart and I don't think you should push it any more since I think you are likely to start encountering side effects.

[Cozzy]

They are both cracking works.

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Very Nice 🙂 

I think there will have been a lot of re-processing old data going on last week or two considering the wather.

Steve

[glowingturnip]

21 hours ago, MartinB said:

I don't think you should push it any more since I think you are likely to start encountering side effects.

Yes indeed, isn't that always the way !  Thanks for the nice comments all

[MarkAR]

Both great images, the rework has a little more vitality and a slightly "stormier" feel about it. The original a little more peaceful looking.

[glowingturnip]

23 hours ago, MarkAR said:

Both great images, the rework has a little more vitality and a slightly "stormier" feel about it. The original a little more peaceful looking.

I agree, I do seem to lean to the dark and stormy side at the moment - must be typhoon season in the Lagoon 🙂 

[Jkulin]

For me the first version is beautiful and gently processed, using the old adage...less is more.

You have introduced some star colour in the revised which to me doesn't look as good.

[don4l]

I prefer the reworked version.  However, I prefer the stars in the original.

Both versions are lovely, and I haven't seen it presented like this before, so I'd say it doesn't really matter.

Edited February 11, 2020 by don4l

[glowingturnip]

fair comment re the stars - I usually use a tone-map technique like this for merging my channels which gives the flat white stars as in my original image.  It does give me headaches on the brighter stars around my newt spikes though.

For the reprocess I actually borrowed some star colour from a previous DSLR image of mine - maybe it should be feathered in a bit more 🙂