Reprocess of Leo Triplet

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Tried a trick of reducing the colour saturation of the noisy background, without affecting the colour in the objects.

I basically did an HSL decompose of the image in GIMP, and computed a luminance channel (from LAB colour space) which differs subtly from the Lightness channel of HSL. I then imported the L and S channels from HSL into AstroImageJ, performed a maximum filter with radius 50, followed by minimum filter of radius 25, and a slight Gaussian blur (radius 5). I did a pixel-wise minimum combine of the S channel and this modified L channel, and saved the result. This resulted in a modified saturation channel, in which low intensity part of the image which are not close to a bright structure to have low saturation. I then combined the modified S channel, with Hue and Luminance as HSL in GIMP. The result is an image with just as much noise in the background as before (and it is still not quite flat), but at least the bright colours in the noise are gone.

[MarkAR]

Looks great. 

[Rodd]

Reaistic....That is my goal.  Well done