Tackling airglow

[SyedT]

I took this image a couple of years ago and thought I'd have a go at re-processing. This was taken in relatively dark skies (Bortle 4) but with population nearby, and scattered clouds didn't help. I'm having trouble getting rid of the background tint. I've read that this is usually due to airglow so can be tough to mitigate. Any words of wisdom would be appreciated! Happy to send over a raw TIFF as well.

 

Edited May 3, 2020 by SyedT

[x6gas]

Can't help with any advice but that's a lovely image!

[SyedT]

6 minutes ago, x6gas said:

Can't help with any advice but that's a lovely image!

That's very kind, thank you! I just have a feeling that I can extract a lot more from it, but am at the point of giving up!

[x6gas]

It's just maybe a little turquoise so can you isolate the sky and tweak it with selective colour in PS?

What was this taken with?

[SyedT]

1 minute ago, x6gas said:

It's just maybe a little turquoise so can you isolate the sky and tweak it with selective colour in PS?

What was this taken with?

Will give that a go! What I'm having trouble with is that the colour balance seems very fine. The tiniest tweak in the sliders sends it the other way! Perhaps I need to come back to it another day.

Canon 6D, Samyang 14 mm f2.8.

[discardedastro]

Yeah, tricky. I pulled it into PI, built a quick mask to protect the bottom of the image and just used CurvesTransformation (separate G/B channels) and ColorSaturation. I did have a play with dynamic background extraction but not to much avail.

I think it's hard to aim for a really neutral sky colour without a good reference. It's a fantastic image though! Here's my attempt at tweaking to remove the turquoise cast:

Pushing much more aggressively with DBE and more "creative" curve correction can kill off most of the background but I probably screwed the colour in the process:

[SyedT]

1 minute ago, discardedastro said:

Yeah, tricky. I pulled it into PI, built a quick mask to protect the bottom of the image and just used CurvesTransformation (separate G/B channels) and ColorSaturation. I did have a play with dynamic background extraction but not to much avail.

I think it's hard to aim for a really neutral sky colour without a good reference. It's a fantastic image though! Here's my attempt at tweaking to remove the turquoise cast:

Pushing much more aggressively with DBE and more "creative" curve correction can kill off most of the background but I probably screwed the colour in the process:

Thanks for having a play with it! I think I'll run the image of the milky way separately in DBE and see what it does! It seems to correct the background very nicely.