please help, problems about post processing

[Bc0428]

hello, i live in bortle 8 skies and i tried to photograph the milky way last night with an astronomik cls filter.

this is what happened:

this is one of the subs, 20 secs, iso 1600, f/4.0

i tried to stack 66 of them in sequator and this is what i got :

 

although the milky way could be seen faintly, im not satisfied with the color balance at all. i tried to adjust the levels from photoshop(its still bluish, but im not familiar with it), re-stack in DSS(it didnt work at all, maybe due to the foreground?), lightroom(but the milky way didnt appear at all.). so the one above is the best i got.

 

should i adjust the colour balance of each subs before stacking? any ways to batch-process all the subs?

besides, it seems i couldnt further highlight the milky way, what am i missing?

 

im very new to this, so please tell me any basics im missing, or any tutorials for milky way under heavy light pollution? also, any method to eliminate the blue cast? i followed a few tutorials and i still couldnt master it.

[ollypenrice]

This is a big ask. I'll speak for Photoshop. Briefly you should try to get the top left of each colour channel's histogram peak aligned. You can only do this by moving them to the left. Move the black point slider to the right to do so.

There is a huge difference in brightness between the artificial lights low down and the Milky Way higher up. The only way to see the best of both is to do two stretches and layer mask them. This is a good tutorial: http://www.astropix.com/html/j_digit/laymask.html

Olly

Edited June 21, 2020 by ollypenrice
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