starless images

[Les Tilly]

I gave the starless image treatment to my Monkeyhead Nebula I think its a little dark but very interesting process now have to figure how to add a not so stretch starfield

2nd image is an attemp to add stars

[Tim]

It's arty Les, but i'm not keen personally.

It's tedious to do, but doing a reduce stars layer with each stretch iteration is possibly the most effective way I think.

The reduce stars tool in Noels tools takes your original image, doubles it in size, reduces the size of the star with a minimum filter, then shrinks back to original size, (bit more to it than that, but thats the basic).

On my shots with the OSC qhy8, I often wish I could take the stars just as they appear after the first levels and stretch, nice, crisp, colourful and clean, and apply them to the final image. There must be a way.......just haven't found it

Nice monkey btw

[MartinB]

Very nice monkey but I prefer him with the dandruff

[Les Tilly]

I have a star removal plug in That I used to remove the stars from the Monkey head I believe I got it from Astro Anarchy: PS-actions

[Psychobilly]

Thought I recognised the characteristics of the plugin... for the starless one the remnants of the ones in the neb need to be sorted as well... I like the second one...

TJ - Sounds like a job for star masking and taking them onto a separate layer with a transparent background ... and dropping them back in maybe... OK thats probably a massively over simplistic view of the process...

[Les Tilly]

I say just play around with your images and try new things its all in the art of Manipulation of the image strech ,tweak, tweak somemore and have fun just remember to duplicate before each adjustment