M81/82 12hr RGB: it's great, but I feel like I can do better

[pipnina]

I spent a lot of time twiddling with this in PixInsight, working out the order i should calibrate, background extract, denoise, how much to stretch vs curve manupulate etc. Despite knowing there's a fair bit of IFN in this image I just can't seem to bring it out to shine despite my 12h of data. At this point I am not sure if I would be best served spending the next few clear nights (whenever they appear) taking luminance frames to try and improve the signal as quickly as possible, or if I should continue capturing RGB for as long as I can in hopes it improves sufficiently...

Either way I likely need 4 or even 8x the SNR in this data to resolve that IFN clearly. It makes me think I've been doing something wrong during capture or processing since others seem to draw it out of this region nicely, but it could just be my seaside city being a murky mess!

I couldn't 100% decide on which temperature I liked best, warmer or cooler, so here's both:

 

Tips welcome as right now I am not sure where I need to be going with this haha.

Happy hunting

[mackiedlm]

Thats really nice. I dont see a whole lot of difference between your warma nd cold versions?

At 12 hours with a IMX571 you should for sure be able to bring out some IFN. Are you removing the stars and Stretching with GHS - that woul be the first steps I'd try but you'd need to do some masking (GAME script would work well) to really bring it out.

[Mr Spock]

Looks really good. I think I prefer the top one. It's only a slight difference though.

[Bluemoonjim]

One could be forgiven for thinking they are the same image  
I think your images sum up the tribulations of astrophotography. We can drive our selves mad with fretting about incremental changes and lose sight of the magic of viewing what is out there.
The pursuit of perfection with imperfect means.

Lovely image, well done

[pipnina]

1 hour ago, mackiedlm said:

Thats really nice. I dont see a whole lot of difference between your warma nd cold versions?

At 12 hours with a IMX571 you should for sure be able to bring out some IFN. Are you removing the stars and Stretching with GHS - that woul be the first steps I'd try but you'd need to do some masking (GAME script would work well) to really bring it out.

For sure there's IFN data in there, but even with noise-x it's proved very difficult to bring into the image in a nice way due to a lack of signal. I'll have a look at the GAME script to see what I can do, thanks!

1 hour ago, Mr Spock said:

Looks really good. I think I prefer the top one. It's only a slight difference though.

I think I too prefer the top one, although yes the difference is slight. They sit on the balance between "too muddy and warm" and "too sterile" i think.

32 minutes ago, Bluemoonjim said:

One could be forgiven for thinking they are the same image  
I think your images sum up the tribulations of astrophotography. We can drive our selves mad with fretting about incremental changes and lose sight of the magic of viewing what is out there.
The pursuit of perfection with imperfect means.

Lovely image, well done

Indeed, I find myself perpetually frustrated by a lot of my work as it never quite lives up to what I wanted to produce, but every image I work on brings me a little closer I think to something that'll make me happy, but there's still a few areas I need to work on and starless processing is one of them!

 

Having looked back at the image with my monitor at the more comfortable 0 brightness setting I notice the IFN becomes totally invisible, but since I processed the image at 100% monitor brightness, trying to push the data further resulted in it looking a bit overcooked.

I think this edit is probably better for lower brightness screens- a difficult balance to strike! Maybe when HDR displays become more common it will be easier to create images that look the close to the same for everyone who views them "properly".