Reprocessing (I have nothing better to be doing)
September 22nd, 2011
The wife’s television schedule is causing more time hiding in the office than normal of late, and Fallout New Vegas can’t hold all of my attention, so instead I’ve been spending a bit of time browsing the Pixinsight forums looking into some alternative methods of imaging processing. Mainly of interest to me was the very excellent Masked Stretch script. I’m not the person to give a detailed description of how it works, but in a nut shell is performs a non-linear stretch of an image to reach a set median background level whilst controlling object growth, namely stars bloating.
I’ve also been refreshing my memory on the correct use of HDR Wavelet Transform, ACDNR, DBE for images without much background and Colour Calibration. Putting that all together I have taken a second look at three recent images to see what comes out of the other end.
The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula I think came out the best, showing cleaner detail, better colour and contrast and a more uniform background.
My Cygnus Core image also shows great improvement I think, though I may have let a small green tinge in whilst dialling back the red. However overall I think it’s a solid step forward.
The Cocoon nebula once again, this image has become the bain of my life and even though this is a major improvement it’s still not where I want it to be. Faint dust clouds seem to be a problem for either my location, equipment or processing skills, I’m just not sure which.
