Gee, Steve. This is a tough one!
Here's what I did using the latest beta.
As always, I do an AutoDev to see what we got. The data seems to be pre-color balanced. It appears to be very, very noisy with the spiral arms just sitting above the noise floor. This is going to be a tough one! I further see a yellow bias and noise grain that looks like its coarser than 1 pixel - a sign that this data is from a DSLR and the noise was introduced by the debayering stage.
I bin to 50% to reduce noise and at the very least reduce noise grain to 1 pixel.
I also crop the image to frame M101 a bit better.
Next I do a Wipe, Dark Anomaly Filter at 5px (to be absolutely sure no anomalous dark pixels interfere with true background detection). The 'Temporary Autodev' setting lets us see what we're doing. Considering the apparent lack of flats, the result doesn't look to bad.
I choose to do a manual Develop (I don't usually), as I really want to keep that noise floor under control. I could've use an AutoDev with an ROI and turning Outside ROI way down. AutoDev can struggle a little with sever noise like this - it just wants to bring it out. [Digital Development] set to [87.08 %]
Not expecting too much in the face of so much noise, I try my luck at Decon, I choose a radius of 1.4px, Parameter [Regularization] set to [1.15 (smoother, less detail)].
I use the HDR 'Reveal' preset and set 'Detail Size Range' to 32px to make it a bit more aggressive.
I perform some wavelet sharpening, setting Amount 200%, setting scale 1 to 0% (as to not exacerbate any fine noise).
In the Color module I let it do its thing, and set Cap Green to Yellow. The muted colors are typical of an image that was shot with a CLS filter in place. Specific hues spedtral lines were irreversibly removed from the red and green channels and no amount of rebalancing won't bring them back.
In a last attempt to push back noise a little, I use the Life module's Isolate preset. I overdrive the Saturation by 200% and set Strength to 50%.
Finally I stop Tracking and perform final noise reduction;
Parameter [Color Detail Loss] set to [6 %]
Parameter [Brightness Detail Loss] set to [20 %]
Parameter [Redistribution Kernel] set to [5.6 pixels]
Parameter [Read Noise Compensation] set to [33.54 %]
Parameter [Smoothness] set to [51 %]
And this is what I ended up with;
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- M101_new_32.jpg (62.93 KiB) Viewed 5243 times
