StarTools

A friend asked me to process 25 Nikon RAW DSLR images of the Rosette nebula. I stacked and aligned in Maxim and loaded the result in ST. Cropped out stacking artifacts and AutoDev'd. Wow what a lot of odd gradients vignetting and light pollution! Upped the dark anomaly values and it improved, up to about 10 pixels, still bad gradients.

I re-watched Ivo's Google hangout video and heard his recommendations to mask out the good stuff and update the agressiveness. So I masked out the nebula and upped the Agressiveness until the image seemed clean at a 100% aggressivenes. Things went ok from then.

Was wondering how others deal with extreme gradients and color cast?

Waynr

100% aggressiveness is pretty... aggressive

It might be better trying to figure out what is causing the gradients. If they undulate so much that 100% aggressiveness is required, they are more often than not caused by something other than just light pollution, sky gradients or some other normal light source.

How does your data look without flats?