Yes, probably not much to do for HDR module due to the appearance of this dark nebula. Did SV Decon had no impact to the stars too? Stars do look like needles, like always or often for you. 
Even the brighter stars are pin-points. Have you used the Shrink module? And with which settings? And I wonder why your stars show these nicely coloured halos, reaching out so far into their surroundings. 
It did, but not on as many stars as I am used to. Especially fainter and smaller stars were unaffected. Maybe my sampling was different and contained brighter stars than usual. The bright stars were fine as you already noticed.
Yes, Shrink is an important part of the workflow for me
I used the Tighten mode with 15 (instead of 10) iterations and also bumped up the sliders for color tame and halo.Yeah, that seems to be a deficit of my optical train. I see that (too) often. But I appreciate that you call them nicely colored
I guess these halos are just part of my train's PSF. If you have bright targets the outer halos don't get stretched too much so that you don't notice so badly. But if you stretch agressively as was the case here (due to the dark nebula...) also the halos get stretched. They are real detail of course for ST. First of all: I indeed like this look of some of your images having these coloured halos (I often do that
, but in this case it was not meant to be ironic!). I was wondering if this was done with some kind of post-processing. It looks like only the chrominance signal is smeared / spread out whereas luminance is not:
Hmm, I dunno. He doesn't say much and some info is missing. And even if you look at some of his other uploads, I think it's all in Swedish.Stefan B wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 8:34 pm Yeah, not too bad. But sometimes I see images like this (https://www.astrobin.com/r732ag/)
and ask myself...how? The stars are extremely defined. Point SPREAD is barely the right word for this star appearance. Or are the stars actually bloated here and using ST the stars would look like in my image since they wouldn't get overstretched?
Regards
Stefan
It's GermanMike in Rancho wrote: ↑Tue Aug 22, 2023 6:22 am And even if you look at some of his other uploads, I think it's all in Swedish.
He is an Austrian astrophotographer who has a YouTube channel which explains part of his recognition. When I was binge watching AP videos, I frequently watched his. I guess you and Ivo wouldn't have been too impressed by his workflow since then he used APP for stacking, gradient removal and initial stretching and then went on to PS. But still I liked the look of his images. They had a natural look and didn't look too overprocessed. Especially his stars weren't reduced too much.I don't think so. He only recently switched to PI and the XT tools. The image is from 2020. Don't think that applies.Mike in Rancho wrote: ↑Tue Aug 22, 2023 6:22 am If I were to guess, I would say maybe the galaxy and star field is mashed together via the whole star removal thing.
You should definitely give it a try! Might be more rewarding than you think. And yes, I of course remember you mentioning that you passed my hometown! Glad you enjoyed the travel!
I bet the skies are great. Unfortunately I haven't been to Austria since I am doing AP. I'd definitely appreciate the dark skies now...