StarTools

I guess i should post this...

Ron seems to struggle with the blue and since he asked how to do here is perhaps something that he would like.
I reprocessed my Elephant trunk nebulae in HOO using the L-enhance stack only...

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2arqmyi1 ... kes35&dl=0

That should be the link to the startools log file, should anyone be interested

And here is the picture
It took quite some effort to pull the blue out in GIMP. I can't really write down all the steps since there were too many.
But i had to use color balance in the color menu to push some red to cyan. Then i used hue-saturation, color temperature to get it right.
However when i got some blue all the stars were blue too...no good...so i loaded the picture tiff file back in startools, used a starmask and re-colored the stars to let it look at least a bit descent.
The big yellow one needed a separate treament..
Then in the end i found i left too many stars in...i used Morphological transformation in PI to reduce the busy starfield...

All very unconventional, i guess. Frankly i don't care. I like the result. Others may have different opinions, off course...
The blue however did not come out so strong as in the Soul nebulae, maybe there is just less OIII in the trunk compared to the Soul. Just a guess, i don't have any idea...

The thing now is, well are still the stars. I don't know how to layer in my RGB stars from the color shot i have also..;I can make a starless image, but just the opposite is needed. It would be nice to have the red/blue trunk together with the RGB stars, like Stefan has in many of his pictures...

Suggestions, thoughts, comments always welcome...

hmm...i guess i am starting to understand...

I took a color stack , made a mask of the stars and inverted and substracted in the layer module. That left me with ...well stars.
Then again in the layer module combined them. My source color stack was not exactly the best,but well it was an experiment...
I aligned also the two different images with Star alignment in PI before i loaded them in the layer module of Startools..

Well i got some color in the stars, blue and yellow some red i like less...but i think this method could work..

Redid the whole process...but this time i used a starless nebulae image , i combined it with a nebulaless image, so only stars, Shrinked those too.

I think thisone is the best of the 3