StarTools

Long time since posting anything new.

Post processing in StarTools, exclusively. The image was processed manually in PI, with no further intervention.

As described in Astrobin, this is a combination of iso800 f/5.6 and iso1600 f/6.3 images over 2 nights February and March (200mm Canon Lens). Camera is a temperature regulated Canon 1000D (-5C).

It was processed on a laptop and may appear overdone on a good monitor.

I want to add more data to this - perhaps next year as Orion will be receding to the horizon next new moon.

Comments, suggestions, reprocessing challenge, whatever. This was try 3 or 4 and I am amazed by the detail that popped out on this occasion.

Processing was basic.

Develop, Wipe, Develop, HDR Reveal, Life Isolate, Colour with inverted 4 layer star mask carried over from the Life module, Track and noise reduction.

http://www.astrobin.com/82477/

That's an exquisite collection of Orion's gems. Excellent detail, colors and nicely framed too.
This is very deep as it is with loads of the interstellar medium visible already.
From where I'm sitting, it appears that processing on the laptop has had no material effect on the quality; it's spot-on in my humble opinion!

Thanks Ivo. I have updated the Astrobin image following additional processing - HDR Optimize Brighten Dark and further colour saturation with a 4 layer exlcude purple mask.

http://www.astrobin.com/82477/

Very nice Rowland!
Che

Thanks Che. I plan on making a project of this, but it may have to wait until next year.

Fantastic field. You make a great image, with a very well colour balance and a lot of signal. Congrats! Add to fav!

Thanks Akeru. I'll keep working on improvement.

http://www.astrobin.com/82477/F/

Here is a new revision. I have added darks. Now that I have a full set and the images have been prepeocessed completely - the joy of regulated cooling - the difference is striking.

Workflow same as before, except the mask did not exclude purple, along with a little Sharpen, 33%. Just enough to remove blur from the lovely veil of dust at the bottom right of the image. The biggest challenge for me was colour balance. I struggle with controlling the greens. Possibly a monitor issue?

ST has done a great job.

This is an update using a different post processing workflow. It is a derivation of the DSLR-LLRGB method, but a little different. RGB channels were extracted from the integrated image and saved separately. The RGB image was converted to greyscale and saved as L.

In StarTools, L, R, G, B were combined in LRGB with channel interpolation off - not sure if this was appropriate. The composite image was then Binned stretched and cropped lightly. Remainder of processing was my standard workflow as in previous post, with a a 40% wavelet sharpen.

As in the LLRGB method, the L channel could be processed prior to combining - I will give this a go in ST.

Not sure if I have gained anything here but it was an interesting experiment.

Rowland wrote:This is an update using a different post processing workflow. It is a derivation of the DSLR-LLRGB method, but a little different. RGB channels were extracted from the integrated image and saved separately. The RGB image was converted to greyscale and saved as L.

In StarTools, L, R, G, B were combined in LRGB with channel interpolation off - not sure if this was appropriate. The composite image was then Binned stretched and cropped lightly. Remainder of processing was my standard workflow as in previous post, with a a 40% wavelet sharpen.

As in the LLRGB method, the L channel could be processed prior to combining - I will give this a go in ST.

Not sure if I have gained anything here but it was an interesting experiment.

Both images look great Rowland!
StarTools already creates a synthetic luminance from RGB, so the process wasn't quite necessary, but it looks great nonetheless!