Everything goes great until I try to balance color

[Mike in Rancho]

Yeah that first one was pretty cooked on the saturation. I was trying to figure out what had to be done to get that rich brown-orange like the apod or other references. I get the feeling they are probably done in layers. Probably even starless layers on the nebulosity, considering a whole star didn't make it back in.

I tried again a little tamer. Actually used the uncalibrated preset in Wipe to try to get some control of those various background colored areas. After that and a no ROI stretch, I think I just ran default Contrast and then Color. I used a star mask to color the stars at default with sampling, kept that and then inverted the mask to color the rest - pulling out green and modifying the saturation. Then a default SS and denoise to end.

No other touchups. Anyway, not quite as loud as earlier. To copy the apod though I think would take layer blends.

xonefs iris st8 2a.jpg (415.87 KiB) Viewed 2296 times

[xonefs]

here's my latest take- I'm mostly happy with with it for now and this level of work but open to feedback

edit: I didn't bin since I want the resolution for prints and I'm not oversampled at around 1.5arcsec/pixel. The dust still lacks the 3D look Che got with the dust popping out more so I'm wondering what I'm missing to get that and if I can get it without binning.

[Carles]

Hi : )

I had a go at your data, too.
Really good quality files indeed!

Since the framing was similar to mine of the same object
( https://www.astrobin.com/mk1uz0/ )
I've processed it similarly to mine
I kinda like the brown-ish colour of the fine clouds Althought
not sure if that is a correct representation of it (maybe it is since there's plenty of orange-yello stars around..?

In my case since my laptop is old and slow, I had to bin all files, compose then FilmDev->Contrast->HDR x2 -> SVDecon->Sharp-> Colour (inverted star mask to get white balance from them)-> colour again (stark mask to recover the colour of stars) -->Shrink (auto mask - Classic) and Track off ---> FilmDev to add some Skyglow and reduce a bit Blue

Screenshot-1.jpg (344.76 KiB) Viewed 2282 times

I was pretty happy with mine, but Now I kinda prefer yours haha (although mine a bit more red-ish, Bortle 5 and OSC with L-pro 4h 40min total integration )

Thanks for sharing the data...now I think I want to add more time to mine! haha

Clear Skies

Carles.