If you have not already looked at the Intro page with the links to the files used, make sure you press the "PixInsight Tutorial" Button.
I'm a strong believer that you learn better when you actually follow along and do the procedure. Still, it is your choice.
It is also possible I will have false starts and will back up in the processing. That is fine if it occurs. That will show how I think about the processing.
Overall Workflow:
To a certain extent my workflow depends on what happens with the image, but here is a skeleton outline of some of the likely steps:
Luminosity:
Crop out stacking artifacts
Dynamic Background Extraction (or Automatic Background Extraction)
Create Point Spread Function for Deconvolution
Create Star Mask for Deconvolution
Create Overall Mask for Deconvolution
Deconvolution
Histogram Transformation
HDRMultiscaleTransform (Wavelets)
TGV Denoise
Histogram Transformation
RGB
Channel Combine the separate color stacks
Crop
Dynamic Background Extraction or Automatic Background Extraction to get rid of gradients
Color Calibration
Histogram Transformation
TGV Denoise
Histogram Transformation
Saturation done using the Curves Tool
L and RGB
Register (Align) the separate L and RGB images
LRGB Combine
Crop
Curves (on the luminosity portion) to adjust contrast
Luminosity: Cropping Out Stacking Artifacts.
If you bring up the luminosity stack and do a [ctrl]a (which does an auto-stretch, you will notice that there are black borders on some of the sides. They are caused by when we stack, we are aligning the stars. Unless you got things absolutely perfect when guiding, you have no flexure, and you did not dither, the FOV will be slightly different between the different subs. That mismatch of FOVs will show up as darker borders. In this case, it is most obvious on the left side of the image. This particular image only has minor amounts of it most obvious on the left edge.
I'm a strong believer that you learn better when you actually follow along and do the procedure. Still, it is your choice.
It is also possible I will have false starts and will back up in the processing. That is fine if it occurs. That will show how I think about the processing.
Overall Workflow:
To a certain extent my workflow depends on what happens with the image, but here is a skeleton outline of some of the likely steps:
Luminosity:
Crop out stacking artifacts
Dynamic Background Extraction (or Automatic Background Extraction)
Create Point Spread Function for Deconvolution
Create Star Mask for Deconvolution
Create Overall Mask for Deconvolution
Deconvolution
Histogram Transformation
HDRMultiscaleTransform (Wavelets)
TGV Denoise
Histogram Transformation
RGB
Channel Combine the separate color stacks
Crop
Dynamic Background Extraction or Automatic Background Extraction to get rid of gradients
Color Calibration
Histogram Transformation
TGV Denoise
Histogram Transformation
Saturation done using the Curves Tool
L and RGB
Register (Align) the separate L and RGB images
LRGB Combine
Crop
Curves (on the luminosity portion) to adjust contrast
Luminosity: Cropping Out Stacking Artifacts.
If you bring up the luminosity stack and do a [ctrl]a (which does an auto-stretch, you will notice that there are black borders on some of the sides. They are caused by when we stack, we are aligning the stars. Unless you got things absolutely perfect when guiding, you have no flexure, and you did not dither, the FOV will be slightly different between the different subs. That mismatch of FOVs will show up as darker borders. In this case, it is most obvious on the left side of the image. This particular image only has minor amounts of it most obvious on the left edge.
The dynamic crop tool is used to get rid of those edges. Here is what the image looks like while applying the tool.
And here is what the Dynamic Crop settings were:
To actually apply the Dynamic Crop, you click the green check mark at the bottom of the Dynamic Crop controls.