With the new denoise scheme and other skills under my belt, I’ve been redoing the post-processing of many of my older images, with much better results. As another example, here is the Crescent nebula:
Steps taken to process this were the following:
- Levels adjustment to remove most of the background.
- Remove a radial background using the gradient tool with a subtraction layer.
- Denoise using “Iain’s noise reduction” G’MIC plugin.
- Touch up some remaining background artifacts in the corners.
- Wavelet sharpen with a layer mask to not blow out the brighter stars.
- Saturation increase.
