What are your favourite tricks for masking?

[RobF2]

I'd be grateful to hear how advanced users go further than Starmask to hide OR protect backgrounds or brighter features when processing.  ACDNR has a nice mask preview and tweaking feature, but I frequently find myself wanting to mask everything except say a single central galaxy (or bright nebula).

Is there any clever way to construct such masks without resorting to pixel math tom-foolery?

[Tom OD]

Hi Rob,
I'm looking for the same info. On Rogelio Andreos page, "deepskycolours" he show show to make some masks using the ATWT tool.
Tom.

[RBA]

Is there any clever way to construct such masks without resorting to pixel math tom-foolery?

The thing here is that you're going to build very different masks for different tasks, and likewise, masks too will be different depending on the image, the problem at hand, etc.

So there really isn't a cooking recipe for THE PERFECT STAR MASK, but every situation will have a star mask that will be the closest to "perfect" you can find for that particular situation.

The star mask I build in this tutorial http://blog.deepskycolors.com/archive/2011/09/08/star-size-reduction-via-Morphological-.html includes a few techniques that I haven't seen many people use (modifying the source image, in this case with an HDRWT, prior to building the mask...  or using the contours option), and that may be useful depending on the situation...

[RobF2]

Thanks Rogelio, I wasn't aware of that tut on your site - must check it out.  Anything that leads to a new technique for the "quiver" is potentially invaluable.   8)