Tone Mapping in PI Alone (Or Primarily in PI)

[jerryyyyy]

Over at Astrobin Equinoxx published this great M16 image and I asked  for the methods. 



In any case, I was somewhat familiar with most of the techniques but never could pull them off right.  In general you have to go back and forth with Photoshop.  I think that this can all be done in PI, especially now that I can get star-free images with the Straton software. 

Where I come to grief is it seems setting the correct levels for the three different images.  The Ha still seems to overwhelm.  Do you just have to play around with the HT? 

Is there any workflow that anyone uses in PI that is understandable to someone who speaks PI?

PS  Then how do you put the stars back in? 

[pfile]

gerald has a video called "how to enhance nebulosity without pushing the stars"

http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=5384.0

maybe that is useful

rob

[jerryyyyy]

Thanks.  Downloaded the video which seems most relevant.  Does not seem to have one on Hubble Pallet, but looking at the OIII and H-alpha one.  Seems to use deconvolution primarily. 

[jerryyyyy]

This is still crude but I tried to do almost all of it in PixInsight. 



This is what the workflow looked like:

Subframe select and BatchPreprocess Tak images in PI.
No-star the stacked H O and S images with Straton.  Save them back into PI as FITs images.
Manually stretch using HT the de-starred images in PI using HT (next time will try masked stretch)
Create "Tone_Map_No_Stars image in PI using PixelMath and SHO = RGB.
Create Luminosity from H-alpha image (O and S luminosities tried but did not add much as they overlap)
Use Multichannel Synthesis AIP script to produce RGB image.
Create mask of core
Stretch core with LocalHisoEq
Invert mask and noise reduce periphery with AtrWaveletTransform
Manually stretch and clip with HT