reducing star sizes

[giumar69]

Hi to all.
Following some tutorials, I am able to reduce the size of the stars. However, this operation is usually performed on strongly stretched image, where the brightest stars are strongly saturated. Consequently, the brightest stars still remain saturated, poorly smoothed and with too little color even after the size reduction.
Please, could you give me a suggestion on how to obtain better results on brightest stars?

Thnaks in advance.
Giuseppe.


PS:
I have a doubt: by strongly stretching an image, and consequently saturating some its part, is original information on signal and color definitively lost?

[drmikevt]

Yes, once the stars are clipped you can not recover color information.   

Try this:
 - Prepare your RGB and L frames as you like
 - Just before LRGB combine, run HDRMultiscaleTransform on both images (set to 6 or 7 or 8 layers)
 - Comine LRGB as normal

Are you stars better? 

Mike

[chrisvdberge]

Use MaskedStretch for your (initial) stretch. If you find the contrast lacking (I usually don't mind that much to be honest) you can always duplicate the image and stretch with MaskedStretch for the stars and combine with the 'regular stretch'

[giumar69]

Thanks a lot!!

Giuseppe