Image processing help

[ppeake]

I tried to take a milky way photo from my home, not terribly successful because of light pollution, being made worse by a thin cloud layer.



This is a single exposure processed in Affinity Photo.

I thought that I might be able to do better processing it in PixInsight.
So, load the image (RAW file - NEF). Run Debayering, run SCNR to remove the green.



Tried boosting overall saturation,




then played with curves and histogram transformation.
I really can't get the contrast boost needed to bring out the milky way. This is about as good as it gets.



Any hints from the processing gurus on here as to how to get detail at least as good (hopefully better) than I got pretty easily with Affinity Photo??

[STEVE333]

I downloaded your image and used a mask and some contrast enhancement to try to boost the contrast of the Milky Way that was above the clouds. If you are interested I can post the result to see if you like it. If you do I can outline the steps I used.

Thanks for sharing your image with us.

Steve

[ppeake]

Yes please. For some reason, I just am missing how to adjust just that small band of brightness to pull out the Milky Way ... I thought it would be easy with curves/histogram, but it seems not.

[STEVE333]

Yes please. For some reason, I just am missing how to adjust just that small band of brightness to pull out the Milky Way ... I thought it would be easy with curves/histogram, but it seems not.

I wasn't able to pull anything out of the clouds along the bottom portion of the sky. If I stretched that portion of the image it just got brighter and brighter. So, I used the GAME script to create a mask that just selected the clear portion of the sky and Milky Way above the clouds. I always blur the GAME mask to soften the edges so there isn't an abrupt transition in the processed image. Then I used:
HistogramTransformation to gently stretch the sky(and Milky Way).
CurvesTransformation to increase contrast.
LocalHistogramEqualization to further increase contrast (Kernel Radius = 110, Amount = 0.5).
CurvesTransformation to slightly increase the color saturation.
SCNR (Green, Average Neutral) to remove any unwanted Green.

The attachment below shows the result.

Thanks for letting me play with your image. Hope this helps.

Steve

[ppeake]

That is impressive .. especially from a reduced resolution jpg image!

The original RAW file is here if you want to play: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/alpha.vogon.net-photos/_DSC0888.NEF

[STEVE333]

That is impressive .. especially from a reduced resolution jpg image!

The original RAW file is here if you want to play: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/alpha.vogon.net-photos/_DSC0888.NEF

Thanks for sharing the data. I'll try processing it.

Steve