Best way to fix saturated star cores

[lucchett]

Hello,
I hope someone can advice on how to overcome this issue.

Having a field of about 2x2 degrees, I usually end up having some bright stars in the field of my ABG camera.
These stars saturate using a 600 sec exposure, a lenght that I find ok for the main subject and CCD (16803).

I am looking for a nice way to give back color to this saturated star cores.

The idea would be to use some sort of masked HDR combination (which I have never used..), using shorter exposures.
Can someone help me indicating the basic steps or an alternative way?

Many thanks,
Andrea

[pfile]

i think if you just make a stack of a shorter subexposure length, then register it to your main stack, you can just use the HDRComposition process to bring in the unsaturated data. pay attention to the masks it creates to see if you are really replacing the correct blown-out data with the non-blown out data. also this should all be done when the images are still in linear format.

[lucchett]

Ok,
So the mask is the critical part.
Thank you for the insights,
Andrea