Replying to my own thread, I was reading an article I had copied from Sky & Telescope June 2011 by a great amateur imager named R Jay Gabany. I had seen him several times over the years at the AIC conferences in California several times. His primary choice of software, at least at the time, was Photoshop and he developed a process he called Layered Contrast Stretching which I just tried on this image. It seems to have been able to bring out the faint detail that I'm trying to reveal. So with that said, and I don't know if it can be replicated in PI without layers although I suspect someone with a good working knowledge of Pixel Math could most likely accomplish this. To bring out the faint detail, a copy of the image was made as a second layer. The layer then had a Hide All mask added and the blending mode was set to screen. Using the brush tool and a very low flow and opacity rate (15%) you brushed over the area of interest using multiple strokes to build up the effect. In my case this was all that was needed but he also had a second layer added with the blend mode set to soft light which increases contrast and color using another mask to add to areas needing it's assistance.
So the question begs to be asked, is there a way to do this in Pix Insight at this time? Image posted at
http://www.astral-imaging.com/NGC6888__LRGB_RC_1600LCS.htm with a darker version here
http://www.astral-imaging.com/NGC6888__LRGB_RC_1600LCSd.htm I hope I don't ruffle any feathers with this post but I would like to learn a way to do this in Pix Insight.
Many Thanks,
