Processing challenge, Needle Galaxy captured with zoom lens [Deep Sky] Processing techniques · Fabian Butkovich · ... · 10 · 588 · 6

FabianButkovich 0.90
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Hello all, just thought I'd offer my stacked raw image for processing if anyone would like to give it a go. The last time I did this with my image of M81 it was extremely popular!

NGC 4565

This is a recent acquisition of NGC 4565 The Needle Galaxy, taken with my humble 600mm Sigma lens, total integration is 16h56m.

I used 2X drizzle when stacking in Deep Sky Stacker to improve the final resolution a tad, this caused some confusion in PixInsight as I had to remember to halve my pixel resolution in the Image Solver wizard or else it would not plate solve correctly. 

Here is a screenshot of my processing workflow:

image.png

Excited to see what you all come up with! cheers and happy processing!
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messierman3000 7.22
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thanks, will try
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Ezequiel 1.51
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Hi, can you share the Fits file instead of the Tiff?
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FabianButkovich 0.90
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Hi, can you share the Fits file instead of the Tiff?

Yes, I have since added the FITS files in the same shared folder, do you also need dark calibration frames?
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Ezequiel 1.51
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Hi! here's my processing of your image. For me, the hardest part was to get rid of the gradients in the background. Chrominance Noise reduction was a good help, also I needed to remove all stars to work better in the background. These are the steps I used.

Dynamic Crop
Dynamic Background Correction
Background Neutralization
Resample
Histogram
Auto Histogram
SCNR
ACNR (Chrominance only)
Background Neutralization
Star Xterminator
Clone Stamp
Pixelmath (Add stars again)
Star Mask
Morphologial Star reduction
NoiseXterminator
Color Saturation
Curves Transformation
Range Selection
Exponential Transformation
Blurxterminator
NoiseXterminator
NGC_4565_DBE_DBE.png
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Astrokles 3.21
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Hello,
thanks for making the data available!
Quick and dirty with the TIFF file:
NGC_4565_Fabian Butkovich.jpg
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messierman3000 7.22
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NGC_4565 final.jpg
No crops, as can be seen by that vertical line to the left

I think you wanna merge all the versions together again, right?

so I think you can easily crop that out if you want

here's my steps:

1. Autostretch, to see what's immediately wrong with the image
2. There was gradients (tougher sharp ones actually), so I tried GradientCorrection, didn't help as much as I'd like, tried DBE, still not good, but helped, then I tried Graxpert, which helped the most with it's AI gradient removal.
3. Brought back into PI, tried SPCC, but it said something like "not enough data points" and didn't work, so I just accepted the colors as it was
4. Ran BXT at .92 with the nonstellar and .50 for the stars (image is still linear)
5. Ran Starnet
6. Applied Arcsinh stretch to the Stars, and a very slight curve stretch with curves transformation
7. Increased blue saturation about 100 percent, and reds/oranges by about 30 for the Stars
8. Applied ExponentialTransformation using SMI function with an order of 1.00, and a smoothing of 38, with the Lightness Mask box checked, to the stars. (this basically gives all the stars a small and faint halo)
9. Now I moved to Starless, applied Arcsinh stretch and Arcsinh black point increase, with a slight HistogramTransformation curve stretch.
10. Reduced orange saturation for the Starless, and increased blue saturation a bit (there was not much blue details I could bring out though; not sure how Markus did it)
11. Combined Starless and Stars: ---------------------- Stars + Starless - Stars * Starless --------------------- (which gives screening effect)
12. Now at the very end, I applied NXT: .60 for Denoise, 0 for Detail.
13. Sometime around step 11-12, I Solved the image using an image scale of 0.427"/px, and a pixel size of 2.4um, so I now used TypeCat script to detect the faintest galaxies and put that info in the Annotation which I did afterwards.



Annotation:
a_Annotated.jpg

I can PM the full res TIFF if you, (the OP), wants.
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FabianButkovich 0.90
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Very excellent edits! @Ezequiel I think yours is my favorite as far as color goes, it's a little on the soft side, but it was a pretty noisy image to begin with, perhaps this is from NoiseXterminator. 

@messierman3000  Your edit is the sharpest so far I think, thank you for sharing your PI workflow, there are a lot of functions I still have yet to explore in PI. I'm quote surprised you ran BlurXT up to 0.92 on nonstellar, I have never experimented with going that high. Good catch I probably will end up blending everyone's together lol. I'm actually surprised you couldn't get SPCC to work. 

@Markus Gorski Yours has the best contrast between the central dust band and surrounding galaxy, also the color accuracy is very good, but the background looks compressed or blotchy. 

Seeing as many of you utilized NoiseXT I might have to cave and purchase that, I just have been hesitant as I already have Topaz DeNoise AI for photoshop and I usually post-process my images in Photoshop after a certain point and either just use that tool for additional noise reduction or the Adobe Camera RAW noise reduction tool. 

It will be interesting once again to see all of these merged together. 

Thank you guys for your attempt! great work
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JanvalFoto 4.51
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I've only been working from my laptop which haven't had any PI updates done in a while, so very little/gentle noise reduction has been done, no NXT. Also, no SPCC as I just decided to throw the AutoColor script at it and manually adjust the histogram afterwards.

I've cropped all the stacking artefacts as they serve no purpose for the final result, I also resampled it by a factor of 2 with IntegerResample. All stretching has been done with HistogramTransformation as that is my preferred method.

Done_dark.jpg
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JanvalFoto 4.51
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EDIT: Post got duplicated, removed content.
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JanvalFoto 4.51
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I don't know why it got posted twice, I had some weird "bad gateway" issues from AB for a few minutes.
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