Same Data, 9 Months Apart [Deep Sky] Processing techniques · The0s · ... · 1 · 103 · 2

Hello The0s,

This is just my opinion of course, but the two images still seem quite similar to me (it’s difficult to form a proper judgment without full-resolution versions, especially for aspects like noise…); in fact, the first version even appears more "natural" to me, both in terms of color rendering and the appearance of the stars. The difference in the overall look between the two images mainly lies in the saturation and selective color adjustments, but achieving a highly saturated image is not particularly difficult—and it’s not an end in itself.

As for the stars, I find the first image more successful, as the "Gaussian" profile has been well preserved. In the second image, the smaller stars appear somewhat "muted"; this is typically a result of a "starless" processing workflow where the stars are extracted, processed separately with their own histogram stretch, and reinserted at the end of the processing—I'm not sure if that’s what was done here, but it certainly looks like it.

One positive aspect of the second image is that the stars are well-colored, and some faint signal regions are more clearly visible.

Nice processing in both cases IMO : Reprocessing old data is always an interesting exercise to assess how much progress has been made purely on the processing side!
jb