I had made a post about "Busy" looking images a little while back and decided to start a new thread about it.
I was off work today and had some time to fool around with processing and stumbled across what may be a solution.
My typical workflow in
1: AutoDev - keep.
2: Bin 50% - keep.
3: Crop (to liking or at least enough to remove ALL stacking artifacts) - keep.
4: Wipe (Dark anomaly filter to 2 pixels) Do - keep.
5: AutoDev with slice of ROI - keep.
6: Decon (auto generate mask) Primary radius depends... If there's a bright star like Alnitak, I have to reduce to 1.1 because of the diffraction spikes but, otherwise 1..5 or so seems ok... - keep.
7: HDR ( maybe or maybe not "reveal core" depending on the object...) - keep.
8: Sharp - Do - keep.
9: Contrast - Do - keep.
10: Color - Legacy - (very little fiddling here) - keep.
11: Life - (Here's where I started experimenting) Ivo mentioned running this module without a mask and I couldn't. Looks like some sort of mask is required... I created a star mask then hit "shrink" once and then "grow" once then "invert"... I kept this mask and hit "Isolate" and the result (at least to me) was a much less "Busy" image...
Here's a few images processed both ways.
I can't seem to figure out how to get it all in order, but the 1st image displayed is my reprocess and the second is my original.