"Busy" looking images revisited...

[Larry 1969]

Good evening all!

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 StarTools is this:

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.

[Greenman]

Thanks, Larry yet to play with Startools I have the demo, just the time I lack. Seem to be a must take a look program.

[bobharmony]

That is a very nice result, Larry. Doing a direct comparison shows that you haven't thrown the stars away, while allowing the target to show though clearly. Nice work, and thanks for sharing!

Bob

[Larry 1969]

Thanks, Larry yet to play with Startools I have the demo, just the time I lack. Seem to be a must take a look program.

StarTools is really great software but, like all photo processing software (at least I think so), it comes with a learning curve.
The demo version doesn't allow you to save the image after spending a ton of time trying the different modules and that's unfortunate.
I think it would be better if it were more like Pixinsight's demo (45 day free trial) that allowed for saving the image.
Plenty of folks on here use StarTools and they were kind enough to walk me through their processes and I've adapted some of my own.

Larry