Processing attempt of polaris long exposure.

[realflow100]

Would anyone be able to give me any tips for cleaner/better processing of my images?

What I currently do is stack the image. take the stacked unprocessed image and do a slight curves adjustment in gimp (Just a mild one)
Then fix white balance usually with levels tool which does a fairly good job
Take the image and put it into fitswork4 and flatten the background gradient with variable flatten tool
Do some further curves edits to bring out fainter details and push the background sky down so its way darker and brings out a lot more of the faint details.
then I'll sometimes do color denoise and only in severe noise cases use NLM noise reduction just enough to reduce the noise so its not as offensive.
occasionally do things a little differently but this is the general idea.

Sometimes I will take the image back and forth between fitswork4 and gimp a few times (2 programs I use)

[Graeme1858]

Would anyone be able to give me any tips for cleaner/better processing of my images?

Morning RF

I split this post from your Polaris image thread to here.

Regards

Graeme

[Graeme1858]

What I currently do is stack the image. take the stacked unprocessed image and do a slight curves adjustment in gimp (Just a mild one)

That's pretty much what I do! Curves and Levels in Gimp. Then some colour balancing, increase saturation and sharpen.

You can do the colour balancing in Curves by selecting each colour in turn.

How do you get on with Fitswork? I've not used that one.

Regards

Graeme

[realflow100]

I try not to go too crazy with separate color curves unless theres an issue with the image
Fitswork has a variety of useful astronomy related options too. can sharpen/reduce star size. decrease blue/purple fringing halos around stars (Helped a lot in this image of polaris)

its pretty handy sometimes. the variable flatten option is very powerful for getting rid of background color gradients. especially from light pollution or vignetting. Since ive never had any good luck trying to use flat frames this works fine for me.