Perseus and Retinue

[Baurice]

It had taken over a day to process this image using DeepSky Stacker, GraXpert and GIMP. It shows the constellation of Perseus, with the Seven Sisters (a.k.a Pleiades, M45) to the south and Aries and Triangulum to the east.

[Makuser]

Hi Philip. A very nice image of the constellations. Excellent contrast and nice star shapes in your capture. Thanks for sharing another fine work with us on here Philip and the best of regards.

[OzEclipse]

Hi Phillip,
Sometimes, passing a set of images from one app to another to another can result in poor or over processing. You didn't give much info about capture or sky conditions so take my comments with a grain of salt. Perhaps you are shooting in very LP skies and have had to lean hard on the processing to suppress the LP?

Specifically:
1. I think you have clipped the bottom end of the histogram (the shadows) much too hard. Even in my nice Bortle 1/2 skies, the sky doesn't look that black. When I "get info" on a dark area with no stars, I look to get a reading of 15-30 levels all similar in RGB.

2. All of the brighter stars are clipped or the wells saturated so that all the brighter stars look similar brightness. Bright stars in this shot have no colour.

regards
Joe