Nice Learning about PCC!

Wayne Hixson

I had recently been at the Oregon Star Party and done some OSC imaging. The skies were very dark and cloudless, but haze and smoke from Cali permeated the air until the last day. I expect this was why my M33 galaxy had a muddy green/brown tinge even after DBE and BN and PCC. Following the Fundamentals Workflow PCC/DBE tutorial I tried doing PCC first instead after debayer and checking the Background Neutralization box, and including a background preview. Amazing. The sky turned dark neutral gray and the galaxy kind of an almost silver color after a linked STF stretch. There is some reddish tone in the Ha regions and I see some blue also. It will take some saturation but I’m starting from a better place.

I now plan to do DBE on the color image, but do you recommend extracting the Lum before deconvolution and following the rest of the Workflow like it was an LRGB image?

Thanks,

Wayne

BlockHead

Hi Wayne,

Typically the answer is "yes" in terms of making a grayscale image to operate on . It does depend somewhat on the image itself- so there isn't a general answer really. Certainly if you have the signal for deconvolution and other strong contrast enhancements- doing this on a luminance (grayscale) image is best...and then coloring it with the RGB (that may take a different path in terms of stretching, noise reduction...etc).

Not a super helpful answer- but something to think about.

-the Blockhead