The Wizard Nebula

Processing Example

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Here is a comparison of processing for star control.

Processing Steps:

  1. 1.Align and Stack 40 x 6 minute subs in Nebulosity then taken to Pixinsight

  2. 2.Initial Crop

  3. 3.DBE tool

  4. 4.Background Neutralization

  5. 5.Color Calibration

  6. 6.Stretch with Histogram tool

  7. 7.Removed First layer using A’trous wavelets at 8 layers

  8. 8.Make Star Mask

  9. 9. HDRWT tool at 6 with lightness mask and star mask

  10. 10. SCNR tool for green at 1.0

  11. 11. ASDNR for Small scale noise in Lum and Chrom

  12. 12. Repeat Histogram stretch to remove clip unneeded black levels

  13. 13.Color Saturation Boost

  14. 14. Final Large Scale noise removal with ACDNR

  15. 15.Save as 16 bit Tiff and take to Photoshop

  16. 16. Carboni’s makes stars smaller

  17. 17. Carboni’s Star color boost

  18. 18. Resize to 100 Pix/inch

  19. 19.Save as Final Tiff

Processing Steps:

  1. 1.Align and Stack 40 x 6 minute subs in Nebulosity then taken to Pixinsight

  2. 2.Initial Crop

  3. 3.DBE tool

  4. 4.Background Neutralization

  5. 5.Color Calibration

  6. 6.Determine PSF with DPSF tool

  7. 7.Use PSF for mild deconvolution

  8. 8.Mild Erosion at 0.3 with Morphological Transformation Tool

  9. 9.Second mild Deconvolution using motion and appropriate angle to improve star shape due to tracking errors.

  10. 10.Stretch with Masked stretch tool 200 iterations X 2

  11. 11.Make Star Mask

  12. 12. HDRWT tool at 6 with lightness mask and star mask

  13. 13. SCNR tool for green at 1.0

  14. 14. ASDNR for Small scale noise in Lum and Chrom

  15. 15. Repeat Histogram stretch to remove clip unneeded black levels

  16. 16.Color Saturation Boost

  17. 17. Final Large Scale noise removal with ACDNR

  18. 18. Save as 16 bit Tiff and take to Photoshop.

  19. 19. At this point in Photoshop I did a remove stars tool to create layer with stars only and one with nebula only (Wei Hao Technique - bottom of page):


For the Nebula only image:

Used Ken Crawford’s Methods to sharpen foreground structures and create perspective.


For the stars only layer:

  1. 20. I used Blair star control and Neil’s method’s (Step 51 and on) for star control which were already better due to the masked stretch.


  1. 21.Then recombine layers together and Flatten.

  2. 22. Final tweaks to Levels and curves.

  3. 23. Carboni’s Star color boost

  4. 24. Resize to 100 Pix/inch

  5. 25. Save as Final Tiff