Cygnus Starfield -Star Reduction and Colour Management

I've certainly got a lot of mileage out of this dataset and it's been fun exploring new image processing tools. This composite was created with pre-processing from Maxim DL and fine tuning with Pixinsight. I'm hoping I will be able to do all my processing in Pixinsight over time, in the meantime I'm happy to straddle both worlds as they both have strong and weak points.

As I mentioned in a previous image of this region the numerous stars of the Milky Way make this a difficult subject to process and showcase the H-alpha regions.Previously I have used various tools to "remove" stars to reveal the detail of sky areas but this usually came at a cost of artifacts.In Pixinsight there is a tool called Morphological Transformation which basically allows you to erode the starfield. I found the management of this process fairly tuneable and does a good job and remains more subtle than other processes I've used. Still not perfect but I like the results and you can adjust fairly precisely to taste.

The overall colour of the images were managed through Pixinsight's extensive colour management tools I especially like the TGV Noise tool as it finely tunes colour noise situations that you just can't get right. The results are far more subtle just like all the tools in the software suite.