Astrophotography Diaries of a Rookie: Removing stars from images for tone mapping

For my recent image of the Crescent Nebula, I researched ways to combine the narrowband images. And I found a presentation by J-P Metsavainio (astroanarchy) from this years NEAIC about tone mapping. The main idea is to remove the stars from the images, then stretch and combine them (without bloating the stars) and then copy the stars back in (http://astroanarchy.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/power-of-tone-mapping.html).

I wanted to use this technique especially for the SII image of the Crescent nebula which has myriads of stars and only a very dim image of the nebula:

I have used Straton in the past for this, but never for an image of this complexity (many stars, dim signal). Trying it out, I get this:

Lots of distortion in this image. Zooming in:

Before:	After:

Clearly, lots of signal got lost when removing all these stars. Not only because there are so many, but also because some of them are quite bloated. Let's try again with the Ha image which has less and smaller stars:

This is the outcome of the Straton star removal:

Looks much better. Let's zoom in:

Before:	After:

There is some signal loss, but it's not as pronounced as with the SII image. So, it is an issue with these tiny stars that plaster the SII image and how to reconstruct what's underneath (and not to disturb the adjacent regions). I tried playing with the (few) parameters in Straton, but could not get better results.

Searching around (and especially looking for a Pixinsight-based solution), I found a couple of other attempts:

A Photoshop approach and Photoshop action by J-P Metsavainio himself
In this Pixinsight thread (search for "Remove stars" in the page) by Alejandro Tombolini
A video tutorial by Gerald Wechselberger for Pixinsight

#1 Photoshop actions by J-P Metsavainio

I installed the StarRemoving.atn actions and tried it out. There were actually two actions: RemoveStars and StarRemove1. Both delivered similar results:

RemoveStars:

StarRemove1:

The first one (which is just several times applying "Dust and Scratches" with various radius) did an OK job with the small stars and kept a lot of the nebula intact. But when zooming in, you can see that the image is very "blotchy". The second one left a lot of the stars...

#2 Approach by Alejandro Tombolini

The first step is to extract the stars and maybe some of the nebula. Using the approach by Alejandro, I get this:

Not bad for such a simple approach. But it missed a lot of the tiny stars:

Original: Extracted Stars:

When I use this star mask in the next step (subtract from the image), I get this image:

Which is not what we were looking for. We were looking for the isolated Nebula with maybe some star fragments still there.

I tried using the star mask from above (created using StarMask with smoothness=4). This results in an (almost) black image as the stars and the background have a different level then the original image (if I subtract the original image from the star mask, I basically get the star mask again). I.e. this star mask is good for protecting the image for subsequent operations, but not for direct manipulation.

#3 Approach by Gerard Wechselberger

The very first step here is to create a star mask that contains all stars. But I was not successful in this as my star masks never contained all smaller stars. I asked on the Pixinsight mailing list about how to improve the star mask to include more stars. And got a very quick response how to use the parameters in StarMask. This is what I got:

On first look, this looks much better - it also cuts out the nebula itself. Zooming in:

Original:	Extracted Stars:

This star mask would cover a lot of the underlying nebula and background. Trying different settings for smoothness:

Original:	Smoothness=16	Smoothness=8	Smoothness=4	Smoothness=2

With smoothness=2, the individual stars become complete squares - which isn't good.

I also wrote an email to Gerald asking him for advice. He was very kind and sent me back a series of steps to minimize the smaller stars.

Here is his sequence: