Critique on my Andromeda shot changed how I stack images

I posted a photo of Andromeda in here a few months back and someone pointed out that my background sky looked too smooth and artificial. They said it was probably from over stacking or using too aggressive a noise reduction setting in my software. I had been using DeepSkyStacker with the default settings and never really messed with the sliders. So I went back to my raw subs, tried a median stack instead of average, and backed way off on the luminance smoothing. The difference was kind of wild honestly. The stars looked sharper and the dust lanes had way more texture instead of looking like a blurry blob. Has anyone else had to totally redo their processing workflow because of one comment like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

river_allen16d ago

Yeah that comment would haunt me too, I get it.

ivanross16d ago

I heard someone say that the brain treats regret like a physical pain, which explains a lot.