Because of how it promotes fine detail that can get lost in broadband, I think some nebula targets look best in just Ha -- the Bubble Nebula is a good candidate and Horsehead, hands down – but I also have to admit that an Ha only image is sort of a processing vacation...: ) Just one channel to pre-process, no big surprises,, no fiddling and re-fiddling with the colors.....
I tried a new (for me) star reduction technique mentioned here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM3-yAcAbZc I stretched the image twice, once normally and the second a much lesser stretch. I then separated stars and nebula for both, and combined the regularly stretched nebula and lesser stretched stars. The linked video above offers a couple tools, one of which uses this technique, but it reduces the stretch of a non-linear star-only image (that it creates) using the MTF function and I found that applying a lesser stretch to a linear image seemed to result in better stars than reversing the stretch of a non-linear image.
Cheers,
Scott
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