 Today's video is sponsored by FlexiSpot. This is a dual narrowband filter, and for anyone that doesn't know, this is the type of filter to use with color cameras when capturing emission nebulae. It can be used under any kind of sky, but it's especially effective at blocking out the light pollution of a city sky. And the reason it's so effective at light pollution blocking is it's just passing the O3 emission line and the H-Alpha emission line blocking everything else. But you're maximizing the potential of your color camera because the HA signal is being captured by all the red pixels and the O3 signal is being captured by all the green and blue pixels. But then when it comes time to process the data, that's when we maybe run into a problem, because if we try to process normally, the HA signal will typically dominate. So even after color balancing, we're left with a photo that it's almost entirely red, which can be a bit boring and lifeless. So the trick to processing with this type of filter, a dual narrowband filter, is actually to treat it like you shot mono narrowband data and to separate out the O3 and HA signal while they're still linear. So now you have two black and white photos, you then stretch those separately and finally recombine them with a color palette to your taste. In this video, I'll show you how to do exactly that three different ways. First with the free and open source software, Serial and GIMP. Second with DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop. And third with PIX Insight. And then specifically with a new free script in PIX Insight from Bill Blanshin and Mike Cranfield called Narrowband Normalization. But before I jump into the tutorial, let me give you a quick desk tour, which is something I've never done before. So this is my main shot, which you've probably seen before. But let's turn the camera around and do a little bit of behind the scenes. So this is my fairly complex setup. I have a lot going on, including both Mac and Windows computers, a teleprompter slash confidence monitor with a camera behind that I also use for zoom calls and other things. I have a remote controlled light here above for my face and of course a microphone. And all of this is attached to a FlexiSpot E7 desk. And this video is sponsored by FlexiSpot. They sent out this desk, this C7 ergonomic chair and the monitor arm for me to try out. But the funny thing is, I was already using a FlexiSpot desk before they even reached out. I like it because it's a very solid desk. I can attach all of this stuff to it and not worry about it shaking about because these legs are incredibly heavy and sturdy. The standing desk has a dual motor, one for each leg, and that means it can handle a huge amount of weight. Even when in the standing position, I have no problems or worries about putting all this stuff on the desk. Another thing I really appreciate since I spend a lot of my time in my desk is that I can make it a very ergonomic setup. So I can have both my arms and legs at the correct angle for good posture when typing while seated. And you know, nothing is strained here between my vertical mouse and these very adjustable armrests. I can be sure I won't get any repetitive stress injuries, which I do worry about. I initially wanted a standing desk for health reasons, but I also picked FlexiSpot on the end because it's one of the more affordable on the market. And I've been very impressed by the chair they sent. It's much better than my old desk chair. I like the mesh back for ventilation and that it offers a lot of support and adjustment options, all for a really reasonable price. FlexiSpot is currently having their Labor Day sale, which ends on September 10th, and they're offering up to 50% off their normal prices on both the standing desks and the ergonomic chairs. And then in addition to the 50% off, Nebula Photos viewers can get an extra $30 off by using the code Nebula for orders over $500 with the link in the description. Okay, here's Zero. This is the latest version as of September 4th, 2023. This is Zero 1.2.0 Release Candidate 1. I'm going to go ahead and start by going here to my preferences, go down to miscellaneous, and just make sure that I'm pointed correctly at a Starnet executable and Starnet weights folder. So if you're not using, if you haven't installed Starnet, all you have to do is just download the command line version. And I have a video about it, and then point to that version from here in Zero. Now, if you're on a Mac like I am, there's a couple more steps. So you can watch that other video if interested in getting Starnet working, because I am going to be using that in my processing here. Okay, the next thing I'm going to do is just set my working directory. So to do that, I'm going to go up here to the little blue home icon, and I'll just set my working directory to this folder right here on my desktop. Okay, and if we look at that folder, it has my data already separated into these sub folders or directories with the bias frames, the darks, the flats, and the lights. Okay, that's what Zero wants when it uses these, when you go use these scripts. Now, of course, you can write your own scripts or download scripts from the internet that don't use the calibration frames, but I would always recommend using calibration frames. Now, the script that I'm going to use for dual narrowband data is this one, OSC one shot color extract HA03. And what it'll do is it will actually mathematically sort of separate out the HA03 based on where they would fall in those color channels, and then provide you with two resulting stacked images. So it's a very neat script. And it's something that is sort of unique, and I think to zero. So let's go ahead and run that. I'll click run script. And here it goes, we'll catch back up when it's finished. Okay, it finished it took 46 seconds. Let's go ahead and see what it created here under results. So it has an 03 result and an HA result. Let's look at the HA result first. I'll open it here. And I'll just apply the auto stretch. That looks good. Let's take a look at the 03 result. That looks good too. So I think that it did a nice job. The next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to make a color version for the stars. And so I'll do that using pixel math. So I'm going to go to image processing and go down all the way to the bottom of that menu, pixel math. Here's pixel math. Let me just click on this little plus sign. And I'm going to go ahead and add the 03 and HA as images. And then in red, I'm going to add the HA. I'm going to uncheck this use single RGB expression. And in G and B, green and blue, I'm going to add the 03. And then I'm just going to click apply. And I'll close that. Okay. And so this is what it created that looks quite good. So this is just a HOO image. And I mostly want this for the stars. Now, I mean, you could, of course, just start processing from here. I'm going to do this a little bit differently. Let's go ahead and stretch this image just for the stars. So I'm going to go into generalized hyperbolic stretch. I'll turn the display mode back to linear. Under type of stretch, I'm going to do modified arc sign transform. And then I'm just going to use this stretch factor to bring out the stars. And I'll just do it a couple times. Okay, I'm just doing this to taste. And when I like how the stars look, I'm just going to stop. I'll close this. And I'm going to save off this image. So I'll do over here next to the save button. There's a little save as save the current image. And I'll call this stars. And I'm going to save it as a TIFF file. So I'm going to bring this into GIMP in a second. I'll save it. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, next, I'm going to go ahead and go back to our results folder and open up that HA result. Okay. And I'm going to run star net on that. So I'm going to check pre stretch linear image. I don't need a star mask. And execute. Okay, that's done. Let's just put an auto stretch on it, see how it did. Looks really good. So let's go ahead and now stretch this using GHS. So I'm going to go to image processing generalized hyperbolic stretch. I'm going to look at an auto stretch here. I'll pick an empty area of the sky. Set that as my symmetry point. I'm going to turn the local stretch intensity way up. And start stretching the image. Okay, that looks good for an initial stretch. I'll go ahead and apply it. I'm then going to pick a new symmetry point. I'll do something like this. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and apply that. At this point, I'm going to move the whole histogram over to the left a little bit just with a linear black point shift. Okay, and then I'll do one more GHS stretch. I'll leave the symmetry point there. And I'm going to apply a little bit of highlight protection to this just because I don't want to blow out the crescent at all at this point. Okay, I think that looks good. I'm going to apply that. I'll close out. Okay, and so this is my HA starless. And I'm mostly again doing this by I just from experience, but this is what I basically want the HA starless to look like. Not super stretched at this point. I don't want any of these areas to be pure white. I want it all to be fairly gray still, because it's going to blend a lot better if we if we don't stretch it too much at this point, we can always add more contrast later. If you had too much contrast now, it's it's going to be a problem. So let's go ahead and save this. I'll save this as HA. I'll save it as a TIFF file. And then we're going to open up our 03 result and do the exact same thing. So again, here's what that one looked like. And let's go ahead and run star net on it. I'm going to check pre stretch linear image. I don't need a star mask. I'll click execute. Okay, that's done. Okay, and one thing I notice is that the this corner is a little bit brighter, right? It looks like we have a little bit of a gradient going on. So let's try running a little bit of a background extraction on this. I'm going to turn smoothing way up. Let's turn it up to 0.85. And I'm just going to do a few samples here, not too many. Yes, I think that's an improvement. I'll go ahead and apply that. Okay, and then let's stretch this. So again, generalized hyperbolic stretch. I'll pick this area for the symmetry point, then going to turn off the auto stretch, turn the local stretch intensity way up to about 12. And then start putting in the stretch factor until we get this histogram to come out. Okay, that looks good. I'll apply it. I'll go ahead and reset my black point with the linear stretch or black point shift. And then let's stretch this a bit more. But I'm going to move my symmetry point. So I'm just going to pick a different area here. And I'm going to reset the black point one more time. Okay, so that's our 03 stretch. Let's go ahead and save that as 03. I'll save it again as a TIFF file. Okay, so we've now created out of zero three stretched files, our stars, our stretched starless HA, and our stretched starless 03. It's now time to move to GIMP. Okay, here is the GNU image manipulation program or GIMP. And we're going to go ahead and do file open and open up our stars.tiff. There it is. And then I'm going to go file open as layers. And I'm going to bring in our HA and 03. Okay, so I'm going to reorder these a little bit. I'm going to put the stars on top. Okay, and then I'm going to go ahead and turn off the visibility of stars and 03. And I'm going to click on this HA layer. And we're going to colorize it. We're going to colorize it to red. So to do that, we go to colors, go down to colorize. If you go to colors and colorizes grayed out, make sure under image mode that you're in the RGB mode. That's why I opened up the stars image first is so this would, it would create an RGB document. So that's the easiest way to do it. But if you, if you went in a different order, you can always go to image mode and set it to RGB. And then you'll be able to colorize. Okay, so let's go ahead and colorize the HA starless to a nice red. Okay, then I'm going to turn on the 03 visibility. I'll click on that 03 layer. And I'm going to change the blend mode right above here where it says mode normal. I'm going to change that to screen. And I'm going to colorize the 03 to blue. So I'll do colorize colors, colorize. And you can see just with this teal that it picks, it already looks quite good. But let's just play around and see if we like a different color better. I think who that looks nice, maybe even more saturated. There we go. Okay, I like that. So I'm going to get click okay. Okay. All right. And then we'll turn on the stars layer. And we're going to screen blend this as well. So change the mode from normal to screen. And then we're almost home. The last step in this process is we're just going to go to layer new from visible creates a new visible layer right there. And then I'm going to just apply a curves transformation. So I'm going to do colors, curves. And I'm going to bring down here. Then I'm just going to go over just a little bit on the curve and bring it up a little bit. So this is just a subtle S curve in the part where I want to add a contrast. You're going to subtly change these until it looks right to my eye. That looks pretty good. And then I'm going to add saturation. So we'll go to colors, hue slash saturation. And one nice thing about the hue dash saturation process here in GIMP is that we can all we can actually target different colors. So if I want to target red and just add more saturation to red, I can do that. I'm going to add a little bit more saturation to red, a little bit more to cyan, and a little bit overall. And then I'm just seeing that it's the background is just a little too red. So I'm just going to go back to curves one more time. And instead of doing a curve on the overall image, I'm just going to do it on the red here. Hopefully that was helpful. I know it was a lot of steps, but I really like the result. And it shows you that it's perfectly possible to get amazing results out of completely free open source software. In this case, CRL, S-I-R-I-L and GIMP, G-I-M-P. Both of those are acronyms, of course. And if you have any questions about this process, go ahead and ask them in the comments, but we're going to move on to the next couple of software, which are Deep Sky Stacker and Photoshop. Okay, next up, we have Deep Sky Stacker, and then we'll take the result from Deep Sky Stacker and bring it into Photoshop to finish processing. This is the latest version of Deep Sky Stacker 5.1.3. It is a really nice upgrade. They've made it a lot faster, but all of the basics stay the same. So if you've followed a Deep Sky Stacker tutorial before, you're not going to be confused by the new version. So I'm going to start by open picture files and just pick all of my lights here. I'll then load my dark frames and my dark flats and my flats. Okay, I did not use bias frames since I shot dark flats. I'm going to go ahead and click check all, which just checks all of these light frames here. We can look at one. There's an example. If you're not seeing color here, make sure that it says yes under CFA, and if it doesn't, go into your raw fits settings and make sure that it's you can check this and actually set the Bayer pattern. If you can just look that up and apply, and because sometimes it may not be included in the fits keywords, and then you would just have a black and white image in the end. So if you are not seeing color here, and if it doesn't say CFA, then go ahead and change that under the raw fits settings. Then we can go ahead and go into, so we checked all of the light frames. We can go then to register checked pictures. I'm going to stack 100% of the pictures because I've already checked these and they look good. I can ignore that warning about offset frames because we're not going to use them. I can just check that the star detection threshold is okay. As long as you have over, you know, 100 stars, that's fine. And then I'm going to go into stacking settings and just make sure these are the same as the last time I used this. I want standard mode. I want Kappa Sigma clipping on the light frames. Okay, that all looks good. So I'm just going to go ahead and click okay to start this going. Okay, I usually just go ahead and save a version here by clicking save picture to file and just save it as a 16-bit TIFF because then when I bring it into Photoshop, I have all of the options. There's the options are a little bit limited with a 32-bit TIFF like the autosave. So I'm just going to call this stacked and leave compression on none. We'll go ahead and save it. And then we can open up Photoshop and open that image. Okay, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this background layer can just call this first. And the reason I do that is just in case I ever, you know, make a mistake or want to go back to this, the unstretched data to do something with it, I like to have it there. And then with this first layer here, I'm just going to go ahead and open up image adjustments levels. And you can see I have my histogram open here and I have it open to all channels view. So I can see as we're stretching where our color balance is. And you're just going to stretch a few times until we get this histogram out from the left edge. Okay, and then at this point, you can see the histogram is out. And we can see that the red channel is a lot stronger than the green and blue. That's fine because there's there's going to be a lot of red in this image. It's a hydrogen rich area. But what we do want to do is line up the left edge of these color channels. So I'm going to open up the blue channel and stretch that a little bit separately. So that the left edge is lined up a bit better. And then I'll stretch them all again and see what happens. Okay, that looks pretty good. I mean, I'm going to go even a little bit more on that blue channel though, just to really bring that out. Same thing with the green. So I'm just using both the shadow slider and the midtone slider to just sort of stretch these a little bit more. Okay, that looks good. So at this point, I don't want to stretch too much. I just want it to look sort of like this just pretty neutral, stretched enough that we can see some nebulosity and the stars. But we're not blowing anything out. The star field looks nice and tasteful. Nothing is is clipped to white or anything like that. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to I can close the histograms for a second. I'm going to go right next to the layers panel is the channels panel. And in here, I'm going to select just the red channel. And I'm going to select all and then edit copy, make a new document so file new. And it will know the right dimensions from the clip board. So I'll click create. I want this to be 16 bit though, and grayscale is fine. And then I'll paste in that red channel. And we can rename this red. We don't need the background layer. Done. Or actually, we can rename this h a because this represents our h a signal. And we can go ahead and save it as well. So I'm just going to go ahead and save this as h a can save it as a Photoshop document. That's fine. Okay, and then we'll do the same thing, but with the green channel, and this will represent our three signal. Now, I know that there is signal in both the green and the blue, but they should basically be the same signal. If you're really going to be a stickler, you could try combining these two channels together. That's what you can do automatically in serial. But I'm just going to take the green just for simplicity in this tutorial. So I'm going to do the same thing, select all, edit, copy, file, new, set it to 16 bit, create and paste. And then we can go in here, delete the background layer, call this o three and save it. Okay, then what we're going to do next is we're going to make each of the h a and the o three, we're going to take out the stars. And if you want to do this with free software, you can download star net. And then what you would do is just save these as 16 bit tiff files and then use star net externally, then bring them back in. Another option, if you don't mind paying for a plugin is you can download Russell Chromans star exterminator. And that gives you a way to take out the stars right here in Photoshop. So I'm just going to run that on each of these. Okay, and then after they've made star list, I can see that I really just need these a little bit darker. So I'm going to run levels on each of these, just changing the black point just a little bit. So they look more like that. So it's just image adjustments, levels. Okay, so now here's our two results. I'm now going to bring these back into our stacked image. But why is this black and white? Because in channels view, I only have the green selected. So I'm going to go ahead and turn back on RGB. Okay, let's now select this control a control C. Bring that in. I'll call this HA starless. Again, with this control a control C, control V, we'll call this o three starless. Okay, and now I can turn off the visibility of these top two layers. So now we're just seeing the HA starless. And we're going to colorize it. And the way we'll do that is with an adjustment layer, we'll go to adjustments, pick this huge slash saturation, click colorize, turn the saturation up to 50. We can leave it on this red hue. If that's sort of what we want, we could also go more of like a a Hubble palette look by making it more orange, but I'm going to go red. Then I'm going to turn on the o three starless layer. And I'm going to make that a screen blend. So let's change it from normal here to screen. And then I'm also going to colorize that one. So I'm going to pick hue slash saturation. I'm going to pick colorize. And this time I'm going to go for a more bluish teal, something like that. Now the whole picture turned this bluish teal. That's because this is this saturation layer is applying to everything below it, but we just want to have it applied only to this layer. So we're going to hold down the alt key or option on Mac and click on this line between the two. And that clips it to just this layer right here. Okay, so you can see that it's starting to work. But the next thing we're going to do is a curves adjustment. So I'm going to open up a curves adjustment. And I'm going to reset our black point here, something like that. Then I'm going to open up a selective color adjustment. And I'm going to play around with the different colors. So I usually like taking some red out of cyan and some yellow out of blue and yellow out of cyan. Okay, the colors are starting to look about right. There's a little bit of too much blue noise. So I'm just going to go back to my 03 starless here and just see if I can adjust that with just a curves adjustment. So I added a curves adjustment to the clipping chain. And I'm just going to see if I can. It's looking better, but I'm also going to think just apply a little bit of noise reduction to the 03. So I'm going to filter camera raw filter and go to detail and just apply some noise reduction. Okay, a little bit of manual cleanup there. But I'm liking how this is looking now. So I'm just going to go ahead and turn back on our first layer. This is our stars. And I'll screen blend this back on. Okay. And then we're going to do one final curves adjustment here. So I'll just go back to adjustments curves. Go ahead and reset our black point and do a small S curve down here in the shadows area. And maybe then just add some final saturation. So I'll go to hue slash saturation and just apply it globally a little bit. Now that I've actually added the saturation, I think maybe we're just a little bit too much red in the background. So I'll add one final selective color layer, I'll go down to blacks and just take a little bit of the magenta out. See what that did. Yes, I like that. It just makes it a little bit more neutral. Okay, that's it for the deep sky stacker and Photoshop version of this processing guide where we're going to next move on to Pixinsight. Okay, and here we go with Pixinsight. I am on the latest version of Pixinsight here 1.8.9-2. I'm not usually one to immediately update the latest version because there's usually some bugs to work out. But this narrow band normalization script by Bill Blanchin and Mike Cranfield is only available in this newest version. So that I did update and I do want to show this to you because it's pretty cool. Anyways, let's just get going with processing here. So we'll start with pre-processing and I'm going to use weighted batch pre-processing. You'll hear astrophotographers who use Pixinsight calling this WPP and that's just the acronym weighted batch pre-processing. If you've never seen it before, it's a little bit intimidating at first, but I'll try to sort of just show you the basics here. So we're going to go to the darks tab, load in our darks. And I have both normal darks, which you can see are 300 seconds, and dark flats, which are 0.13 seconds for calibrating my flat frames. But Pixinsight does a good job of just separating those out automatically. We'll go ahead and load in the flats next and then finally load in the lights. Under calibration, I always just make sure if it's color camera to make sure that this CFA images is selected for both the flats and the darks. And then I also like to set the mosaic pattern, also known as the Bayer pattern, because if I know it because sometimes it's not automatically recorded and then Pixinsight throws an error. So I'm just going to go ahead and choose that. And actually, I'm also going to choose a reference image because I happen to know that with this data set, the fifth image is the best. I've blinked through the subframes, so I'm just going to choose my own reference image that it's going to register everything to. Okay, and I'll go ahead and make a new folder here to save all these results in. I'll just call it WPP. That's the output directory. Okay, and then under pipeline, I'm not going to turn on linear defects correction because I haven't found I usually need it. I'll leave the other options on and then I'll go ahead and click run and click continue. And here it goes. And we'll just let this run and I'll catch back up with you when it's done. Okay, that finished in 14 minutes. We're going to click done, done again, and exit. And then let's take a look at the master light frame. Okay, there's the rejection high. So that's a satellite trail and some hot pixels. There's the low rejection. And there is the result. And I think that I probably have, yes, I've already unlinked the channels here. So if we just stretched it normally, it would look like this, you know, see very red. If you unlink the channels, it then tries to equalize the red, green, and blue a bit more. And so you get this result. So it's already boosting the 03 quite a bit, but not in a way that a lot of people find super pleasing just that that auto stretch. But it actually is sort of the first step in using narrow band normalization. When I talked to Bill Blanchion about it, he suggested start with just an unlinked stretch like that and then bring it and then take up the stars and bring it into narrow band normalization. So that's what we're going to do. But I'm actually going to first make a because I'm going to do this a little bit my own way, just to my preference, in terms of workflow. So I'm going to first drag out a copy and you do that by just holding down that your left click on the mouse and just dragging out this tab. And that makes a new copy of the image. You can see it ends in clone there. And since these names are quite long, let's rename both of these. So I'm going to rename one stars. And you rename just by double clicking. And I'm going to rename the other one starless. Okay. And then we can put the stars to the side for now. So I'm just going to click the minimize. And then I'll just move this over here to the side. Now, with the starless, what I'm going to do is I'm going to first stretch it just using this unlinked stretch. And then I'm going to remove the stars. So to apply this auto stretch to the image. It's not as simple as just clicking the button because you can see I can just turn that right back off because this is just a an auto stretch. It doesn't actually apply until we apply it with something like histogram transformation. So you've probably seen this before if you're a pics insight user, but to apply an auto stretch, you just open up histogram transformation. And click this little radioactive in screen transfer function. Take this triangle icon and drag it over here onto this bottom bar on histogram transformation. Let go. Apply it to this image. So we're going to hit the square. And then it goes completely white like this because now we have both the auto stretch applied and this histogram transformation applied. So we can just go ahead and reset with this little red X right here. And now this is actually stretched. And I know that was a little convoluted, but that's I think the easiest way actually to apply an unlinked stretch from screen transfer function. So we've done that. Now we want to make this actually starless. So let's go to process object recognition. And I'm going to use star exterminator. This is a paid plugin, but you can use star net, which is free too. And I'm only interested in just creating a starless image right here. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off this generate star image. And I'll just drag the triangle onto the image here to start this. Okay, great. So this is a very honest, you know, representation of what you can get from a dual narrowband filter. In this case, the SV bony 220, which is only $159. And it looks quite good, I think we have a lot of both HA and O3 response. But you know, some people would want to get more out of this image, understandably, and change the colors. And that's where narrowband normalization comes in. So we'll go to process color calibration, narrowband normalization. I'm going to go ahead and reset it here. And for this, we want the palette to be HOO, because that's what it is. It's the, you know, the red pixels are the hydrogen and the the O3 is in the green and the blue pixels. So that's correct, HOO. And then the next thing I want to do is actually bring up a real time preview. And when you see this circle with an empty circle like this, that's the real time preview icon. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And let's make it bigger. Okay, so now we're getting somewhere. So this is showing us with mode one, what it's going to do to the image. So if you want a very Hubble palette looking image, this is great. And keep in mind, you can always add saturation after using this process. So it might look a little bit washed out right now. But we can always add saturation to make the colors pop after using this. What this is doing is just normalizing the colors, meaning sort of changing their balance. And we have this is blend mode one, it's a very like sort of Hubble palette look. Here's mode two. And this is what I've been doing with the other program. So this is probably what I'm actually going to use, but I just want to go through these different modes to show them to you. And there's mode three. So it looks like mode one and mode three are fairly similar. But in mode three, the oh three is looking even bluer. While in mode one, it's a little bit more natural looking, I think. And then mode two, we have again, that sort of very natural look of a of the hydrogen being red and the oxygen being blue. But let me go ahead and turn off this real time preview for a second, just look back at this. You can see it is different than our original one because in our original one, the the hydrogen signal almost looks orange. And the oxygen thing signal looks sort of greenish. While here, it's gotten to a much nicer balance in my opinion of sort of a pink hydrogen and a blue oxygen. So just with all I've done here is just opened up the process and switched the mode. And you can get these different looks, but there's a bunch of different options as well here. So one of them is there's a fancy process where you can use the LAB color space and it helps bring out detail with a lightness image. And that's built into this narrow band normalization. So you can play around with the different options there to see if you like what it does to the image. And I think I do sort of like that the HA lightness for this image. It feels like it actually even smooths out some of the O3 noise by maybe sort of darkening it into the shadow. So I like that. So I'm going to go ahead and turn on the HA lightness. Well, okay, actually, the only thing I don't like is is here in the crescent. Yeah, it's sort of doing something weird there. So actually, no, I'm not going to turn that on. I'll leave that off. Let's see if we if we try to blend if we try to boost the O3 what happens. Oh, that's interesting. Now, it's pretty obvious to me you can quickly take this too far, right? So be careful here, because I'm starting to see some areas where it's not looking too good. Because the O3 is a weak signal, if you don't have a lot of data, like I don't have a lot of data here, boosting it too much might not look very good. So I'm just maybe just going to boost it just a little bit. So I think it started at one. Let's try 1.1. Even 1.07, I think looks pretty good. Okay, and then there's some adjustments here to the shadow point. Okay, so this if you bring this down, it looks like it there's less contrast, but I liked it at one that looked good to me. There's a highlight reduction that might be necessary on some images. I don't think it's necessary here. And there's an overall brightness slider. I'm going to bring the overall brightness down just a little bit. Okay, let's go ahead and close the real time preview and apply this to the actual image. There we go. So I really liked what that did. Let me go ahead and turn this. I'll make this a little bit bigger here. And I'll undo and redo. So I think it's just very clear that it's a really nice way to work with color palettes in Pix Insight because I feel like that was one of the weaknesses in Pix Insight was it was hard to have a real time preview and work on color palettes. You'd have to sometimes use masks and it was very difficult to see exactly what you were doing. I wasn't a huge fan of using masks because you could easily make the mask wrong and then get into sort of a bad situation. So I like working globally and this narrow band normalization is a great tool to do that. Now, the next thing that we can do is a little bit of work with curves on this starless image. So I'm going to go ahead and open up the curves transformation and I'll open up a real time preview and maximize that. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and just try adding a very subtle S curve down here in the shadow area. I like what that's doing. And then I'm also going to increase the saturation. Okay, I like that. So I can go ahead and close the preview and apply that to the image. Okay, at this point, I feel like there's a little bit too much of blue noise in that upper right quadrant. So let me just see if I bring down. Okay, I like what that did overall, but now we have some green noise. So I'm just going to run SCNR green really quick here. There we go. Okay, I'm liking this. Okay, so I think this is a great starless image here. So now we want to add the stars back. And I'm going to do this a little bit differently than probably you've seen other people do it. It's just my method, the one that I like the best. I'm not saying anyone else's method is any better or worse than mine. It's just what I prefer. So what I like to do is I'm going to go ahead and turn off the screen transfer function on this by just clicking a little reset. And I'm going to open up generalized hyperbolic stretch, reset it. I'm going to go to arc sign for the transformation type. And then I'm just going to apply a few stretch stretches with arc sign to this image. And arc sign transformation is nice because it's a color preserving stretch. So we should be able to get a little bit of star color this way. Okay. And once I like how the star field looks, I stop. And I like how the star field looks like this. The stars look well defined, but not overpowering the image. So then I'm just going to combine these two images together. And I'm going to do that with pixel math. So I'm going to go to process. Okay. And I'm going to screen blend these two images together. And some of you might be wondering, well, why didn't you make this a stars only image? That's not my process. I like to screen blend with some of this dim background nebulosity included, because to me, it makes for a more natural looking image with fewer artifacts that way. So I'm going to go ahead and screen blend these two together. So I'm just going to do tilde parentheses, tilde, stars, times tilde, starless, and parentheses. And what this expression is saying is invert the stars image, invert the starless image, multiply them together, and then invert the whole thing back. Okay. And that's a screen blend. Now we want to create a new image with RGB color space. That sounds good. I'm going to go ahead and hit the square to apply this. Okay, there's the resulting image. That already looks really nice to me. But I think it's just a little bit now bright, right? We want to bring down the brightness of it. So I'm going to do that again with curves. And while I'm in curves, I might do a few other little tweaks. So again, we'll open up a real time preview. And I'm going to pick my RGB slash k curve here. That's just sort of an overall curve. And I'm going to darken the image. So this is the part where it's just I'm doing this entirely by eye and just from my own expertise and taste. But what I typically what I'm trying to do here is I know that right around here, right around one quarter over is where I'm going to want to start darkening the image. But then I'm just going to bring a point I'm just going to go right a little bit next to that. And I'm going to brighten in that same area because right in there is where I want to add the contrast. And so that's looking pretty good. I like some of this sort of like brown feature that we're getting. Don't want to go too bright. Something like that. Okay, and then I think this image could use a little bit more saturation, something like that. All right, I think that looks good. I'm going to close the real time preview and apply that to the image. Okay, and that's it. That's my whole process. So hopefully that made sense. We just used weighted batch pre processing. We did an auto stretch an unlinked auto stretch on the data, one copy of the data made it star list, used narrow band normalization process to get to this nice color palette, did a little bit of curves work on the star list to make it a little more saturated. On the other copy, I just used an arc sign stretch to stretch the stars to my taste. We then combined these two with a screen blend in pixel math. And then I did a final little bit of work with curves here to get to my desired final product. Looking at this now, I think one thing that I should have done right away was a background extraction. You can see this corner is looking too bright. But I forgot, it's okay. Overall, I think that you see that there's things that you can add along to this process. But that's the basic idea of how I would approach dual narrow band in Pixinsight. You're now seeing everyone who supports this YouTube channel over on patreon.com slash medula photos. It's an excellent community of amateur photographers at all different experience levels, but all people who want to learn like you and many people who are willing to share that expertise. There is an active discord you can get involved in where I run a monthly imaging challenge. And I really can't thank my patreon members enough because I'm now doing nebula photos full time. Thanks to all of you. And it's what allows me to make these in depth processing videos for free here on YouTube. So if you enjoy this channel, I think you'll get a lot of benefit out of joining my patreon community, which starts at just $1 a month. You get a lot of benefits. And if interested, just head over to patreon.com slash nebula photos. And also don't forget about FlexiSpot if you're looking for a desk or chair. They're currently having a Labor Day sale and you can get additional savings with the code nebula. The link to check that out is in the description. Until next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.