After having some success with my Pacman image using an HOO process I decided to review my images taken early December with a view of trying to bring out more of the Oxygen / Hydrogen separation. My original blog entry for the RGB version of the Soul nebula can be found here.
I re-used the star mask created from the RGB data - to try and keep the colour of stars correct when I recombined with the starless OIII and Ha stacks. The OIII was a little noisy to I tried an new technique of using Photoshop colour masking and inverting it so I could then bring down the background levels and increase the contrast of the OIII data. This was then passed through camera raw to bring down the texture a little to effectively reduce the noise a little.
The Stars, Ha and OIII where then layered and screen masked, each with some adjustment layers for Curves / Colourise and Vibrance.
The how combined image was then adjusted using Photoshop Camera Raw, I used my typcial workflow which includes some minor HIghlights and Contrast changes / Texture and Clarity / Noise reduction and finally small tweaks to Saturation, Vibrance and Shadows.
Here's the final image and the RGB version below: -
