Does my M101 look "overexposed"?
Hello everyone, this is my first post here.
This is a picture of M101 I took over several nights, with the help of a friend who provided ~2 hours of material which I added to my ~3 hours. Any feedback on what I can do to make it look better with this data is very very welcome. Below are the techical details:
We shot together under the same sky on night 1 under a bortle ~5-6 sky, then after some equipment upgrades I toke more subs on night 2 under a bortle ~6-7 sky and a full moon (unfortunately). All subs were calibrated with coherent darks, flats, biases.
My setup on night 1:
Skywatcher150/750 pds on heq5 synscan
unmodified canon eos 600D (@iso 800)
baader MPCC mk3
optolong L pro
no guiding
My subs for night 1 include 45x130s + 25x70s (alignment and tracking got sloppy after meridian flip and we were about to go home anyway)
My friend's setup on night 1:
same mount and scope
unmodified canon eos 1200D (@iso 800)
no coma corrector, no filters, no guiding
His subs were 146x60s
My setup on night 2:
Same mount, scope, camera, coma corrector
no filters this time
guide scope svbony 40/160 guide scope
guide camera zwo asi 120mm mini mono
5 pixel dithering every frame
In this session everything was orchestrated through N.I.N.A and phd2 for a total of 35x120s subs.
For processing I only used Siril, along with graXpert and starnet++, following these steps (I may have forgotten some of them):
Calibration of all light frames with darks, flats and biases
Registration
frames on night 1 together using star alignment
frames on night 2 by themselves using bayer drizzle
One extra registration with all the pre-registered lights
Stacking¹
Aggressive crop to remove stacking artifacts
Photometric Color Calibration
Hop on to graXpert for:
AI background extraction
AI object only deconvolution (I have the beta version of graXpert from gihub)
AI heavy denoising at ~0.85
Back on Siril, one more run of PCC to fix the background
Starnet++ to remove the stars and only work on the galaxy (also because the mixture of my coma corrected stars and my friend's non corrected stars, along with discrepancy on camera angle and flares brought to some heavy artifacts)
Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch in a few passes (first doing a bunch of slow stretches and occasionally resetting BP, then some manual curves to enance contrast a bit)
Color saturation to bring out some light blue and make the core more yellow.
CLAHE (can't recall the numbers I used but I tried my best)
Now I took my subs from night 2 only (no filter and coma corrector: natural, non deformed stars) and stacked them, ran starnet++ to generate starmask, registered it with the cropped, star-ful linear master light and then recomposed the processed starless galaxy with this starmask from night 2 with a good stretch on the star trying not to burn them.
(May have run a very weak stars only deconvolution on graXpert)
very weak denoise (~0.2) on graXpert
Export to JPEG.
I am not extremely happy with the result (even though it came out better than most previous attempts at this subject) and I feel the galaxy looks too light/"overexposed" with not enough details and contrast. How can I improve my workflow to make it look better?
¹Note: for stacking and calibrating I used the same command line istructions you can find in the stock siril scripts, OSC_Preprocessing and OSC_Preprocessing_BayerDrizzle (or something similar)
Edit: some copy-pasting messed up the formatting