It often pays to revisit older images you’ve captured. I was never very happy with the processing job I did originally on the Pacman Nebula. It was hastily done the first time. I shot it over multiple days, and cropped it in pretty tight for the final version originally.

This is the original image. Over processed, over saturated, and lacking contrast despite the very saturated coloring.

When I reprocessed this, I actually removed 100 180s frames from the overall data set, getting rid of the 100 poorest quality frames. So, overall, there was less integration time, but the quality of the final image is really nice. There’s a high contrast of colors at the inner nebula that can be seen a lot better in this new version.

This tight crop of the inner part of the new image really shows off some detail that was missing in my original process of this nebula.

In all, I reprocessed in Astro Pixel Processor to integrate and calibrate all frames, removing the 100 worst frames. I then pulled in into PixInsight to stretch each channel, combine them into one RGB image, denoise, and add contrast. Then pulled it into Photoshop for final color touch up.