Mike,

This is a great thing you are doing, giving us all a chance to work with your fine data.

Since you suggested Registax and Photoshop, I decided to be contrarian an use PixInsight, a currently free image processing tool. It has a pretty steep learning curve, but it provides great control over many image enhancing tools.

So, complying with your direction to share processing steps, here is what I did.

1. I ignored the direction to align each color channel. I know this is being lazy, but there was no easy way to do it. In the final image, I don't see differences in alignment for each channel.
2. I combined each color image into an RGB image, factoring each color evenly.
3. I extracted a luminance channel using "Extract Channel" in PixInsight. I used this to get to the best wavelets for the image, based on the tutorial on the PixInsight website.
4. Finding the right parameters for the Atrous wavelet tranform, I was still not satisfied. I created a mask using a severe wavelets transform of the planet. Parameters were: Levels 8 & 9 (scale 128 & 256) bias 1.0 and 0.1 respectively. All other layers disabled. I then stretched the resulting with curves, eliminating the low end, to create the final mask.
5. Using the mask, I applied wavelets to the entire image. The parameters were, by level: 1: off, 2: +12, 3: 0, 4:+0.8, 5:+0.6, 6: 0, 7: 0, 8:+0.3, Dynamic Range Adjust: High: 0.4
6. Still using the mask but using it inverted, I darkened the limb of the planet. This improved the "flattened" look created by the sharpening process
7. I applied an overall curves (no mask) that increased contrast and boosted saturation. The ability to manipulate hue and saturation in the curve dialog is a great strength of PixInsight.
8. I used the GreyCStoration noise reduction algorithm to smooth out the noise in the image. I increased the scale of the noise to 1.2 pixels, all other parameters were default.
9. I saved the file as a FIT (PixInsight works in 32 bit floating point, so saving in FIT saves all the data) and a TIFF for Photoshop (16 bit integer).
10. I saved the file as a PNG from Photoshop. No manipulation with that tool. I tried an high-pass filter, but it didn't really help.

I'd be happy to share all intermediate files or PixInsight processing details.

Thanks Mike for a great project!

--Andy

Attached Images

Jupiter-AMS-RGB-20.png (143.2 KB, 65 views)

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