Pixinsight- 2nd Impressions-Dealing with core burnout

Well needless to say I am STILL processing the M13 from last spring trying to use Pixinsight from beginning to end! I won't dwell on the calibration steps as these are similar to other programs. The one feature that PI does have which is one of it's most powerful is the ability to eliminate complex gradients while the image is in its linear fits format (i.e. before stretching). This is WAY more effective in my opinion than anything I saw in PS. I can't really demonstrate that with the cluster since there isn't much background obviously so instead I am going to demonstrate PI's answer to a very common problem in image processing, namely core burnout. You're trying to stretch out a histogram and get the peripheral areas of your object to show up but in the process the core gets oversaturated. What to do? Well in photoshop we know there are several methods. You can perhaps use curves to dampen the stretch on the core, you can select the unsaturated core from one image, then merge and feather into the burned out image, or perhaps employ layers. Now in PI there is no image selection and there are no layering techniques (yet). There is a tool called HDR wavelet transformation, which basically compresses the dynamic range of the image controlling the oversaturated areas. You can see an advanced application of that with other processes here

In my case as I am new at this I decided to do something much more simple. I stretched the cluster until I was satisfied with the entire thing ignoring the oversaturated core. That is seen in the first image. Then I opened this HDR tool, used all the default settings and in 1 click arrived at the second image! I don't know but that was pretty darn easy! What do you think? If you click on either image to get into the image view you  can click back and forth to really see how the saturation literally vanishes!