Starguide - A Practical Guide to Astro-Photography

Example:

In this simple example, we want to protect the galaxy and remove the artifacts around it. To do so, we place an ellipse around the galaxy and rotate and resize it to fit.

Then click on Execute to create the mask. A new window opens up showing the mask:

Now close the FAME tool.

Then, pull the image identifier of the mask window over the identifier of the original image to create as masked image:

Now the red section of the image is protected. In order or work on the non-galaxy parts of the image, go to Mask > Invert Mask in the menu or press CTRL+SHIFT+I:

You can now use other tool like Histogram Transform (HT) or Color Transformation (CT) funktions e.g. to hide the artifacts outside the galaxy:

After updating the image with the selected HT settings (press the little blue rectangle on the bottom left of the HT tool), you can close an opened preview window and also remove the mask (Mask > Remove Mask).

This is the resulting image:

Note: The images are part of an image processing of the Cigar Galaxy (M82) in Ursa Major (see: Starlust - PhotosOID0007), in which the stars were separated in a previous step. When the separately processed stars are added back in the next step, the overall image looks like this:

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