Starguide - A Practical Guide to Astro-Photography

A very effective method for reducing the number of visible stars in a photo of a nebula is EZ Star Reduction as part of the EZ Processing Suite from Elveteek Ltd — PixInsight Plugins. The instructions for downloading and installing the suite can be found here.

Here is an example of an non-linear image (the EZ Star Reduction only works on non-linear images!) post-processed with EZ Star Reduction:

This script requires 2 input files:

1. the image in which the stars are to be reduced  
2. a Star Mask (non RGB), see the Star Mask process

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