NGC 3532 / Caldwell 91

Couple of months ago, I would have processed this image in a completely different way, since my style was focused on strong contrast and saturation. Luckily I've attended the first TL Webinar where I asked Nik (and challenged myself) whether images with nebulae should be more or less contrasty and more or less dark. He gave an excellent answer, which made me rethink what I was doing with my astro images. Happy to say that with this image I got a lot more 'details' by actually reducing the contrast in the lower left area which made the dark nebulae a lot more prominent (they were getting lost in all that dark of the original image). I have of course boosted other interesting elements' highlight and white amount, and reduced the prominence of the stars. Have a look at the other 2 versions I've also added, starless and almost starless and have your pick :) Also feel free to comment in the comments section. There are too few comments on Telescope Live, lets change that :)

The processing of this involved many many hours of back and forward changes, export from one application to another, and more and more tweaks :) Starting with PixInsight (with AutoIntegrate and H over L priority), Adobe Photoshop (lots of layers and lots of blending, working in Camera Raw on different layers differently), exporting to StarTools for better stars management and then back to Photoshop, also increasing the resolution in Topaz Gigapixel, just so I can 'dense' it back to the original resolution, but with a lot more smooth detail.

Wiki Info:

NGC 3532 (Caldwell 91), also commonly known as the Pincushion Cluster, Football Cluster, the Black Arrow Cluster and the Wishing Well Cluster, is an open cluster some 405 parsecs from Earth in the constellation Carina. Its population of approximately 150 stars of 7th magnitude or fainter includes seven red giants and seven white dwarfs. On 20 May 1990 it became the first target ever observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. A line from Beta Crucis through Delta Crucis passes somewhat to the north of NGC 3532. The cluster lies between the constellation Crux and the larger but fainter "False Cross" asterism.