It’s done in darktable no rawtherapee:
DSC_0892 - Copy.NEF.xmp (34.5 KB)
I gave it a go. I used a technique I learned from a Lonely Speck YouTube tutorial for processing Milky Way photos and mixed in little color picker trick I learned from @harry_durgin.
Sorry, I used darktable for the edit. First I turned saturation and vibrance up all the way then used the color picker tool and switched it from point to area and selected an area with the worst purple. In the color picker tool you can see the RGB values for the area. Then I used the white balance module to adjust the red, green and blue until the values were withing a few points of each other.
The rest was using parametric masks to reduce noise in the darkest parts of the image. Finally, I used more parametric masks with curves, levels and saturation to get to the final image.
Here’s a link to the xmp file if you want to have a look. It’s from the latest stable version of darktable. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxhiLCtCYWVSWlJ3c2tpV0NlNDQ/view?usp=sharing
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Well, unfortunately Darktable isn’t available in Windows
How about this then?
DSC_0892 - Copy.NEF.pp3 (11.0 KB)
(Although I still like that of @Jonas_Wagner better, to be honest 
)
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So here is an attempt with RT:
I think I spent about 10x more time on that than the DT one and I like the results significantly less.
I like RT a lot. I use it to develop the base images of a lot of my edits, I used it on all of my sisters wedding photos.
But as soon as heavy noise reduction & complex editing is required it doesn’t work for me. Because of the lack of previews of the noise reduction (when zoomed out) the wysiwyg nature completely breaks down and everything turns into a giant guessing game (unless there is a way to force full previews which I don’t know about?). The lack of masking/local edits is also a serious restriction when edition such photos. I generally want to bring out the color and detail of the milky way a bit more, what I don’t want is to magnify all of the noise in the image with it.
Maybe try Darktable in a VM?
this is on the to-do list. hopefully for 5.3 - if I find the time (or someone else gets to it before 
)
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I think the darktable folks are not too keen on that build…
On the other hand, I wonder if we could ask politely and see if @houz might have some insight (or something we could test with)? 
Bunch of negative nellys on that thread, geez.
One more tentative. This time I was specifically trying to emulate the Darktable result of @Jonas_Wagner, but only using RT. Still not quite 100% there, but closer…
DSC_0892 - Copy.NEF.pp3 (10.8 KB)
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All I can tell you right now is that 2.4.0 will have Windows support and that I am pushing for a release this autumn. We might be able to have a development release (kind of a preview) earlier but there won’t be any promises.
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Yeah I have seen few pretty harsh responses from darktable folks Re OS Windows support on darktable users mailing list… but looking at houz’s response above it looks like the things have changed.
I was talking about the pl32.on thread…
I would appreciate that very much if darktable was to be released for windows. And by Autumn you mean which month? We don’t have seasons here in Kenya 
. Though this would be my third raw editing software that I would be trying
I think you’re right about the limitations of RT in noise reduction - I’ve noticed it myself
but I have a question, you menti0oned masking/local edits. I don’t know what masking is but if I understand local edit correctly, you edited part of the photo and not the whole of it? Possible the milky way region?
If that was the case, how would I apply local edits on the milky way across 300 photos when the milky way keeps moving in every photo? This is for a timelapse
To everyone who has responded, I’ve tried those edits that I could in RT and I tried my own. I really appreciate what everyone has done so far
I would like to point out something that I hadn’t made clear. I’m very new to editing photos. I’ve never learned any kind of editing from any class or tutorial before so the few types of editing that I’ve been doing are the basic ones like blackpoint adjustment, exposure, white balance etc. But I really have no idea what I’m doing. All my photography friends use lightroom which I can’t afford and hence why I have gone to other options like Affinity Photo and Rawtherapee
I would be willing to try any number of raw editors as long as I can understand what and why I am editing something in a photo. If I am using wavelets, I need to understand what they are. If I’m using masking, I need to understand that as well. And know when to use them and where. There are hundreds of tutorials on lightroom but I don’t know if there are any about RT or DT
Is there a guide or tutorial series about editing? I asked this question in the affinity photo forums and didn’t get any good response. Maybe someone can help me here?
I tried my edit and created this timelapse: Milky way timelapse trial
I don’t like what I’ve produced, it just doesn’t look good.
And I have 300 photos after this for a second timelapse and 400 after that for a third timelapse. All of them are more or less about the night sky
I don’t mind waiting in developing the photos, as long as I can get the technique about editing astro photos right
Thank you
for RawTherapee, I like this very much: https://paulsphotopalace.wordpress.com/
it covers also wavelets, and that’s what made me appreciate the tool
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I personally am no good at noise reduction and my photos rarely need it, but I’ve seen some good noise reduction results from RT. Check out:
Masking allows you to apply certain operations/edits selectively to parts of the image. This is a good example: