Now for the final clean up of noise before reducing the image back to normal.

Use a "Gaussian blur" as before with a radius of 2. (No screen shot here, just use the same procedure as was used earlier.) This will help reduce some noise that has been amplified with the use of curves in the previous step. This blurs the image but we take care of it with an application of "Unsharp Mask".

The sharpening will "tighten" the fainter stars an also brighten them. I used a setting of 7 for radius and strength of 50 with clipping set to 0. You can vary these settings until the desired amount of sharpening is achieved. Don't over do it here. Remember we will be resizing back to the normal 640 X 480 resolution which will also effectively sharpen the image.

Now resize the image back to its normal size. Use "smart" resize and a setting of 640 in the width window. If the "Lock Aspect" box is checked the height window will automatically display 480.