Thanks for your thorough response Mike. I’ll check out PixInsight and keep in
mind the intimidation factor 😱. From your comments it sounds like having both
Photoshop and PixInsight could be a good combination for image Astrophoto image
processing. Thanks for your inputs.
Jim Sellers
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 18, 2019, at 8:45 AM, Michael McDonald <mikemac@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:--
When I first started, it was between APT and BYEOS. APT looked intimidating
on their website so I went with BYEOS. I’m also cheap so the like $30 vs $100
came into play too. I didn’t know at that time if I was really going to get
into this or if it was going to be a passing phase.
I still use BYEOS when I’m using the Canon on my little StarAdventurer. I
haven’t gone thru the steps to define a second configuration in APT for the
Canon yet. I’ll probably do that one of these times when I get frustrated
with my main rig. Maybe at the AAMM! :-)
PixInsight is really intimidating. It’s got a gazillion different tools and
options built in. So it can be confusing to figure out how to get started. I
watched a couple of YouTube videos and stopped framed one called something
like “simple pixinsight processing of orion”. I jotted down the steps he was
using and thrived it out on one of my data sets. And it worked!
I had tried DeepSkyStacker (DSS) before but I couldn’t ever get it to work
reliably on by color DLSR images. And I couldn’t understand all of the
finicky parameters you have to set. PIxInsight’s stacking procedure makes a
whole lot more sense to me and the defaults are usually a god place to start.
It takes more steps in PixInsight than DSS but the step make sense to me. The
engineer in me likes it when I think I understand what is going on! :-)
If you decide to use PixInsight, I would recommend getting a book to help you
out. I bought the latest edition of “Inside PixInsight” a couple of weeks
ago. It is FULL of detail which can be a bit of a negative when you first
start as it talks about some advanced stuff in the very beginning that as a
beginner I was questioning why I needed to know that now. I just wanted to
composite my RGB channels into a color image! And it does tell you how to do
that. But first it spends a bunch of time on “best practices” for capturing
the data in the first place.
One of the things it does talk about in the beginning is a script called
“blink”. I had never seen this mentioned anywhere before. I guess everyone
just assumed every knows about it. But “blink” cycles thru your frames in a
slideshow so you can separate out the bad frames before you use the bad data
in your processing. Sounds like a very useful tool! I’m going to give it a
try today or tomorrow when I start processing my M3 images from Saturday
night. I know there’s going to be some bad frames in there that need to be
culled.
One of the nice things in PixInsight is just about everything can be easily
undone. And it makes it very clear when you’re about to permanently save a
modified image. So I don’t have to worry about accidentally losing my
original data.
PixInsight and Photoshop are intended to do different things, although there
is some overlap. I don’t have Photoshop. I would buy it if that was still an
option but I don’t want to have to “rent” the program. I personally want my
SW to keep working the way it did last time essentially forever. I would be
an infrequent user of PS and I don’t like the idea of having to relearn and
relicense my programs every time I want to use them. But I understand why
Adobe went to the subscription model ($$$).
Anyway, PixInsight is for image processing, which is different than PS aims
at. The processing that PixInsight does is more scientific based, which you
may or may not care about. PS is more about creating pretty pictures. If you
can afford it, I’d recommend you get both as they really are complementary.
But from everything I’ve learned so far, PixInsight is the way to go for the
necessary steps in astrophotography image processing.
How’s that for a long winded answer? :-)
Mike McDonald
mikemac@xxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 18, 2019, at 6:47 AM, Jim Sellers <jsellersaz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Mike...hope you enjoyed the GL concert. I went to the Rosanne Cash
concert at the same venue Feb19.
In addition to my learning curve for guiding my AVX using a star wave 50mm
guide scope and Altair gpcam with PHD2 SW, I too want to convert from dslr /
byeos to a cooled cmos camera/ APT. I’m looking at an Altair 183mono and 80
mm filter wheel for that. I also need to develop post processing skills.
How do you like Pixinsight? I currently have Photoshop which I’m just
beginning to learn.
I’ll try to find you at the AAMM.
Jim Sellers
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