Star Reduction now in a Pixinsight Script!!
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- Опубліковано 14 лип 2023
- This video is about our new Star Reduction Script for Pixinsight Software. Mike Cranfield and I decided to give you a graphical interface so you can visualize the star reduction before creating a new image. The math used is based on my previous pixelmath process but has been updated with new options, such as using a small star mask to help protect smaller stars from being reduced, and the ability to export a reduced stars only image using convention unscreening or our new reverse stretch unscreening process. Many thanks to Mike for helping me turn my pixelmath projects into actual scripts! Below is the download links for the Pixinsight repository:
Star Reduction Script (copy address link as shown in video)
www.cosmicphotons.com/pi-scri...
Buy Me a Coffee link: buymeacoffee.com/AnotherAstroChannel
Many thanks for all that have supported us!!!! :-)
Original Star Reduction pixelmath videos for reference:
Lukomatico: • The BEST Star Reductio...
VisibleDark: • New and FREE PixInsigh...
Screen Stars Script (copy address link as shown in video)
www.cosmicphotons.com/pi-scri...
My other Pixelmath scripts.....
Star Reduction PixelMath:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Narrowband Normalization PixelMath:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Modified SCNR PixelMath:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
RGB Stars to Narrowband Transfer PixelMath:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Add Ha to an RGB image PixelMath:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Add L to an RGB image PixelMath:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Stretching PixelMath:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Color Mask PixelMath:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Reduce large stars and protect small stars is exactly what I need. Thanks a lot.
Thanks!!
now how did I miss this... nice work Bill
Dad gone Bill, you have just "outdone" yourself. These scripts are awesome!
Thanks Ed!!
Bill, Thank you for continuing to help beginners do the difficult-to-learn processes and make it so easy.
Thanks!!
Brilliant work, thank you!
This is great! Thanks Bill
WOW! This is a killer script!! Amazing! Thank you!!
This is simply amazing. Thank you very much.
Thanks for this bill, I've not looked at the updates on this for a while so great to have these updates and such an easy to use tool as well. Many thanks for the work on this 🙏🙏
It's people like you and RC-Astro suite that have made using Pixinsight such a breeze compared to its earlier days. Please keep them up.
Thanks!!! Our goal is to help people and it is awesome to see possibilities open via custom scripts within Pixinsight. We hope to do more in the near future. 😀
I tested the script and it is fantastic. well done, thank you.
Pixelmath is great but, having a preview of what you're getting is priceless! Great job guys!
This looks awesome! Thank you for your great work on these astro tools you share with us.
Thanks!!
Gents, this is AMAZING!
Thank you!!
Great stuff as always Bill!
Thanks buddy!!
This a great tool, testing it right away, thanks for all your help and efforts for the comunity...
Give it a try and let me know :-)
Damn! Loving your scripts - Thank you!
Thanks!!
You are a star, thank you so much for this video and all your hard work 🙂
Awesome job!!! Thanks a lot!!!
Thanks!
Genius! Thanks so much both 'wizards'.
Thanks!!
Bill, this is a game changer for us all. thank you for all your hard work (and Mike's!)
Thanks!!
Awesome script, Mike and Bill. Thank you for contributing and making post processing easier.
Thank you very much!!
Very impressive Bill
bro can u share zip file?I can't get
Incredible! Thank you! And thanks to Mike too!
Thanks George!!
Bill, awesome job, thanks for making it with all the options, love it able to protect small stars, thank you again
Thank you!!
This is 100% absolutely brilliant. Thanks to both of you.
Thank you!!
Great video. Thank you for your new tricks.
Thank you!
Just fantastic. Thanks for what you do and it was worth some cups of coffee!
Thank you!!
Thanks Bill. New user and found your color masks, playing/learning them now. Need to figure out if this script will help me. I am se Starxterminator now, and seems to work. Never thought of star reduction.
WOW, what a precision, what a care for details! Awesome !
Thank you!
Wow wow wow. Amazing work you both pulled through! Thanks
Thanks - glad you will find it useful!
Thanks!!
Oh, I had this script already in PI and I didn't even know it! I must have installed it with a bunch of others and forgot about it.
But it's great; I just did a quick test on some old data that had a few huge stars, and then ran BlurXTerminator on an image with, and without, the Reduced Stars script. And I got a much better result on the image that had Star Reduction applied to it.
The most noticeable difference was on a double star, where the script made the stars just small enough that BlurXTerminator could work its magic properly.
I'll be using this a lot from now on!
Completely Awesome you two. Thank you both. Enjoy your coffees :)
Thank you very much!!!
The script family is growing up. Personally, you indeed change and enhance my astro workflow.
You even improve the original pixelmath scripts.
I have sent to you and Bill some french coffees. Totally deserved.
Tremendous work
Thank you very much!
Thank you!!!
Hi Bill - I'm a HUGE fan of your and Mike's efforts to develop tools like this for the rest of us 'ordinary' guys. I've been a die-hard Photoshop user for over 10 years, and have only gotten into PI in the last year. Over that time, I've tried literally dozens of methods for star reduction in both PS and PI. But I have to tell you, your process has raised the concept of star reduction to a whole new level. It's become my GoTo application/process for star reduction.
With all that said, I have to apologize though; because, it also brings-out the Engineer in me - always looking to make things better... You've done a great job of breaking the star field into two (2) segments, those 'larger' (brighter) stars to which the reduction is applied, and those smaller stars that do not receive it. But, I've noted the resulting star-fields have a slight tendency to become too "flattened-out". That is, the variation left between large (bright) and small (dim) stars can become diminished; leaving the image to look "speckled" with too many stars that all have the same (or similar) brightness. It sometimes appears it would be better if we could just let the dimmest of the dim stars to drop completely out of the image. I guess it could be described as the 'density' of the number of stars also needs adjusting (lower).
Would there be any way to design into your code the ability to let the user adjust two (2) parameters?: 1) the current adjustment already encoded that reduces those stars falling 'above' the threshold, ...and then 2) to make the 'threshold' itself adjustable. That is, to apply the reduction to a user-controlled threshold level. This way, the application of the reduction could be adjusted so-as to lower (or raise) it to include more (or less) stars.
Thank you for all you are doing to make this hobby enjoyable for so many of us. You guys deserve all the Cudos we can muster.
Thank you very much for saying that!!!! :-)
Absolutely superb, I’m really glad you turned you efforts into full scripts, makes it so much easier for numpties like me to use….👏🏻👏🏻 Keep up the good work it’s much appreciated…..
Thank you!
Hi Bill. Found you through SarahMaths tutorials.
Your scripts are amazing. Thank you
Thank you!!!
Bill, this is a great video and a fantastic script! Thanks to you and Mike for your hard work with both the interface design and the underlying PixelMath. I'm a longtime user of your PixelMaths and a new user of Mike's GHS and I'm very grateful for everything you two have contributed to the astrophotography community. Thanks again and best wishes!
Thank you very much!!! It means a lot to hear that
Thanks Bill!!
You are welcome!
Bill, as someone who struggles with PI I really appreciate the tools you create and the extensive effort you put into your videos to provide explanations and examples. Great work.
Thank you!!!
Great new tool, it’ll be nice to combine with the previous tool since you need to remove the stars for screen stars as well!
The issue with mixing with other tools it can make things difficult for people to learn if there is a lot of things happening in a script, so we kept it "simple stupid" and given you the choice to use each of the scripts separately so you can do what you want with them. There is no right or wrong way to processing astro photos, everyone does things differently therefore we can only do so much. After we release Narrowband Normalization Script, I plan on making a workflow video, but again, some people may like it, some people may not. All we can do is offer tools to help people process images and hopefully they will like them. 😀
Thank you so much Bill and Mike. These scripts are amazing. Thank you. A fantastic technique. I was wondering, is there a case for stretching starless and stars images separately. Is that a good or bad idea? Thanks
Thanks!! and I knew I was going to get that question, lol. I would not advise mixing a reverse stretch stars image with a star replacement not using reverse stretch. You can try it but it defeats the purpose of reapplying the stars with minimum color loss on your modified starless image.
Would be good if there was an option to 'reduce the number' of stars based on their relative size. Probably the exact opposite of the Enable small start protection, but without reducing the size of the stars you want to keep. While this is a great tool I find that reducing the number of stars also reduces the size of all the stars. I can see that is a great step in the right direction, but I would like to leave alone the stars that I want to keep and reduce the haze caused be many tiny stars. This would be a great enhancement if possible and there is the will to do it.
Its criminal that certain UA-cams get so many subs, for doing nothing but showing fancy new gear in a garden, Yourself and Cuiv the lazy geek are the best by far, Oh Astrobisciut is awesome too..
Thanks Andrew!!
Wow, Bill, this is amazing. You are helping us newbies so much with your scripts, than you (and Mike) so much.
Would you say your recomended workflow would now be: DBE > ColorCal > NoiseX > BlurX > Strech (GHS) > Remove and Reduce stars > "color" work on starless image > add stars?
Thanks!! Re workflow, it should be DBE>SPCC>BXT>NXT>Stretch. My friends Adam and Russ discuss this in this video at the 36minute mark: ua-cam.com/video/6hkVBnYYlss/v-deo.html . However, I will say this, if you are shooting dual narrowband with a OSC, there is no point in doing color calibration, there is no benefit, in fact it could hurt the image as it could supress some of your OIII data because SPCC would be trying to change the green channel to match a catalog star color. The green channel holds a lot of your OIII info there so I dont recommend it, and to be honest, its not like you get good star color anyways when using SPCC on dual narrowband data. I am thinking about covering this in another video with a new pixelmath script, but still testing. One more thing, it is also perfectly fine to do NXT in non-linear mode, in fact, I prefer this way because it makes auto stretching easier as when auto stretching on a denoised image could blow out an image vs when auto stretching on a non-denoised image. Sames goes for when using my stretching maths or even stretching with EZ Soft Stretch. Another thing is, when NXT runs noise reduction on a linear image, it actually stretches the image, then does denoise, then does a reverse stretch and returns it back to linear (all behind the scenes) beause the AI is designed to work on non-linear images. SXT is the same way. BXT is the one method that has to be run in linear stage. So for that reason, I use NXT after my stretching.
@@anotherastrochannel2173 thanks for the answer. I'm still in the stock DSLR fase but I expect to switch to a mono camera this Christmas. Can't wait to see what other scripts you launch.
As always great stuff from both of you fine gentleman. Thank you for making even more easier to do the star reduction. One question, is it possible to add big star protection? Sometimes I want to leave larger stars and tone down the smaller star field especially when I have a target at a dense star location. Also would it be possible to create a separate folder for your scripts, take them out from utilities.
Thank you!! Re the big star mask, this is actually not an easy task to do. I originally started down this path but when you have little stars inside the star glow of the bigger star then both get shrunk. To seperate the two can be done but then there is an issue with how well the big star mask works i.e. if it is not created right, it could leave artifacts when reducing outside of the mask. Re a seperate folder, we actually talked about this too, and it might be in the works , but the issue I believe is (I would have to confirm with Mike), all items within the folder would have to be revised in an exicutable even if one item within the folder is being updated, thus it makes things more time consuming when updating things, but will have to double check that, but maybe we will do this in future. Another issue is, we also plan on releasing actual processes too (non-scripts) and these would not be located in the script folder.
@@anotherastrochannel2173 Thank you for this detailed explanation and good luck in your next endeavors.
👍🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🙌🏻
Great script again guys! Just two questions though. Since I use Blur X ( and yes I realize it's not a selective star reduction), would there be a case where I'd use both Blur X as well as your Star Reduction script? I do like the added sharpening of non-stellar objects by Blur X so is there any plan to incorporate something like that in Star Reduction?
Thanks for your kind words. To answer your question, BXT is a different thing from StarReduction. BXT is fundamentally a deconvolution process, ie it aims to reverse the distortions introduced by the imperfections in the imaging train introduced, for example, from the optics, atmosphere etc. It must be applied on linear data. By contrast, where you are imaging in an area with a dense star field you may actually want to "de-emphasise" the stars, for example to let the nebulosity take a more prominent role in the image. This is where the star reduction techniques of this script come to the fore. The script should be used on non-linear data. So yes, there could well be a case to apply deconvolution via BXT early in your workflow and then de-emphasise stars later using the StarReduction script.
@@mikecranfield8546 thanks for clearing that up Mike and of course, for working with Bill to give our community such great tools to improve our images.
For some reason when I try using the script it seems like the different modes, and iterations affect the starless image and not the stars image. I have had to resort to just using pixelmath. As I am quite new to processing, and this is all a learning experience for me. I have been making my data non-linear very early in my processing and am starting to 2nd guess that approach.
I have installed the script but it doesnt show in Script->Utility.
when I first downloaded the script it was working fine until pixinsight crashed, now it is not showing in scripts even though it is in the repository, any ideas, maybe I need to re-install it, is there a way to do this.
It said the script for star reduction was added successfully - but under Scripts -> Utilities Star reduction isn't appearing - any ideas? Found the answer in PI forums (problem with the install script commands I wonder?) - Solution was Go to Scripts > Feature Scripts... , click Add, navigate to StarReduction folder, click Open/OK, PI should find the script. Click Done.
Hi, awesome work and great script. Unfortunately the protect small stars feature does not work for me :-/ I see no difference with the checkbox enabled/not enabled…..am I the only one having this problem?
Is your data drizzled or upsample to a high resolution?
A quick question in this tool, it seems works on Linear data too, but seems to reduce the stars much more, is this normal..?
Sorry, It is not meant for linear data.
I have installed the script but its not showing up on in the Utilities !! I checked the repositories and it there installed. Please help !!
same problem for me.
This script disappeared from my Pixinsight. I haven’t downloaded the newest version of PI yet as I’ve heard about all the problems. Any reason why this would have disappeared from my version of the PI software? Thanks.
Try and update to the latest version, it helps with issues like that now.
404 not found (I can't get😅
Copy the web address link as instructed in the video and paste it into your Pixinsight repository.
www.cosmicphotons.com/pi-scripts/starreduction/
You can also get the link from Mikes website:
cosmicphotons.com/scripts/
😀
@@anotherastrochannel2173 make it!thanks!😀
Dude!!! Here’s me thinking I’m gonna have to spend 100usd on BlurX, can’t wait to try this!
Here to report, sadly the link doesnt work, it comes up saying "page not found", cant wait for it to be fixed! (: if region matters im from Uk. Edit: nvm im being very dumb XD i was trying to open the link, not add it to pixinsight XD