StarLess 0.1a (aka Fred's tool)

[irwjager]

Hi all,

Starless pics - it seems people either love them or loathe them. Kudos to Bassnut (Fred) for bringing it under my(our?) attenttion! :thumbsup: However, despite Fred's preachings, it's only after seeing Multiweb's (Marc) Starless Ha Lagoon (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=64987) (Spooky!) that I'm somewhat of a convert.

Besides starless images, it seems that a lot of people prefer to use starless images in their processing chain (http://astroanarchy.blogspot.com/2008/11/star-removal-ps-action.html), before popping the stars back in right at the last moment. Although, personally, I prefer other ways, this technique does allow for intuitive processing without worrying about blowing out stars.

Unfortunately, this technique has been exclusive to PhotoShop owners, as it relies heavily on its 'Dust & Scratches' filter. That's why I studied the algorithm, made some improvements, grumbled, chucked it out, and made something better :P

The resulting filter is rather CPU intensive, but produces better quality images with less false positives (e.g. less features disappearing) and no blurriness.

There's quite a few parameters to tweak to get the most out of the image, but for a lot of images (already processed or not), it should be possible to attain a convincing starless rendition without any further touching up in PhotoShop, The GIMP, etc.

StarLess is up for download on my website (http://siliconfields.net/index.html) as the 3rd tools in the StarTools series. And yes, just like the previous two tools StarWipe and StarBright, this too is a command-line tool.

The attached example of my M31 lazy one-click color GRAS image was processed with;
StarLess --in=M31_final.tiff --dominantcolor=blueNo further processing was carried out on the image.

Upon execution, a brief overview of the different options is displayed, but a proper manual is in the works. In the meantime, as always, I'm happy to offer technical support, hear/implement your feedback and fulfill your job vacancies... :D

Best,

UPDATE: Fixed a bug that would crash StarLess if an image is an uneven amount of pixels in width. 0.1a is now up for download.

[rat156]

OK Ivo,

How do I use it? Please be gentle I'm a windows dummy. I have downloaded the .exe and placed this in the Windows folder.

Where does the image have to be?

Cheers
Stuart

[irwjager]

Hi Stuart,

StarLess is a command-line utility (you might remember them from the old DOS days :) )

You probably want to move it out of the Windows folder (it'll work but that folder is really only meant for Windows Operating System specific components - putting stuff there is frowned upon by the techies :P ).

So let's create a folder in the root directory of your C drive for now. You can just do this from the file manager (aka 'explorer') which you can call up by pressing the windows key on your keyboard and the 'E' key at the same time.

Just navigate to your C drive's root folder and create a folder named 'StarLess' or similar (left click, create folder).

Once you've created the folder, copy StarLess.exe into there. You can also put a test image in there (48-bit/16-bit-per-channel color TIFF) for convenience.

Now for the 'good old DOS' bit...
Click Start, Choose 'Run', type 'cmd' and press enter.
Woohooo, it's DOS in a little window! :P

In the window, type 'cd \' and press enter. You're now in the root directory of your C drive. Type 'cd starless' (or whatever folder you created).

Let's assume you also put an image in the 'starless' folder called 'M20.tiff'. In that case, you can run starless by typing
'starless --in=M20.tiff' and it should do its magic.

Simply typing 'starless' and pressing enter will show a short overview of other commands starless accepts, so you can finetune your result.

One day I'll create a nice graphical user interface for all StarTools, but currently I'm focusing on creating new algorithms and keeping things multi-platform (StarTools also works on Linux and MacOS).

If the above doesn't work for you, or if you have any trouble, just shoot me a PM me, contact me through my site or just ask in this thread! :thumbsup:

[troypiggo]

I'm interested in the MacOS version. I see in the zip files you download there's a "distribution" folder, and in that are a couple of linux folders and a win32 one. Mac?

[irwjager]

Hi Troy,

Check the download now - it should include a MacOSX version.

I don't usually (yet) distribute MacOSX versions, as I don't have ready access to a Mac (I cross compile on Linux), so I can't do as much testing as I would like. I just found the MacOSX version segfaulted on me with one particular image, though others seem to work fine - I've got some investigating to do... :question:

Hope you find it useful in the meantime,

[troypiggo]

Thanks mate. Will give it a go.