[rcheshire (Rowland)]

An IIS member asked me to share my DSLR StarTools work flow on this forum.

After careful consideration and not being an expert by any means, I thought it might be better to list some basic steps- but first, refer anyone interested to the ST forum - in particular the v1.3 videos on the download page and the increasing number of tutorials in that section. Perhaps Ivo might like to chip in and offer his perspective.

I would suggest reading a good book on astro image processing first to get some theory going.

What follows is a very basic workflow - not the only one - to get started. I find it useful for widefield. Images are dithered during acquisition - otherwise it's a waste of time - and preprocessed and stacked in Pixinsight to produce a linear fit file.

Do and Keep buttons associated with each module are self evident and Masks are the key to ST. Very powerful tool.

Open in StarTools

Once the linear image is opened, ST will warn about the presence of stacking artifacts and ask about the type of image (linear / non- linear and more).

Optional - "Bin" large images to the 50% default, to take advantage of the huge reduction in noise and quicker processing time. I don't need a 4000+ x 3000 pixel image for display.

AutoDev - a big stretch to locate any edges that might need cropping. Looks ugly, but ST tracks the stretch and allows you to restretch at any time - clever!

Crop - remove stacking artifacts and cut to size.

Develop - it would be OK to restretch at this stage, or go to Wipe.

Wipe - gradient removal among other things. Notice the default application of a mask.

Develop again - Wipe advises to do this after using Wipe.

Now the image is set up for some detail processing. I do the following...

HDR > Reveal - tweak out contrast detail. Play with settings here for best results.

Mask > Auto > Star - when finished > Invert (in ST masked areas are active - these areas are processed only).

Life - Power of Inverse. Takes a little while.

Colour - I balance it all up with sliders, in prefernce to the auto white balance and sample tools. Saaturate as preferred and Cap Green (seldom is green found in space).

Tracking - Off. ST asks about noise reduction. Usually, yes. I reduce the sliders about 25% below default if noise reduction is too aggressive.

You might want to stretch with Develop to brighten things up. Apply Contrast. Round some stars with Warp. Add detail. Remove stars. Sharpen. Add detail and so on...

Note: StarTools is designed to prevent clipping data. But if you want to you can.

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