[gregbradley]

Originally Posted by troypiggo

Everyone points to Harry's videos as a good starting point. I'd like to also point to http://lightvortexastronomy.blogspot...tutorials.html for some excellent, thorough, well-written tutorials that are regularly updated and added to.

Thanks for those links. I like the lightvortex one. Sometimes video tutorials can move a little slowly and then too fast when you want to practice something was just gone over.

I learnt a lot about the way you handle the basic operating system in less than an hour there.

I can see straight away the basic operating system is very powerfully an intelligently organised. Good stuff!

I can post comparisons of tools in Photoshop and CCDstack to PixInsight as I go along.

One I can mention already is automatic background extraction tool. Simply clicking on the gradient affected areas and setting it to subtract does a very nice correction of background gradients. You may need to do it twice. It seems better than Photoshop based gradient corrections like GradientXterminator or apply image subtractions of dust scratches/blurred images with the main object healing brushed out to create a flat like image of the gradients and setting an offset so it doesn't go too dark.

Morphological transformation can round out stars better than any PS tool (of which there are really none, perhaps Star Tools does to some extent).

Early days for me to tell, but it seems registration tools may do a better job than CCDstack does. CCDstack's CCDIS plugin for registering images can fail occasionally. It did a good job on some DSLR images recently that CCDstack failed to register.

Greg.