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I've used both Carlton. Started with Startools for about a year or so, then moved onto PI. I'm glad I did it that way even though it meant buying two lots of software. So I reckon startools is a good place to start.
Startools likes:
- it is "relatively" easy to get started with it. Although seems odd at first. I seem to remember Ivo has some good youtubes of how to use it.
- You can also make images pretty quickly compared to PI.
- Its cheap, and I used it with DSS to prepare the stacked linear images.
- The tracking feature was neat.
Dislikes:
- It was generally too aggressive, although I could switch to manual to tone it down. The colouring wasn’t very flexible
- It was hard to make subtle changes.
- there’s not a lot of info about how to use it – but I might be wrong on this now.
- I had to write down a list of how to process, just to remember
The main reason I swapped was as follows. I started looking at some demonstrations of PI and thought it looked good. So I picked on one images that I had processed as well as I could in startools, then got a trial licence of PI and had a go with it - I learnt as much about it as I could beforehand. I pretty quickly found that it was better.
First the PI dislikes:
- It takes a long time to get to grips with it. I’m still a beginner after a year or so.
- Its way more expensive
- some say there’s not great resources. I don’t believe this
- its slower going processing images
The likes:
- It also has all the stuff to stack/integrate. Even though it takes a lot to learn it is really powerful. Has excellent weighting and ability to reject images based on well defined criteria. Plus other stuff that improves the initial linear stacked image
- the ability to make a wide range of really precise masks. These make it easy to target the object, background, stars, specific colours, or combinations of these.
- excellent filters for noise reduction, and the opposite for sharpening. Wavelets – you’ll get to love them.
- you can save different series of processes to do different things (calibrate/stack images, process OSC images, make masks, etc). So don’t need to remember everything – just open the process and off you go.
- although there’s a lot to learn, there are some really good resources out there
- its continually evolving and improving. The last release had some real game changers – improved selector for rejection and weighting images before stacking, neural network approach for star removal, etc.
Stop me now!
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