[irwjager (Ivo)]

Originally Posted by Ryderscope

Interesting debate kicking off here Andy on the ethics of Image processing. Personally, I fall into the team that says that anything that is not entirely based on the captured data and thereby mathematically reversible is straying too far. My understanding from reading this thread is that the AI suite is using external data sources to build its algorithms with a composite image resulting.

This is not to say that these techniques should not be used and it becomes a personal choice for the image processor. My view is that it is acceptable as long as one has full disclosure which you have clearly done.

Rodney, I'd buy you an Internet-beer for that. Really well said.
Topaz AI (and Starnet++ for that matter, which creates similar artifacts) is to be avoided if you would like to do astrophotography. The same obviously goes for selective processing (e.g. creating a hand-drawn mask to manipulate part of the image). If you're doing photography, then adding stuff that wasn't there in the first place is not ok, particularly if it's not an "accident" (e.g. accidental ringing/Gibbs phenomenon).

If you do astroart, then anything goes obviously, but I think this particular sub-section of the forum is mostly populated by photographers, not artists. As such, we assume that what you are showing us is real and not the result of arbitrary manipulation of the image, or the result of a hallucination of a neural net.

It's not just Topaz AI either; many "standard" noise reduction routines are specific to terrestrial scenes, and built to reconstruct a scene. They are predisposed to reconstruct edges and geometrical shapes, whereas these are virtually non-existent in outer space. Such reconstructions fail miserably in - particularly - DSO datasets, ending up "reconstructing" detail where non exists. The same goes for debayering algorithms - the most "advanced" ones (for example those based on AHD) yield the worst SNR, as they try to "reconstruct" edges and detail based on random noise. Stacking that - now random detail - yields worse outcomes. This is one of the reasons why something "advanced" like PixInsight only offers something simple like VNG - precisely because it doesn't do anything fancy.

The best (and most widely accepted in astronomy) noise reduction algorithms for astrophotography only remove energy from your data and do not introduce it.