Quote:
Originally Posted by The_bluester
I don't think you could every really automate processing as so much of it at the pointy end is subjective and up to the tastes of whoever is pushing the buttons. But Astro Pixel Processor I find to be quite simple to use.
Load your lights.
Load your flats
Load your calibration files (Master bias, master darks, bad pixel map etc)
Make a few intelligent selections to fairly basic settings if it makes sense with your data.
Click "Integrate"
The subjective stuff comes when the basic integrations are done.
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This make APP sound complicated, you only need lights, its interface is tabs based and numbered in order of usage but you can just go straight to the last one to integrate and it’ll try to run all the earlier steps itself without any input from you and eventually give you a nice pretty stretched image, Fairly idiotproof program really, but it has power and features to add control but its defaults will get you a 99% perfect image with the files you give it and you dont HAVE to give ita bunch of certain types of frames, jpg light only work fine, but if you happen to grab some darks or flats it will make use of those if you add them, it doesnt force you to collect a set number of darks, bias etc. When I bought it I gave it a bunch a set I had spent months in Pixinsght to produce what I think is the best possible image for the data I took and APP spat out an indistinguishable result overnight. I still enjoy PI and as it keeps growing new feature I keep improving my workflow to make full use of signal to my skills (not perfect). But processing is a time consuming process, same with APP but it isn’t too bad to run through each tab over a few hours then the final integration I try to run before going out or going to bed and when I return the result is there in its glory. There are some niggles I want to see fixed or implemented andits not the powerhouse PI is capable of but it does an awesome job for little effort and fairly quickly too. I never was able to get the hang of stretching the Integrated output of DSS very well, APP seems to do a spot on job of stretching on its own and it has a great mosaic feature so instead of registering against one target frame it can register mosaic style all your frames (take a lot longer of course and produces a much larger resolution image as a result but its damn good and none of the complicated stuff in PI to deal with making mosaics, creating artificial starfield to match against etc.