Quote:
Originally Posted by netwolf
And I have read somewhere b4 that binning is possible with DSLR images in photoshop, is this right?
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The software binning you’re referring to follows a similar concept, but different to in camera binning. In camera binning (either 2x2, 3x3 or what ever your camera supports) electronically combines pixels. When the camera is placed into a 2x2 mode, it groups four pixels to make them act as one. This increasing camera sensitivity, but at the same time potentially reduces resolution depending on your arcsec/pixel scale.
In comparison, software binning does not increase sensitivity. It follows a similar principle of combining pixels, but does this by taking the average of each pixel to make the final pixel output. i.e. with a software 3x3 bin, results in one large pixel containing the averaged value of the nine pixels. You’re probably thinking “Why would I want to do software binning if it doesn’t improve sensitivity?”. Well… software binning from an image processing perspective is one method of smoothing data to reduce noise. As the pixels are averaged, it is makes it easy to remove outlier pixels. First upscale your data, then active the software bin mode of choice. There is of course many other noise reduction methods which I think are more efficient than software binning, but it does work well for RGB data which is later to be combined with a 1x1 luminance.
It is also important to note that with any form of binning, image size is reduce. This makes sense considering you are combining pixels. So if your camera pixel array is 1024x1024 in a 1x1 configuration, binning 2x2 results in half the array size i.e 512x512. This is the reason why I mentioned to upscale your data first so when the pixels are averaged you finish with the original sized image (before binning).