Quote:
Originally Posted by mldee
Hi Ivo,
I had a few spare hours today and have had a chance to play around with Starwipe. I'm a novice in this field, but I was quite impressed with the results I achieved in a few minutes. See below! 
I am a dedicated non command-line type, so the first thing I did was write up a couple of simple one-line batch files in Notepad to automate the typing process a little. 
I feel there is considerable potential in your program and hope you can be supported with feedback and suggestions as you progress. 
For any others out there who may be interested in trying Ovi's little work of art, I've attached a couple of results, plus my batch files, which I had to rename as .txt files to satisfy IIS uploader. Rename them with .bat after saving.
As Starwipe is a command-line job, it only recognises 8-letter filenames. I made a directory d:\Starwipe, and put it and the batch files in there. Make a couple of shortcuts to the two batch files (def 1 and def 2) so you can run them straight from the desktop. 
Drag, copy or save your .BMP image, (I saved the BMP from my screen FIT file in Neb), into D:\starwipe and name it image.bmp. Filesize is about 40MB for an 82MB drizzled Neb file). Then just click on the appropriate shortcut for which type of processing you want (channel or pixel), and away it goes, and will autosave the processed .BMP image in the directory. (Read the manual). You then get the thrills of loading it into Neb or whatever to continue processing. Painless.
These are only very basic learner instructions. Take a peek at the .bat files, and read Ovi's manual and then do some processing tweaking as you wish. The two images I did, I used Def1.bat. I also tried a really bad snowy third image, using pixel (def 2), but since I was only guessing (all of 10 minutes into the program!) results were not super improved. Like any thing, takes time to experiment. But so easy to do! Just change the values in the .bat files! 
BTW making the .BMP images in Nebulosity was painless, as simple as saving the present screen image. I really like Neb!
Now, if some kind soul will just elegantize Starwipe wif a GUI, it would be super!
Cheers, |
Great read & nice to see it's got a place in your toolchain!
StarWipe hates artifical/non-natural data such as dead pixels (it's OK with hot pixels), borders, seams, or excessive noise. If you'd crop your M83 image slightly to get rid of the anomalous data (probably due to stacking?) in the bottom right corner, StarWipe will do a much better job!
Looking at your batchfiles, you're missing out on 'local' mode (for starters try it with '--scale=10' '--window=2' or thereabouts). Local mode can really help poke through dusty or nebulous regions.
If you have an exceedingly noisy image and want to use StarWipe on it, you can do the following;
Take the image and blur it until you can't see any noise anymore, then feed it to StarWipe, but use the '--maponly' option.
This will output the light pollution map instead of the corrected image to the BMP.
Then feed the original (unblurred) noisy image to StarWipe, but use the '--inmap' parameter to load the light pollution map you just extracted from the blurred image. And presto!
EDIT: To use file names longer than 8 characters, simply put your filename between double quotes. Ex;
StarWipe.exe --in="quitealongfilename.bmp" --out="evenlongerfilenameaslogasikeep ontyping.bmp" --mode=local --window=2 --scale=7
Another neat trick is to use the TAB button on your keyboard, like this;
StarWipe.exe --in="quite<TAB>
This will autocomplete the filename to
StarWipe.exe --in="quitealongfilename.bmp"
...as long as that file exists in your current directory (it's a nice quick way to check that).