Quote:
Originally Posted by Satchmo
These images aren't straight out of the box though . I'm getting much more bloated star images . What is your most common workflow ?
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That's true. I'm navigating the long and winding path of post processing. Still very new to it though. This is what I've been doing to date. It's pretty basic but it's where I'm at. I'm not sure that I really want to do much more with a Seestar shot:
- Move the lights (fits format) into a subdir hanging off the directory I've set up for the object (eg. .../NGC3199/lights)
- Open Siril
- Click the Home icon in the tool bar and set the home directory to the root directory for the object (eg. .../NGC3199)
- Run the script called OSC_PREPROCESSING_WITHOUT_DBF (as the darks have been applied by the Seestar and there are no bias or flat calibration files to use)
- Open the result.fit file in the home directory
- Click on Autostretch, and the Unlink button next to it to do a screen stretch
- Perform a background extraction if you're not using GraXpert. Whether you do it here or later depends on how your noise reduction will handle an extracted source. Seems to depend on the subject for me. Galaxies always seem to be a lot more difficult.
- Remove green noise
- Perform deconvolution
- Perform photometric colour calibration
- Save where you're up to under a new name
- Jump into linear mode
- Perform Starnet star removal
- Perform Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch on foreground, and background. More than once if it's a delicate subject, working on it incrementally
- Save the Without Stars version under a new name for later
- Load the Starmask file and work on saturation to try to get the star colours right
- Save the Starmask off under a new name
- Go into Star Recomposition
- Load the Without stars version, and the Starmask version and blend to taste
- Save the final file as FITS and also PNG
- Open the PNG in photoshop and work on file with NoiseXTerminator
- Adjust curves and balance image as required
- Save as PNG
- If you didn't do a background extraction earlier, you can move to GraXpert and do it now. It's unusual for me to do this step last, but I get pretty bad banding with some Seestar shots and extracting the background early on gives me useless results with NoiseXTerminator.
I've seen another fellow on YouTube splitting the colours, and recombining them using RGB Image Compositing. He dumped the blue (I think) and substituted the Red channel into both Red and Blue, and also into Luminance and converted it to a CIE L*a*b Composition. His results were OK, but when I did it I wasn't happy. It may be a much better way to go but I haven't done much with it.
Anyway, take a crack at this simple workflow to see if you can make any progress with it in Siril.