Hi all,
Starless pics - it seems people either love them or loathe them. Kudos to Bassnut (Fred) for bringing it under my(our?) attenttion!
However, despite Fred's preachings, it's only after seeing Multiweb's (Marc)
Starless Ha Lagoon (Spooky!) that I'm somewhat of a convert.
Besides starless images, it seems that a lot of people
prefer to use starless images in their processing chain, before popping the stars back in right at the last moment. Although, personally, I prefer other ways, this technique does allow for intuitive processing without worrying about blowing out stars.
Unfortunately, this technique has been exclusive to PhotoShop owners, as it relies heavily on its 'Dust & Scratches' filter. That's why I studied the algorithm, made some improvements, grumbled, chucked it out, and made something better
The resulting filter is rather CPU intensive, but produces better quality images with less false positives (e.g. less features disappearing) and no blurriness.
There's quite a few parameters to tweak to get the most out of the image, but for a lot of images (already processed or not), it should be possible to attain a convincing starless rendition without any further touching up in PhotoShop, The GIMP, etc.
StarLess is up for download on
my website as the 3rd tools in the StarTools series. And yes, just like the previous two tools StarWipe and StarBright, this too is a command-line tool.
The attached example of my M31 lazy one-click color GRAS image was processed with;
Code:
StarLess --in=M31_final.tiff --dominantcolor=blue
No further processing was carried out on the image.
Upon execution, a brief overview of the different options is displayed, but a proper manual is in the works. In the meantime, as always, I'm happy to offer technical support, hear/implement your feedback and fulfill your job vacancies...
Best,
UPDATE: Fixed a bug that would crash StarLess if an image is an uneven amount of pixels in width. 0.1a is now up for download.
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