Lucy Richardson Deconvolution Photoshop Plugin

[04Stefan07 (Stefan)]

Anyone know where I can get it??

[gregbradley]

If you google that topic you get a few options.

A few are Astra Image, Topaz in focus, Focus Magic. There's probably several others.

Greg.

[Merlin66 (Ken)]

You can use Lucy Richardson, among many others in AstraArtV5 ;-)

[04Stefan07 (Stefan)]

I found a plugin for Photoshop but it's double the price of the software package they sell.

[gregbradley]

Depending what type of image you intend deconvolution on but in my experience deconvolution works best on mono CCD images usually only on the Luminance image and sometimes on either 1 or all of the RGB images. Its a good way to make say the blue channel star sizes match the other RG or whichever one has larger stars if any.

It reduces red rings around stars after the colour combine if you match the star sizes. Marcus Davies put that technique out at AAIC 2 years ago. Quite a useful piece of info.

Also deconvolution works best multiscaled as per Ken Crawford tutorial. You do several versions on the luminance at various strengths and then layer the various strengths in. Decon too hard wrecks the stars and leaves sharpening halos. PixInsight has decon. I don't know for sure but I suspect it may have the best version of it like most things PixInsight.

Decon works best on oversampled images as well plus images with lots of hours of exposure.

Greg.

[RickS (Rick)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

PixInsight has decon. I don't know for sure but I suspect it may have the best version of it like most things PixInsight.

I don't know if it is the best (I haven't tried many others) but it is pretty good There's a DynamicPSF tool to estimate the PSF for your image and avoids guessing. You can use a Luminance mask to limit decon to the bright areas of the image and a star mask as a support to protect bright stars from ringing. That usually avoids the need to merge multiple versions.

[gregbradley]

Originally Posted by RickS

I don't know if it is the best (I haven't tried many others) but it is pretty good There's a DynamicPSF tool to estimate the PSF for your image and avoids guessing. You can use a Luminance mask to limit decon to the bright areas of the image and a star mask as a support to protect bright stars from ringing. That usually avoids the need to merge multiple versions.

Great tips Rick. Thanks for that. I will definitely try that. I am learning PI at the moment and updated my software to the latest V1.8 recently. I kind of half knew my way round PI a few years ago but dropped it. Now I'm relearning it properly.

PI seems to do many basic tasks really well, like gradient correction etc but the finer colour processing often seems way harsh and HDR's which is an ugly look. I suppose its a matter of turning it all down to make it useful.

Greg.

[RickS (Rick)]

Greg, the main culprit for that "PI look" is usually the HDRMultiscaleTransform. I use it but often blend back some of the original image with PixelMath to reduce the strength of the effect.

[gregbradley]

Originally Posted by RickS

Greg, the main culprit for that "PI look" is usually the HDRMultiscaleTransform. I use it but often blend back some of the original image with PixelMath to reduce the strength of the effect.

Yes that is quite likely. HDR isn't my favourite image look. But a little probably shows up detail that is just a blur in regular images.

Some example images are just plain shockingly bad. Way over contrasted to get "detail" which is really just entered artifacts.

Greg.

[04Stefan07 (Stefan)]

I bought some Topaz Photoshop plugins which work great! Better than the Lucy Richardson in my opinion.

[gregbradley]

Which ones were they Stefan? I think Topaz have a sharpen program.

Where I find decon useful is not in Photoshop at all. But at the beginning stages of image processing in CCDstack. I often do a 15 to 25 iteration Decon on luminance and save it separately. If its a galaxy type image I will do perhaps 2 more until I am starting to get artifacts around the stars (that varies with the image but usually around 30-40 iterations).

Then I blend them or combine the decon luminance to make a sharper luminance that I use in the LRGB combine.

I also sometimes do mild decon on RGB to tighten them up if seeing was poor or one colour stars are a lot larger than the others. This can reduce haloing of one colour on stars. Marcus Davies came up with that technique. It can be quite useful at times and heads off a processing challenge with coloured rings on bright stars.

I would not use decon on a colour image as its too destructive and counter to colour. Colour has gradualtransitions of colour change whereas luminance has sharp transitions of shade giving detail.

So applying decon to a colour image may be harmful to the image. Like in any image processing a little may work but a lot will look bad.

Greg.

[04Stefan07 (Stefan)]

I bought a couple of them.

- Clarity
- Clean
- InFocus
- BW

I tend to use the InFocus one the most and end up getting great results!

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Which ones were they Stefan? I think Topaz have a sharpen program.

Where I find decon useful is not in Photoshop at all. But at the beginning stages of image processing in CCDstack. I often do a 15 to 25 iteration Decon on luminance and save it separately. If its a galaxy type image I will do perhaps 2 more until I am starting to get artifacts around the stars (that varies with the image but usually around 30-40 iterations).

Then I blend them or combine the decon luminance to make a sharper luminance that I use in the LRGB combine.

I also sometimes do mild decon on RGB to tighten them up if seeing was poor or one colour stars are a lot larger than the others. This can reduce haloing of one colour on stars. Marcus Davies came up with that technique. It can be quite useful at times and heads off a processing challenge with coloured rings on bright stars.

I would not use decon on a colour image as its too destructive and counter to colour. Colour has gradualtransitions of colour change whereas luminance has sharp transitions of shade giving detail.

So applying decon to a colour image may be harmful to the image. Like in any image processing a little may work but a lot will look bad.

Greg.