Try following these videos for pixinsight:
http://www.harrysastroshed.com/pixinsighthome.html
-edit-
Harrys DBE video is broken. I have uploaded a copy of it so you can have a watch.
http://core-au.net/astro/4%20DBE.wmv
Thats where i started at.
My general workflow for a OSC image is:
Open Image
- ScreenTransferFunction to see what your working with.
- DBE (Dynamic Background Extraction - look at harrys video for how to use it). DBE will remove a lot of skyglow and color tinges.
- Color Calibration. This can be hard to get right at times. Harry videos show you how to do it well. There are other methods as well, but the method harry uses is good. Color Calibration is pretty good if you use a light pollution filter (that adds a tint).
- Remove ScreenTransferFunction (bottom right button on STF window).
- Load Curves and Histogram transformation. Same deal as photoshop, just no layers. Do a few curves then remove the excess dark in the Histogram Transformation. Harry uses a different (IMO bad) method. He drags the mids slider in Histogram Transformation down to bring out the detail. This clips data though. Don't make the image too bright or your background won't be black and a tool later on will brighten the image a bit.
- SCNR, remove green channels (harry has a video on SCNR).
- HDRMultiscaleTransform. Play with this. I (think) i used 3 levels in the image i did. Again harry has a video on this tool.
- LHE (LocalHistogramEqualization). watch harrys video on this. You will need a lightness mask otherwise your background will also be affected by the tool (not wanted). Try using a Kernal Radius of around 180 and Amount of 0.75. LHE is really powerful so have a play. This tool is heavy on the CPU though, so it will take a while if you have a less than stellar PC.
- Other tools. I used ATrousWaveletTransformV1 to sharpen the image slightly. Harry has a video on this i think. Its a difficult tool to use. Other tools are in there as well you can try. I don't use ACDNR to remove noise. I find it washes out the image and makes it look worse. MorphologicalTransformation is pretty good if you want to alter your stars (make them smaller etc), but requires a lot of time to play around to get it right.
- AssignICCProfile (optional). I assign an sRGB profile to my images at this stage. I do this because no two monitors/PCs are the same. If you specify an ICC profile, pretty much all other PC's know what color space to use. Without it, a great looking image on your screen may look terrible on someone elses.
- Curves again. Open Curves and goto Saturation (S on the right side). The curves window is broken up into squares. Four squares make one larger square. The grid is 4x4 large squares and there is a line going from the bottom left to the top right. When i am playing with saturation i always drag a spot from where the line intersects the top right corner of the first square in the 4x4 arrangement. I attached a SS to show you what i normally do. This method works OK for most images. Some odd images may require the point at a different spot (aka - have a play with it).
Apply the curve. Still lacking color? Apply it again, and so forth.
And there you go. Should look OK. If you want you can run HDR or LHE again and see how it works out.
Best way i found to learn PI is to watch harrys vids, then just have a play with some data on a rainy weekend.
PS: harry includes sample mono and RGB data on his website that he used for processing. You can download that and follow harrys instructions to the letter and see what you get.
I had a play in PixInsight, but I need a really good tutorial! I'm finding it a bit challenging! I'm glad you think the data is good, at least that's one thing that I might have got right.....
