Pixinsight

[Physicist13]

update on trial, if anyones interested!

Pros: powerful routines specifically for getting the best out of astophotos. The writers obviously know their maths and signal processing! It will let you get the best results from your pictures. There is a lot of help available but be specific in your questions.

Cons: Price,s/w is in flux it seems as bits being added or changed quite a lot...but thats what s/w developers do. Documentation is minimal but there are very useful vids and forum discussions..but beware that these need to refer to the latest versions.

You do need to be very methodical in your workflow and understand what each step is aiming to achieve. Fair bit of technical jargon is used that may need learning.

This is a signal processing package and as such is very computationally heavy..its what PC's are made for.

...its on my bithday wishlist.

[harry page]

Cons: Price,s/w is in flux it seems as bits being added or changed quite a lot...but thats what s/w developers do

Hi

I am glad its like this It means I get lots of new toys all the time and foc

Regards

Harry

[Physicist13]

Hi!

v true!! They are producing lots of v nice toys!!

[ollypenrice]

Harry should have a free battery of FSQs on a big 10 micron for all he's done for PI! Curiously I haven't heard from Adobe regarding my own request for same... Ingrates!

lly

[harry page]

Harry should have a free battery of FSQs on a big 10 micron for all he's done for PI! Curiously I haven't heard from Adobe regarding my own request for same... Ingrates!

lly

I get the pure satisfaction of turning a olly from photoshop

I know you still like photoshop a bit , but its not my fault your are not perfect

Harry

[Aenima]

Hehe, yes the updates are very much appreciated. Thanks.

Aside from ps versus pi - I am neutral here - the price does seem a little high but considering the amount you pay for, say, a decent camera or coma corrector to improve your images , the software at the end of the process is equally capable and worth investing in. I'm lucky enough to have the Sky at night coverdisc copy of serif Photoplus 10 (early in 2012) which keeps on surprising me at its ability to replicate almost everything that expensive layerbased editors like PS can do, and all it cost me was the magazine price and a phonecall to retrieve my passcode!

I have a mate who has the bells n whistles software including a 64bit system (only dual core though) and processing on that is only a slight improvement on my 32bit machine with serif's photoplus 10 running.

Something tells me things will get a little more strained with pixinsight though and while i'm free most days to use the better machine I like to have my images on my own laptop and play about on it too. Maybe I can 'hop' over to another laptop for PI tasks and then back to my own for capture/guiding and storage etc.? From program to program 'hopping' is there a good and bad way to store/save images so that compression and compatibility problems are minimised?

Again, thank you for all the input guys

Regards

Aenima

[Sp@ce_d]

If I had to choose only one it would be PI.. I only started using it earlier this year but so far I've found it easier to get the hang of than PS which I've struggled with for far, far longer. That said, it's all down to Harrys tutorials getting me a good start on my way..

I'm very glad there seems to be active development.. it shows they are still interested.. unlike a lot of other software we still struggle to use that seems to have been left behind in the 90's!!

[ollypenrice]

I get the pure satisfaction of turning a olly from photoshop

I know you still like photoshop a bit , but its not my fault your are not perfect

Harry

You haven't seen me in my new Bermudas, Harry.

Olly

[Physicist13]

Hehe, yes the updates are very much appreciated. Thanks.

Aside from ps versus pi - I am neutral here - the price does seem a little high but considering the amount you pay for, say, a decent camera or coma corrector to improve your images , the software at the end of the process is equally capable and worth investing in. I'm lucky enough to have the Sky at night coverdisc copy of serif Photoplus 10 (early in 2012) which keeps on surprising me at its ability to replicate almost everything that expensive layerbased editors like PS can do, and all it cost me was the magazine price and a phonecall to retrieve my passcode!

I have a mate who has the bells n whistles software including a 64bit system (only dual core though) and processing on that is only a slight improvement on my 32bit machine with serif's photoplus 10 running.

Something tells me things will get a little more strained with pixinsight though and while i'm free most days to use the better machine I like to have my images on my own laptop and play about on it too. Maybe I can 'hop' over to another laptop for PI tasks and then back to my own for capture/guiding and storage etc.? From program to program 'hopping' is there a good and bad way to store/save images so that compression and compatibility problems are minimised?

Again, thank you for all the input guys

Regards

Aenima

[Physicist13]

Oops pressed wrong icon there!

Uncompressed file vers such as tiff or fits us the standard astro format...but its a modified tiff.

Harry should be on PI payrole!!!!

PI vs PS no comment ! lets just say Apples and Pears !

[Aenima]

Cheers! is it a modified tiff like once you save it its no longer original? or modified as in pixinsight uses slightly different tiff? not sure on the meaning there....

But thanks for the info - I mainly use tiff cos the whole fits compatibility issues bug me, and there's only a limited number of reasons to include that amount of information in a picture of stars.

Regards

Aenima

[IanL]

PI will:

Load: BMP, RAW (pretty much any camera raw format, certainly all the biggies), FITS, GIF, ICO, JP2, JPC, JPEG, MNG, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, SVG, TGA, TIFF, XBM, XPM

Save FITS, BMP, ICO, JP2, JPC, JPEG, PNG, PPM, TIFF, XBM, XPM

For many of the more complex formats you would use the Format Explorer to change detailed settings, though some of the more important ones will be presented when saving for example (e.g. sample format in FITS).

Most of the FITS compatibility issues are caused by a few applications that don't follow standards, although to be fair there are some things in the FITS standard that are so flexible that there isn't really a right or wrong way to do it. FITS is definitely the way to go with PI since it uses FITS keywords to store all sorts of useful information like noise evaluation, astrometric solutions, etc.

On the whole you either work with the defaults and never have to change them, or occasionally you have to make a setting change which you rarely go back to again unless there is a specific thing you are trying to achieve.

[Physicist13]

Cheers! is it a modified tiff like once you save it its no longer original? or modified as in pixinsight uses slightly different tiff? not sure on the meaning there....

But thanks for the info - I mainly use tiff cos the whole fits compatibility issues bug me, and there's only a limited number of reasons to include that amount of information in a picture of stars.

Regards

Aenima

Sorry I wasn't clear. Fits has all the original data unmodified, it just added a header with various info. Tiff is the same but with a different heade structure. It's because fits does not alter the data tht it's used. There are free fits viewers avail.