Background extraction

[JohnC64]

I've been going through processing my images with the Pixinsight Trial. I must say that it is a fantastic processing tool and once you get your head around some of its user interface nuances it really is good to use. (Disclaimer - I am a software engineer so it kinda looks intuitive to me !!) The Stacking, and integration work well and the results that I can produce look great.

Now it is getting towards making a decision to spend the cash to buy it I'm thinking that I have most of the processing routines implemented in other tools. (Levels, curves, saturation etc) There are a couple of routines in there that I find very useful and would like to use. Namely Automatic/Dynamic Background Extraction (DBE) and SCNR. (OK OK i don't always take flats :-) ) Does anyone know if these processing algorithms are available in any other tools out there?

Cheers for any info

John

[Gib007]

DynamicBackgroundExtraction is something I haven't seen in other tools but then again, I haven't looked at every single one. Needless to say that once I used that one in particular, even when using flats, I had to buy PixInsight. Having said this, the price is very good when compared to the likes of Photoshop and given its power, you will not need to use anything else outside of PixInsight. It certainly makes it worth the money!

[JohnC64]

Oh I agree its very good - It just seems painful to spend so much (~£175) when I will probably only use a fraction of its capability. It is a shame that PixInsight LE is no longer available from what I read, it had a much pruned down feature set but included dbe. It was free when it was available but even if it was available at say ~£25, it would be a no brainer.

[r3i]

There are ways of doing the equivalent of DBE & SCNR in PhotoShop - methods are documented in the book PhotoShop Astronomy. However, the methods are quite long winded, compared to the relatively simple operations in PixInsight.

[Gib007]

Well, you can do ALL your post-processing there. Feel free to have a look at my workflow tutorials in my website: http://lightvortexastronomy.blogspot.com/

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

[RogerTheDodger]

I was the same as Gib007 - once I'd tried DBE I bought it and don't regret it one bit. The Batch Pre-processing for registration/calibration is great to use too.