Lodestar Live V0.11 Status Update

[Paul81]

Hi all,

Finally had some time to work a bit more on LL in the run up to Christmas so I thought I would write a quick status update.

I tried the latest version out the other weekend but had to revert back to V0.10 in the end. One of the changes I had made was to make the UI slightly bigger to a accommodate the extra colour controls, however in doing so I had made the UI bigger than what my old macbook can display, so I couldn't see the status bar etc along the bottom. Ops! There were also a few annoying bugs.

As a result, the UI is now back to its old (minimum) size, and I have fixed the annoying bugs! The new Display Processing tab layout is still in progress, but the latest screenshot is below:

The other major feature change I have been working on is the display scaling. I was pretty un-happy with the gamma function when I tried V0.11 out, so you may have noticed that the gamma slider is gone in the screenshot above...

Now you select a display scaling function. I am still making my mind up what functions are worth putting in (too many and its too confusing - I want to keep it as simple as possible). Current choices are linear, arcsinh and X^0.25 (I suspect these won't be the final ones). These will modify the histogram in different ways with the hope of allowing the user to tease out the details they are after. So far working a treat on the test images I have tried.

I have posted some side-by-side comparisons below. Linear is left, arcsinh middle, X^0.25 right.

Once I have settled on the choices of functions I need to optimise the new code (and the colour control code - this is very slow) and after that we are looking dangerously like a release! 

M33:

M45:

M101:

Merry Christmas and clear skies

Paul

[shirva]

Its looking fantastic paul..ive been looking at images posted from the lodestar live on here and other forums and utube and your programme is getting great reviews and well deserved. .well done..would be good if a tutorial video was posted by someone who could demonstrate it to it's full..the one I saw from an American chap was good but he had only started using it...davy

[Martin Meredith]

Hi Paul

Merry xmas to you too!! And it looks like its going to be a happy new year with those scaling functions -- they're working brilliantly on those images. I appreciate the effort you're making to keep the interface simple too. It will be interesting to see what colour controls you finally settle on. I'm a big fan (in my day job) of hue-saturation-value though I guess it might interact in complex ways with intensity scaling.

Here December has been a complete washout…. but plenty of time to prepare for next year's observing.

Keep up the great work! 

cheers

Martin

[RobertI]

Some very exciting looking developments in the next release Paul looking forward to trying it.

[orion25]

Looks like you're really getting it all together, Paul. Nice work! Can't wait until the next release 

Cheers,

Reggie

[HiloDon]

Thanks for the update, Paul. LL is getting rave reviews around the world. Looking forward to v0.11.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Don

[Paul81]

Thank you all for the kind words! 

Its looking fantastic paul..ive been looking at images posted from the lodestar live on here and other forums and utube and your programme is getting great reviews and well deserved. .well done..would be good if a tutorial video was posted by someone who could demonstrate it to it's full..the one I saw from an American chap was good but he had only started using it...davy

I'll be posting some more videos once the updates to V0.11 have settled a bit more. I posted a few for V0.10 a while back on youtube and had good feedback that these proved to be useful so decided it would be good to do the same with the new controls in place.

Hi Paul

Merry xmas to you too!! And it looks like its going to be a happy new year with those scaling functions -- they're working brilliantly on those images. I appreciate the effort you're making to keep the interface simple too. It will be interesting to see what colour controls you finally settle on. I'm a big fan (in my day job) of hue-saturation-value though I guess it might interact in complex ways with intensity scaling.

Here December has been a complete washout…. but plenty of time to prepare for next year's observing.

Keep up the great work! 

cheers

Martin

Great minds - I am using HSV colour space to apply hue and saturation correction to the image. This is performed once the 16-bit data has been scaled to 8-bit. I decided on this approach as it seemed to be what people were doing by taking their exported PNG and applying correction in photoshop (or similar). The conversion between RGB and HSV is quite slow so I am looking to get it optimised to vectorised assembler - not so straight forward though. Hopefully some research on the net will dig up some good ideas. Ive also modified the histogram rendering to aid in seeing how the channels are unbalanced, and I want to add a button to auto align red, green and blue (thats the next bit i'll be working on). I also think colours come out better with the new scaling modes.

[arkosg]

Looks very promising Paul....

Thanks for continuing to work at improving LL for everyone! 

Could you please add a "cloud subtraction" feature while you're at it for those of us beset by less-than-clear skies? 

Happy holidays,

- Greg A

[shirva]

And a rain filter lol

[Paul81]

Now they would be awesome features! [emoji1]

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Mac4Lyfe]

I just spit up my drink..Now, I'm in tears laughing. Funny.

As much work Paul has done, I wouldn't be surprised to see a cloud filter option. Awesome stuff Paul.

Looks very promising Paul....

Thanks for continuing to work at improving LL for everyone! 

Could you please add a "cloud subtraction" feature while you're at it for those of us beset by less-than-clear skies? 

Happy holidays,

- Greg A

[geminijk]

Looking great Paul. LOVE IT!

John