Pixinsight--Is it worth the £££

[SilverAstro]

15 minutes ago, JohnSadlerAstro said:

My HAPPIEST post ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

I have 16-bit GIMP now!!!!!!  It's amazing!

I am soooo excited right now.......

Yea !! I am so happy too, yet another keeper of the GIMP flame preserved in the camp

and for your next trick you'll be trying out the Gaussian blur tool to get rid of your muddy SW

PS I didnt explicitly say so earlier but IRIS is also free !

 

 

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Hmmm...Nice idea, that.....your SW as bad? We've had 2 "good" nights this year--my mount has more motors than that!

Issue with Gaussians is, they can reduce resolution; planetary imaging-- (I've only recently heard of that, never realized you could see PLANETS or THE MOON whatever that is  from the SW!!!  ) ---would be a nightmare with that!  

John

[ecuador]

54 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

As I said, I'm not aware of anything to beat DBE. That means what it says - I'm not aware of it. I don't claim that it doesn't exist! I'm not in the business of trying every new bit of software that appears on the market and I suppose that I'm mainly motivated to try new software when I see an image that breaks new ground. If I think, 'How did he or she do that?' then I'll be in there, full of curiosity. I'm hardly a PI evangelist, I'm manly a Ps imager, but DBE is profoundly impressive. If you have an alternative, tell us about it. Give us some demos. I'm all ears, I promise. If there is something out there which is more sophisticated than DBE - great.

Olly

No reason to get defensive, I assumed you had not tried StarTools' wipe, otherwise I am sure you would have mentioned it - it is equivalent. And, no, I don't expect you to try every software out there, it was not an accusation, just trying to be helpful 

As I said, my personal experience was: Trying PI... interesting... DBE... wow! Then trying StarTools... interesting... Wipe... wait, it did it with just one click? -> back to DBE to compare... yes, same result. So it is not about "better", it is about giving me the same result with one click for 90% of the cases, while with DBE I did a bit of setup. In the other 10% of the cases, Wipe also has to be assisted (masks), although still probably faster to do than DBE depending on the case. Overall, I can't claim StarTools will give you a better result - I didn't get that advanced in PI during trial to be able to say that, but after trying both (actually spending a bit more time with PI since it is less straightforward), I could get a similar result in about 10 mins (with ST) instead of 1 hour+ (with PI). And I loved the fact that most modules of StarTools are not destructive on your data you can go back and forth, apply as many stretches as you want etc, so I personally find it more pleasant to work with. Now, if you want things like batch processing etc, you can't use StarTools, so, again, that is my experience as a relative beginner. I posted a link to my tutorial if you are curious (I selected an example where wipe needs a little help), there are also many videos on youtube to get an idea. It is interesting to see once in action, just because it does not look like any other program...

I would want to keep PI for calibration/stacking, but it felt too expensive for just that - I already have Photoshop if I want a little tweak after StarTools - so I had to go back to the rather temperamental DSS

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Hi,

So this is a comparison... no prizes for guessing which is 8-bit!!! Interestingly, 8 bit is 1.2 MB, 16 bit is 10.4 MB! (both have slight sharpening applied). The halos on the 16bit are a result of something............but its not in GIMP, stack looks like it, so I don't know. (oh, and only 13 frames in 16 bit, 70 or so in 8-bit, I did a very critical restack.)

 

This is the old, 8-bit, with bad gradient, noise, nasty colour, and clipped.

 

 

Then we have the 16-bit version,  still loads more processing to do, no clipping, lots of colour, loads less noise, and overall "healthy" look. Although I haven't got everything out of it yet, the data is really improved in it. (I like images with quite right backgrounds, easier on the eyes, black sky = bad sky)

 

 

 

Edited February 9, 2017 by JohnSadlerAstro

[Ollyb]

Pixinsight is absolutely worth the investment, my Astro images have gone from being acceptable to a whole new level since I started using PI…

Compared to the cost of a telescope imaging rig Pixinsight is actually cheap and surely the whole aim is to produce stunning images…

I love how images evolve in Pixinsight, it’s literally a stunning piece of software for astrophotographers…

 

[alacant]

On 09/02/2017 at 16:49, JohnSadlerAstro said:

PixInsight worth the £175 price tag

Hi

This thread is now four years old. A long time in tech. Maybe a few updated thoughts?

The stacking and plate solving bits of pi are very good. The processing part is however still based upon a collection of unrelated stretch-and-hope-for-the-best algorithms from 50 years ago. It probably represents the best of any old-school approach and is ok if you grew up with that, have plenty of time for processing and get on well with a mass of overlapping and hidden windows.

Fortunately, alternatives are emerging which get you there significantly quicker by a totally different non-destructive route and also relieve you of the mess of windows by using a modern interface. One such app is StarTools. Its author recently gave us an explanation and a demo.

In the end, it's probably not the financial outlay or the methodology of your chosen app which gets you over the processing line, rather your familiarity with it.

Cheers

 

Edited June 17, 2021 by alacant

[Stuart1971]

APP ( Astro Pixel Processor) all the way for me….👍🏼

But in all honesty I have never even tried PI

Edited June 17, 2021 by Stuart1971

[DaveS]

Can't be doing with PI. I ran the trial but it did my head in, even with Warren's book, In the end I deleted it to save space on my old boot drive (Since upgraded), and the 45 day trial period is long gone.

Sticking with AstroArt 7 that I first used when it was v5 a good few years ago.

I have the Star Tools trial on my computer, but it didn't like the alignment edges that I had on my subs.

[AbsolutelyN]

Another thumbs up for PixInsight - my view is that it is absolutely superb but you need to invest time to learn it and get used to the user interface. 

[bottletopburly]

29 minutes ago, DaveS said:

but it didn't like the alignment edges that I had on my subs.

Yes you have to crop edge artefacts out in Startools  , autodev - bin - crop -wipe - autodev 

[Astro Noodles]

I absolutely love the wipe module in Startools.

[david_taurus83]

I mainly use Pixinsight but often find myself moving over to Photoshop for tweaks. I have some books on both PI and PS but I can't seem to learn anything new from them. Watching other people on YouTube has always gained me a better understanding of the processes. I do wonder about all those processes though. I'd love to see a tutorial or workshop where the user used even 80% of the available processes to create an image.

[Alien 13]

All these software applications and it seems to me that not one of them can go from A-B without using XYZ in between so they are all flawed.. I gave up and only use a single app now..

Alan

[Earl]

Simple answer is yes.

Learning to use it is far from simple.

[rnobleeddy]

It's a bit expensive to try everything, so I haven't,  but startools gets my vote.

Everything it does, it seems to do well. It's probably not got as much going on as some of the other options but after a year I'm still learning. The addition of GPU processing has made a massive difference, and I like that's accessible to a newbie for as long as they need - 45 days sounds like loads but it took me far longer than that to go from first sub to first decent image (you may say I'm still trying!). 

 

 

[scotty38]

On 17/06/2021 at 19:23, Alien 13 said:

All these software applications and it seems to me that not one of them can go from A-B without using XYZ in between so they are all flawed.. I gave up and only use a single app now..

Alan

My images may not be great examples but PixInsight will do it all.