Starnet in the toolbox...

[Hallingskies]

Been having a play with Starnet, now that I have finally found a computer in the house it will run on.  It seems a finiky bit of software, but for the price you pay for it.... The missus and I both have year old second hand but good spec Lenovo lap-tops - but no go with Starnet.  It won't run on any of my considerable collection of older Win 7 PCs either.  I got my son to try it out, and lo, it runs on his gaming PC and his HP laptop, but both of these will be returning to university when he does (or should I say "if" in this febrile climate...).

Anyway...

I run Starnet on separate Ha and OIII stacks I made of M16 the other night, and then HOO combined them.  I'm really impressed with how cleanly it picked off the stars on the monochrome stacks, just a little bit of clone brush needed to mop up the residues of the cluster stars.  It didn't do quite as good a job on the colour image I had already prepped.  Not sure about the aesthetics of starless colour images. They have a striking Turneresque appearance, but they seem a bit flat - don't know if that's just my poor processing skills or a product of the Starnet process.

The power of Starnet seems to be in the ability to selectively stretch nebulosity without blowing out stars.  I struggle with star shapes and alignment anyway, and heavy stretching seems to make things much worse.

How do folk out there use Starnet in processing?  Do they hit individual channel stacks with it before colour combining or do they de-star the colour image?  How do they put the stars back in?  I subtracted the starless stack from the stretched "pre-Starnet" stack to give just the stars, HOO combined the stars, then layered them back over the image above in blend lighten mode, but the star colours were odd and they looked too sharp and painted on, although running a Gaussian blur of the star mask first helped.

In the end, I blended the "re-starred" version with a "normally processed" one, which seemed to put a bit of snap and contrast back into things.

 

I'd be interested to know if and how you experts out there use Starnet.

Edited June 28, 2020 by Hallingskies
Images replaced withiPad friendly ones