Astro Pixel Processor v1.083 Star Reduction/Removal Tool

[tomato]

I have just found out (Thanks @Tomatobro)  that I was not using the latest release of APP, and it now has a star reduction/removal  tool, they seem to be all the rage at the moment. Have any APP users had a look to see how it compares to Starnet or StarXTerminator?

One thing it doesn't seem to do is create separate  stars and starless images, only the latter, so I guess you would use this at the end of all other processing to reduce the stars? 

[PeterCPC]

Bear in mind that you can save your image at any point so you could have both.

[Annehouw]

The star reduction is quite good. Take it to a value of 0.6 or 0.7 for moderate reduction. It can go further, but make sure to scan the image for distorted stars (especially stars that are really close to each other). Either back-off a bit or correct that further in the pipeline.

Total removal of stars is not as good as Starnet of StarXterminator. For my setup, Starnet was never satisfactory. StarXterminator is much better. None are perfect.

If you are only out to de-emphasize stars, then the APP star reduction is all you need imho. For e.g. Narrowband with RGB star insertion, one of the star-removal programs are probably better.

 

A few minutes ago, Nikita Misoura has released Starnet V2 (PI and stand alone with GUI). I have downloaded it, but have not tried it yet.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/starnet/files/v2.0/

Edited January 24, 2022 by Annehouw

[tomato]

30 minutes ago, PeterCPC said:

Bear in mind that you can save your image at any point so you could have both.

Hi Peter, please could you elaborate on this? Both Starnet and StarXTermintor give you the option to create a stars only image (i.e. an image containing only the extracted stars, no nebulosity) but as far as I can see APP’s tool does not have this function, therefore you can only create an original stars plus nebulosity image and a nebulosity only image? 
 

I suppose you could take these into Pixinsight and use Pixelmath to create one that way.

[PeterCPC]

5 minutes ago, tomato said:

Hi Peter, please could you elaborate on this? Both Starnet and StarXTermintor give you the option to create a stars only image (i.e. an image containing only the extracted stars, no nebulosity) but as far as I can see APP’s tool does not have this function, therefore you can only create an original stars plus nebulosity image and a nebulosity only image? 
 

I suppose you could take these into Pixinsight and use Pixelmath to create one that way.

As I say, you can save your image at any point so you could save your image before using the star reduction tool. Then you could use the tool and then save any resultant image.