How to process around Starnet2's artifacts? Some stars not quite handled...

[pipnina]

Working on my processing since my scope isn't in top shape right now. Having a fiddle with StarnetV2 in Pix. After many hours of headscratching trying to install the thing (turns out it won't even show up if you use an AMD CPU, unless you get an alternative tensorflow library that isn't compiled for Intel's AVX-compatible CPUs)

So I try a recent image of the Pleiades, and at first it seems quite good, but when I look at the image a bit longer and the star map, it seems the brighter stars are... Not handled so well.

At first this doesn't look so bad, but then...

It seems like the bigger stars don't really get "saved" in the maps, and even in the starless version one of the big four stars is only mostly removed.

Do I need to do some other work to these images before I can run star removal? Or tidy up the star-removed version and the star map to make it look good once re-combined?

 

Second example, where it kinda worked a lot better:

Obviously removing the stars from this image worked very well, the ABE+stretch-only version (left) looks way more crowded and it's harder to see the IFN in the background compared to the starless-processed version. The starless processed version looks cleaner, less busy, sharper even.

But zooming in, it's not exactly perfect, so maybe I still need to clean it up a bit?

I'd love to hear some tips abut using this tool, as I feel like mastering this new trend in astro processing is going to totally change the outcome of my images if I can get it right!

 

Thanks and clear skies!

[david_taurus83]

Have a look here:

https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?threads/unscreening-and-re-screening-recombining-stars-with-starless-images.18602/

You don't want to use the stars image generated by Starnet (or StarXterminator)

You should create a copy of your image and run the star removal process on it. You then use this to separate the stars from your original image and they should have the same colour (if OSC) and intensity as the original. The Pixelmath function is:

~((~original)/(~starless))

Once you process your starless image and want to add them back in the function to use is:

~((~starless)*(~stars))

This is the best method I have found to work.

[ollypenrice]

If you have Photoshop, I'd use that for working on the combination of layers (stars on top of starless.)  Everything is adjustable and visible in real time.

Olly

[Clarkey]

Another option I would suggest is to try Russell Croman's Star Xterminator tool. It is not perfect, but I have found it does a better job of dealing with 'haze' and small galaxies that SN removes.