Work flow in PI when using exterminator stuff

[simmo39]

As the title says. I have been using PI for several years and still consider myself as a beginner. I have just jumped on to the exterminator software band wagon and find them all very good but my question is when to use them in a work flow for a OSC camera. I'm getting ok results at the moment but think I might be missing something . Thanks in advance. 

[Fegato]

I use all three of the tools:

BlurX - at the end of linear processing, just before first stretch

StarX - after a first light stretch, run with the unscreened option. I find the EZ Soft Stretch defaults give me about the right stretch for taking my stars out, so that's often the precursor to this. I'll adjust star saturation and add them back in as last step in my processing

NoiseX - normally after just a bit more stretching. The documentation suggests running this in non-linear state, but not after too much processing, so if I've got some complicated stuff to do (e.g. HDR) I'd certainly do it before that, and anyway, before final stretch adjustments and changes to saturation etc.

NB I've also started using StarX with DBE during linear processing, after spotting it in an Adam Block youtube post. You can remove the stars with the screened option, use DBE with much more freedom (but remember to have normalised option ticked) and then add the stars back before colour calibration etc.

I'm not exactly lazy, and I do want to spend some effort on a good result, but I must admit that these tools have totally replaced any other noise reduction techniques, my occasional poor attempts at deconvolution, as well as largely removing the need for star masks.

[simmo39]

9 hours ago, Fegato said:

I use all three of the tools:

BlurX - at the end of linear processing, just before first stretch

StarX - after a first light stretch, run with the unscreened option. I find the EZ Soft Stretch defaults give me about the right stretch for taking my stars out, so that's often the precursor to this. I'll adjust star saturation and add them back in as last step in my processing

NoiseX - normally after just a bit more stretching. The documentation suggests running this in non-linear state, but not after too much processing, so if I've got some complicated stuff to do (e.g. HDR) I'd certainly do it before that, and anyway, before final stretch adjustments and changes to saturation etc.

NB I've also started using StarX with DBE during linear processing, after spotting it in an Adam Block youtube post. You can remove the stars with the screened option, use DBE with much more freedom (but remember to have normalised option ticked) and then add the stars back before colour calibration etc.

I'm not exactly lazy, and I do want to spend some effort on a good result, but I must admit that these tools have totally replaced any other noise reduction techniques, my occasional poor attempts at deconvolution, as well as largely removing the need for star masks.

Thanks for the flow, this is more or less what I have been doing.