AstroSleuth new? free Ai blur and noise reduction software

[PhilB61]

Came upon some discussion of this new software on CN, anyone else had a play with it? It supposed to be a free open source alternative to BlurX and Topaz Ai

Downloaded the zip file from GitHub and gave it a try, not much info on how to use it and the first thing I had to do was edit a line in the run.bat file regarding the output file path

Anyway, it works sort of, besides reducing noise and sharpening details, nebula, star shapes etc it also upscales the image massively (by a factor of 4) so output file sizes can be huge.

Unfortunately in my test examples it also introduced quite a lot of artifacts in particular a repeating blotchy background pattern, it also seemed to have interpreted some close together faint stars as one star and generated some new stars from hot pixels/noise

I'm hoping the developer will continue to improve the software, as I think it could provide an alternative to those who don't want to commit to PixInsight, but I do think it needs more development first.

Any thoughts.....