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RC Astro tools coming to Siril

Russell Croman Astrophotography NoiseXTerminator Russell Croman Astrophotography BlurXTerminator Russell Croman Astrophotography StarXTerminator
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Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

Quote from the RC Astro web site:

BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, and NoiseXTerminator will very soon no longer be dependent on PixInsight or Photoshop. The new stand-alone RC-Astro command-line interface (CLI) tool will soon be available for beta testing.

  • Stand-alone, independent of any particular host application

  • Easily integrated into any application, or use it from a terminal

  • Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux

  • Expands Windows GPU support to AMD and Intel

  • Existing licenses honored (no additional cost)

  • Free to download

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Robin Bosshard avatar
Robin Bosshard avatar

Yes! I’ve been waiting for this (GPU acceleration with AMD) since march 25…awesome! Thanks Tony, I checked the news on Russell's Page yesterday and drew a blank!

1day 13hrs to go - counting down!

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Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

I find the whole thing very interesting. BX has been the sole province of PI for so long and to be honest, a major reason for upgrading to PI at all, that it seems the power dynamic within the astro-processing software world has changed. When you add the availability of the RC Astro tools to the increasing capabilities of Siril and SAS the landscape is becoming very interesting indeed. Hopefully this will result in a bigger development push on all sides and that will benefit everyone.

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Tom Boyd avatar
Tom Boyd avatar

Tony Gondola · Jun 25, 2026 at 03:40 PM

I find the whole thing very interesting. BX has been the sole province of PI for so long and to be honest, a major reason for upgrading to PI at all…

Haven’t seen this discussed yet, but has anyone else tried the newest native PI noise reduction process, MLdenoise? It’s a machine learning version of noise removal that mimics NXT. Looking at the announcement it seems PI is going full machine learning to compete with the add-ons many people are using: BXT, NXT, and SXT.

I’ve tried MLdenoise. In my limited tests, my take is it’s much slower than NXT, while producing essentially the same result as NXT. My take is that PI is reacting to the popularity of the xXTs and as a defensive move creating their own version of this native to PI. Just curious what other’s think of this…

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Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

Tom Boyd · Jun 25, 2026, 04:56 PM

Tony Gondola · Jun 25, 2026 at 03:40 PM

I find the whole thing very interesting. BX has been the sole province of PI for so long and to be honest, a major reason for upgrading to PI at all…

Haven’t seen this discussed yet, but has anyone else tried the newest native PI noise reduction process, MLdenoise? It’s a machine learning version of noise removal that mimics NXT. Looking at the announcement it seems PI is going full machine learning to compete with the add-ons many people are using: BXT, NXT, and SXT.

I’ve tried MLdenoise. In my limited tests, my take is it’s much slower than NXT, while producing essentially the same result as NXT. My take is that PI is reacting to the popularity of the xXTs and as a defensive move creating their own version of this native to PI. Just curious what other’s think of this…

It could very well be. A View Into Space tested MLNR and it was rather underwhelming. The main issue was ML causing certain small, ill-defined objects to just disappear so in it’s present iteration, it’s really not a replacement for anything, not yet.

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Oskari Nikkinen avatar
Oskari Nikkinen avatar

That is very nice to hear, thanks for sharing. Surprising to be honest as its been a while since BXT launched as a PI only tool.

It will be interesting to see how PI will react now that a significant PI only tool is available elsewhere. Especially considering that Siril is free (and excellent) and PI is quite expensive.

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Tom Boyd avatar
Tom Boyd avatar

Oskari Nikkinen · Jun 25, 2026 at 05:24 PM

It will be interesting to see how PI will react now that a significant PI only tool is available elsewhere. Especially considering that Siril is free (and excellent) and PI is quite expensive.

They’re building their own native versions:

https://pixinsight.net/dev/index.php?ams/technology-preview-mldenoise-for-macos-arm64.19/

Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

Tom Boyd · Jun 25, 2026, 05:58 PM

Oskari Nikkinen · Jun 25, 2026 at 05:24 PM

It will be interesting to see how PI will react now that a significant PI only tool is available elsewhere. Especially considering that Siril is free (and excellent) and PI is quite expensive.

They’re building their own native versions:

https://pixinsight.net/dev/index.php?ams/technology-preview-mldenoise-for-macos-arm64.19/

Good, competition driving development, just what I hoped to see.

Bill McLaughlin avatar
Bill McLaughlin avatar

My take is that there is a reason that there are so many plugins for PI and that is because there has been so little innovation in the native app. If it were not for the plugins, PI would have already gone the way of the DoDo. It is only their plugin architecture that has saved them.

I am still a big PI user and have been since very early days but they had better get moving toward the future or they will go the way of so many others that are now just history like CCD Stack, MaxImDL, and several others.

Maybe I am wrong but I think they may have had an “overly scientific” outlook and failed to truly embrace the fact that the vast majority of their users were not doing science.

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Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

Bill McLaughlin · Jun 25, 2026, 10:09 PM

My take is that there is a reason that there are so many plugins for PI and that is because there has been so little innovation in the native app. If it were not for the plugins, PI would have already gone the way of the DoDo. It is only their plugin architecture that has saved them.

I am still a big PI user and have been since very early days but they had better get moving toward the future or they will go the way of so many others that are now just history like CCD Stack, MaxImDL, and several others.

Maybe I am wrong but I think they may have had an “overly scientific” outlook and failed to truly embrace the fact that the vast majority of their users were not doing science.

I think you make some very good points. Many times I have had the experience of finding a process that I want to use only to find I have absolutely no idea about what the various sliders do. Then you click in the documentation icon and there’s nothing there. The tool tips will tell you what something does but not always in way that’s understandable.

That said, I really love PI as a workspace. In that regard it’s a thing of beauty, quick and effcient. I may stack in Siril and color correct in SAS but everything feeds into the PI workspace eventually.

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