Bye bye EZDenoise and Topaz Denoise

Andy Wray:
Having checked out the trial of NoiseXterminator I have to say that I will be ditching most of my other noise reduction methods.  The fact that it is so quick and that you can work directly on a preview in Pixinsight to tweak it to your liking PLUS it seems to be really gentle on stars makes it a winner for me.  The default denoise setting of 0.9 seemed a bit to high for me and ended up with waxy images, but at 0.7 to 0.75 it looks quite natural.

I can't believe that something that is this fast and can produce what I consider to be much better results than the in-built tools exists.

Anyone see any real downsides to it?

0.7 is waay too much. If you need this much then you really need more exposure, you still have to reach the noise floor. 0.5 seems a resonable compromise.

I've used 0.7 for some really weak noisy channels, but .5-.6 for everything else.

But yeah, for me it's the biggest advancement in processing in recent years.

I have to disagree here. I was just trialing it out today and NoiseXterminator had a lot of trouble on star cores that were near saturation (note: they weren't actually saturated yet, but above 0.5 normalized) and introduced pixels that had weird color values. This was on a linear image of course. Stretched images seem to fare better. These pixels weren't visible with an STF or stretched using HT, but when stretching with a star-friendly method (like Arcsinh or GHS) they were really noticeable artefacts. I think it's a part of a stretch-denoise-reverse the tool does behind the scene (the reverse ends up clipping?) in linear mode. The tool is still young of course, and might fix this soon enough, but for the image I'm working on now the Jon Rista method still rules supreme.

andrea tasselli:

Andy Wray:
Having checked out the trial of NoiseXterminator I have to say that I will be ditching most of my other noise reduction methods.  The fact that it is so quick and that you can work directly on a preview in Pixinsight to tweak it to your liking PLUS it seems to be really gentle on stars makes it a winner for me.  The default denoise setting of 0.9 seemed a bit to high for me and ended up with waxy images, but at 0.7 to 0.75 it looks quite natural.

I can't believe that something that is this fast and can produce what I consider to be much better results than the in-built tools exists.

Anyone see any real downsides to it?

0.7 is waay too much. If you need this much then you really need more exposure, you still have to reach the noise floor. 0.5 seems a resonable compromise.

You are probably right ... I was testing it on my 50 mins of exposure on M106 in a suburban setting.  With decent integration time I would reduce it massively.

Will be trying it out for sure! 
Especially since you get the discount if you already have a product, nice little touch to reward loyalty!

Very noised image.
Choose Yours the best.
QHY695A  (icx695), RedCat51, fews 900s subs.

I think nXt is created for cmos matrix. In my case ccd  camera this staf (nXt) not working.

I decided to throw it at the M13 I shot from B8 a year ago. It killed it! In fact it did such a good job I had to inject noise back into it just to ensure that it wasn't too smooth.

The most impressive thing I find is how it's able to preserve star sharpness and details even at the higher settings. This tool is really going to be a boon for people who live in light polluted skies.


M13 From Bortle 8

You'd have a hard time convincing me this was 2 hours from B8 if I didn't know any better.

Neat Image… Topaz DeNoise-AI,.. these work pretty darn good for astrophotography considering they were designed for daytime photography, you just need to back way off on the settings.  NoiseXterminator is designed just for artro imaging by the best, Russell Croman, I have all his other plug-ins so for $40, it's a no brainer to at least see what it can do, and so far, it looks very good.