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Just trying to speed up first-pass post-processing before spending hours on an image

Russell Croman Astrophotography NoiseXTerminator Processing Stretching Deep Sky
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Andy Wray avatar
Andy Wray avatar
I'm just trying to learn quick processing skills and also how to use the hyperbolic stretch script to quickly get a reasonable stretch.   It really needs a lot more work on the stars, but I must admit that Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch is growing on me.



Basically this was a total of 5.5 hours capture of RGB only.

Total time to process after calibration was less than one hour.

* Sub measurement and weighting, registration and integration:  about 20 mins using Windsorized Sigma Clipping and no Local Normalisation.  Weighting was 60% PSF SNR Weight and 40% Eccentricity as I had some guiding issues which made stars oblong and whispy clouds that were affecting my SNR/background gradients.
* Dynamic Crop
* DynamicBackgroundExtraction on individual RGB channels
* ChannelCombination
* ColorCalibration
* GeneralisedHyperbolicStretch
* NoiseXterminator
Export to PNG
* Tweak in photoshop .. levels, curves, sharpening

I know it's overprocessed and a bit rough, but gives me a general feel of what it might look like with careful processing.

Anyone else have any tips on how to post-process quickly before doing a final proper job?
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Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
The EZ processing tools in PI work well for quick processing. Although the workflow you suggested here would work fine as well.
dkamen avatar
dkamen avatar
Or try APP.
Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
Dark Matters Astrophotography avatar
APP is also a great tool for simpler processing. Either way, I wouldn't overcomplicate nor over think what you're trying to accomplish with a quick process to get an idea of what you have.
dkamen avatar
dkamen avatar
I mean the default DDP (if you turn on saturation boost) is pretty decent and you can do background extraction at the same time.
Andy Wray avatar
Andy Wray avatar
I mean the default DDP (if you turn on saturation boost) is pretty decent and you can do background extraction at the same time.

DDP?
dkamen avatar
dkamen avatar
Digital Development Processing.

A reasonable (not perfect but very good) stretch that would take you many iterations to do manually, with (optional) saturation, contrast and sharpness boost, all controlled by a few sliders and checkboxes.

Basically what you want smile