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RC Astro Star Shrink: Anyone using this?

Processing Star Reduction Deep Sky
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Jerry Gerber avatar
Jerry Gerber avatar
I have Star Shrink and it seems to run OK as a Photoshop plugin in a program I use called ACD Photo Studio Ultimate. 
But sometimes, when I apply certain settings, the program doesn't do anything, I press OK to start the plugin and nothing happens.  I'm not sure if it's an incompatibility issue or whether it doesn't work when it can't find stars that fit the criteria that the settings call for.  Probably the former.

Anyone use this program and have this issue?

Thanks,
Jerry
Tareq Abdulla avatar
Tareq Abdulla avatar
I believe i have this program in the past and used it sometimes, but maybe you can't see the difference until you zoom in to 100% and look at original and processed side by side to see, i doubt it won't apply any changes, but i can't talk about your situations because i don't know what you are doing, maybe the difference will show stronger on JPEG small size images more than PNG/TIFF big sizes images.
Zak Jones avatar
Zak Jones avatar
I signed up for a free trial for this program last month, but I didn't really like the results it produced (at least with my data). It actually shrunk some of the nebulosity around the stars and the stars at the same time, which I thought was weird. For this reason, I did not purchase a license.

I understand that some people may like this program, but I am only sharing my experiences with it. Plus, I do my star reduction techniques with different tools in both PixInsight and Photoshop, so it's not really a big deal for me that I don't have StarShrink.

Zak
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Jerry Gerber avatar
Jerry Gerber avatar
Yeah, I bought it today but think that 1) there's an incompatibility the photo software I have, and 2) I don't particularly like the way the stars looks with this plugin, they don't look natural to me.  So instead I downloaded StarNet2 and  Star Reduction routines and icons for Pixinsight by Bill Blanshan.   And at no cost for either.

Bill's pixel math routines are simple.  I have to first create a starless image with StarNet2 and then shrink the stars, it's a two step process but the results look very natural to my eye.  I don't think there's any perfect star shrinking plugin available, and since it's going to take billions and billions of years for the stars to shrink themselves, I'll use what I have now.
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Tareq Abdulla avatar
Tareq Abdulla avatar
There is also RC tools for PI such as BlurXterminator, it has one of processing steps as star size reduction i believe, it is a nice tool, i have it only for fun for now as i didn't have new data, but i test it with others data and it is very nice tool really.
Jerry Gerber avatar
Jerry Gerber avatar
Actually, I just did a comparison using Star Shrink and Bill Blanshan's pixel math and, at least for this image (Rosette Nebula) I definitely prefer the Star Shrink results. 

I guess it all depends on not only the image but also the settings that are chosen.   Both Star Shrink and Bil Blanshan's pixel math work better than PI's Morphological Transformation, at least to my eye.  I looked at artifacts, how natural the stars look and whether or not any nebulosity is removed (it shouldn't be). The Settings matter, I don't want to remove all the small stars in order to shrink the large ones, that doesn't look natural.
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