15th Feb 2024: Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta29 released - macOS native File Chooser, macOS CMD-Q fixed, read-only Fits on network fixed and other bug fixes
7th December 2023: added payment option Alipay to purchase Astro Pixel Processor from China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and other countries where Alipay is used.
Hello all. This is my 1st post since converting to APP a couple of years ago. I have had nothing but cloud, wind and rain for months now so decided to revisit an image I took some 10 years ago! It was shot on an unmodified Canon 350D with a 18cm Maksutov Newtonian. I took Lights, Darks and Flats. The exposures were 420 secs x 7 (twice, as it was shot in two panes.)
Back then it was processed with DSS, and being a two pane mosaic it was then stitched together and adjusted in Photoshop.
I was quite expecting to be amazed at what better software and 10 years more experience might bring to the image. The result wasn't as clear cut as I expected!
Firstly the mosaic function of APP is awesome! So easy and the result was seamless. The stars from APP are so much more precise. There is more faint nebulosity in the APP version. The amp glow that so plagued the old 350D was handled well. All things that I have come to know and love from APP.
What is a puzzle though is the difference in colour rendition. Quite a lot of the nebulosity that DSS rendered as red, APP seems to have rendered blue. In fact I really struggled to get the red to come through at all with APP whereas in the DSS version it is just there.
Without a previous processed version I probably wouldn't have thought twice about this but I have always been quite fond of the colour rendition of the older process (other issues aside!) but however hard I tried I could not bring the look of the two different processes together.
No judgement just putting it out there to see what other people think.
Thanks for the nice comments!
Yes, APP should be more precise and more advanced in many ways, so that's good to see and hear. 🙂 The color differences, well that depends on what DSS is doing internally. Did you try color correction on the APP result? I also think the stretching could be a bit better and maybe the post processing in Affinity as well. Just saying as zoomed in, the signal looks like it suffers a bit from, likely, the denoise process.
@vincent-mod. Thanks for the comments. Yes, the APP image is the result of quite a lot of further colour correction and stretching in Affinity. In retrospect it's probably a little overdone but I'm more of a 'pretty picture' kind of guy than anything else, plus I was chasing the old result.
Just for reference this was the result from APP after stretching and DDP.
Nice, what happens when you switch on color saturation on the right? I would also advise to do color correction in APP itself as that is more targeted specifically towards astro images.
