Best strategy to get higlight parts and low light parts in one stack (picture)

Hi Guido,

Currently the best strategy is to make exposures of different integration times, like 30 x 30seconds and 30x 300 seconds. Then integrate these all at once with for instance the quality weight setting, or star shape weight setting. Integrating images of different exposure times is no problem for APP and that will give you much more depth in your results. Maybe I can demonstrate this with M45 data that I have, I'll do some testing.

In a future APP version, I intend to include real HDR processing in the RGB combine tool, in that case, you would make 2 separate integrations of the 2 datasets of different exposures and then do a HDR combine in the RGB combine tool.

Cheers,

Mabula

Great Mabula, thanks voor your warp 10 respons! 😉

one more question Mabula: what's the science behind the type of integration? Quality, star shape, etc....how does it work? E.g.  Does the integration works for some parts of the frames? I have some trouble to understand it. Can i find some explanation about this. Just to know.

Cheers

Posted by: Guido Van Gheluwe

one more question Mabula: what's the science behind the type of integration? Quality, star shape, etc....how does it work? E.g.  Does the integration works for some parts of the frames? I have some trouble to understand it. Can i find some explanation about this. Just to know.

Cheers

Thank you for your question Guido 😉

Integration with weights enables much more sophisticated results aimed at integrating with a certain purpose.

There are 3 separate integration settings that effect the weights that are used in integration.

1. the integration weight setting
2. Multi-Band Blending
3. Drizzle integration

Your question concerns the integration weight setting. This works as follows:

Each image will be assigned a weight based on the weight setting and the corresponding analytical results that APP calculated and shows in the frame list panel. This weight is used for all pixels in that frame, so not for parts of the frame. Since each frame has different weights, the frames with the highest weight will have a bigger influence in the integration result.

Multi-band blending assigns weights per pixel in each frame, so that works on part of the image. Basically, the non-zero data borders of each frame will have less weight than the center of the field of view of the data. The causes the blending of the data.

Drizzle integration is based on integration with weights per pixel as well. The weights are based on the fractions of pixels of the target pixelgrid that are hit by drizzle droplets. This is done with a precision of only 5% of a pixels surface. This is a bit complicated to explain shortly, so we could/should open a separate topic for the inner workings of drizzle integration probably 😉

Finally, if you integrate with

• weights selected on quality,
• enable Multi-Band Blending and
• use Drizzle/Bayer Drizzle integration,

then all 3 processes contribute to the final weight of each pixel (using multiplication of the separate weights) of each frame in the entire integration 😉

Kind regards,

Mabula