[Solved] Black Point Slider very difficult to use

Kelvin

Yes - I struggled with this at first. The trick I use (when looking at a stacked image) is to hit the button on the right of the slider twice. The first time takes it to 4, but the second time takes it to a finer scale, but it still says 4. Then you can click left or right of the slider (rather than drag the slider) and it will make small, repeatable adjustments. By repeatable I mean that a move in one direction then the other will take you to where you started, which I think is what you want. Bear in mind these are fine adjustments, and you might need 3 or 4 of them to get where you want.

I should add that I am still using the last production release, rather than one of the betas - so I am just guessing that the slider still works the same way.

JC

Thanks heaps John - that makes a big difference to its usability.  This definitely needs to be made more aware to users !!    There is still the problem whereby if you move the slider back and forth without lifting your finger off the mouse the black point will continue to increment / decrement for a while even after changing direction.  This a bizarre issue.    So lets say I move the slider first right and then left down to .00500.  If I start moving right again the BP continues down until abut .00350 but then decides to change to the correct direction and start going up.  Weird.

Hi Kelvin & John @kelvin-hennessy @connor23,

Thank you very much for sharing this feedback. John thank you very much for your tips to Kelvin!

Kelvin, your concern is noted and we are aware of this. Once we have 2.0 stable out, a major improvement of the preview filter with all the sliders is planned. We need to make it faster and much more intuitive. We will also add some improvements in the way color images will be stretched 😉

Mabula

Thanks @mabula-admin - this will make a big difference in the useability of your software, particularly when trying to remove light pollution around areas with faint IFN.  John's tip that there is a secret "Level 5" on the slider has already been a game changer for me.  Even just making that feature aware in a post to all the users would I think help a lot of people until stable 2 is released as its always been one of my biggest annoyances of APP

Hi Kelvin @kelvin-hennessy,

Okay I understand. There actually is a red button in the slider panel on the right side. it is located to the left of the auto stretch combobox, please see the screenshot below. The button is red with a question mark, if you push that button, all is explained. That button has been there for many years already. I guess the button does not draw attention to push it? Please push it and scroll down in the instructions to Zoom in/out buttons. 

Anyway, we will make sure that it gets improved 😉 !

Mabula

@mabula-admin yes I am aware that red button is there.  It's just never been helpful with regard to the black point slider.  I think it is confusing and poorly worded or translated particularly the way the range is displayed.   There's a lot of mathematics to be read before you get to the important sentence that I've clearly missed or misunderstood - " If you click on 4 you will be zoomed out as far as you can".    I think this important instruction should be at the start, before all the mathematical explanation.

The range goes from 1-2 then 1-3 then 2-4  (which I thought was the maximum)  and now I find there is a 3-4, the finest range.  This particular user interface never made any sense to me and still doesn't.

Hi Kelvin @kelvin-hennessy,

Okay, thank you for the feedback. My intention is to remove all those zoom buttons for sure and replace it with much more intuitive sliders. The stretch presets with 15% background, 3 sigma actually explain how we can do this. Instead of having a black slider that needs very fine adjustments with high quality data in 32bits, we want to create sliders that simply let you choose the at what level the background will be, that will control the place of the peak in the histogram, the slider simply replaces the ST slider and the slider will not need zooming to work well I think. The new sigma slider will control how much the data is stretched relative to the sky background, and how much you will see of the data in the dark low lights. Again, that will remove the need for zoom buttons on the black slider I think. Does this sound better?

Mabula

This sounds like a much better idea @mabula-admin.  😊 

Alright then @kelvin-hennessy