Is anyone using this combination?
I'm finding that as I try to push Nebula color/saturation/etc., my stars are tagging along for the ride, and that's not helpful. I'm not a big fan of starless images, but I do want nebulosity to be front and center and the stars to be the supporting actors in the background.
I've pulled down a copy of Starnet V2, installed it under Mint and run the test image. As expected, it produced a very soft starless image. It doesn't produce a Mask, so I expect that if I want one, I'll have to figure out how to get GIMP to subtract one for me.
I'm capturing nebula data with my 130PDS, MPCCIII, Nikon D5300 and L-Extreme. I'm playing around with breaking out of HOO and attempting faux HSO by splitting out a Mono in addition to Ha and OIII. I suppose that if Starnet v2 wanted a color image to work on, it would not be a lot of trouble to add a color stack to the list.
So. Back to the question about experiences...
Is anyone using APP and Starnet V2 together, and if so, how did you integrate it into your workflow?
Thanks!
Have you tried the star reduction tool in APP? This can reduce the stars a bit to do what you're after basically.
Thanks, Vincent
I have tried the star reduction tool, and I'm pretty happy with it as a tool for pulling stars more into the background. So that much is in hand, for my needs anyway.
The missing piece is the ability to stretch and manipulate the color and contrast of nebulosity, without simultaneously damaging the stars in the image.
It took me a while to understand why on earth someone would want to remove stars from their image, manipulate the starless image, and then put it all back together. But having spent some time working with the RGB Combine tool, and trying to push the nebulosity while not also affecting the stars, I get it now. About all I can think of is to generate a starless image with Starnet, build a mask in GIMP, and do more of my color/contrast manipulation in that tool.
But if you're taking requests... 🙂
Rather than mess with Starnet, I'd really rather have a good invertable mask solution that could be used inside the RGB Combine tool, or saved for use elsewhere.
Vincent,
Just realized what you were getting at, and did a small forehead-slap 🙂
I'll now try a star *removal* with the reduction tool, and see if I can convince GIMP to do a subtraction with it...
Vincent,
So... I tried a full star removal, and while I've been quite happy with the reduce/dim-down aspect, I hadn't tried the full removal. Didn't work all that well (see attached). Didn't bother with GIMP, as so much was missed.
Now, to be fair, this image had been through RGB Combine, and after that, light pollution/gradient (which had a surprisingly strong effect on the colors!). So this was hardly a virgin image. But basically, Star Removal had trouble with large, bright stars that also had (Newtonian) diffraction spikes...
It does yes, it's not perfect for sure and still being optimized. I just thought the reduction would already be what you wanted. If you want to work on the nebula colors more, you can try the HSL tool, in here you can set certain colors to be worked on to a certain level in the image, this will then affect the nebula more and would leave the stars alone.
@vincent-mod I mentioned about this in another topic. Current star reducing tool is problematic. Since reduced stars are not disappeared properly, sky background have a blurry view. Please have a look attached picture, wizard nebula. See how terrible, wavey and blurry looks the background.
