A Free Alternative to PixInsight?! Siril 1.0 Beta

hey guys quiff the lazy geek here and i am super excited because i am testing a new piece of software while it's not new it's fairly old but it just got into version 1.0 pera which is this piece of software is called cyril it is made by french developers and it is a free and open source alternative to pixel sites um well not quite it doesn't do that much yet but it does two of the biggest things that i always want to do which is background extraction and photometric color calibration of your images and those are very are two very powerful tools that you can do in syria with free open source software and then you can save your image open it in to do further processing with curves and that kind of stuff and it is super exciting to see so much activity in the open source community and i think you know if pixel insight is too expensive for you and you know astropixel processor did not work well for you for whatever reason even though i keep hearing great things about it and star tools doesn't work well for you and you don't want to pay for software even though you've spent a huge amount of money on your hardware for imaging or you're just starting an entry right you have a dslr you have a compact camera you're doing phone based as photography and so you don't want to spend big bucks on processing software well syria is for you now cyril can do pre-processing which is you know you've taken many 10 second frames uh you need to align them and stack them together to get a better signal to noise ratio to basically to get a cleaner picture well you can use serial to do that or you can use deep sky stacker both are free and what i'm going to focus on today in syria is not the pre-processing since we already had a good free tool for that which was deep sky stacker now i want to focus on the post processing because as far as i know we haven't had really good alternatives to pixel sites one of my commenters and thank you so much by the way talk to um pointed me to some script for uh for astrophotography processing so i want to try that at some point so that's one thing but serial is another thing and the photometric color calibration is awesome so let's open up the serial interface and you can probably see my screen right now with sale and i've opened up an old image of m42 now this image was taken with i don't i think it was an asi 294 mc pro it was uh uncooled uh and it so basically you you can think of it as taken with a dslr really and it was taken from death valley are using an out as mount uh the as gti in out as modes and uh it's only like 30 minutes of data of 30 second exposures so it was quite a lot of fun to take this picture but as you can see it's very purple and we want to fix that right and then picks inside would be fix and diet with background extraction with color calibration all that kind of stuff and we can do the same in serial so to open the image by the way just click on that open button and then select the file it is open and by default it will actually split it into channels and then we have rgb now when you first open it by the way you will see something like this which is the linear view of the image just like in any other processing software and what you want to do is click on here and then go to auto stretch to be able to really see the image and i can see i have some stacking artifacts here at the top of the image so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna make things a bit simpler for me i am going to crop that image for that i would take a selection but you can see if i try to do something on the rgb tab it tells me no no no you want to do that on the other tabs so you can only do operations on the other tabs so i am going to do a selection like this with the orion nebula more or less selected we have almost the horse nebula but not quite in that field of view and then i'm going to right click and do crop and like that we have cropped our image and the next step is getting rid of that weird magenta color and i'm going to go into image processing we're going to go color calibration and we're going to go photometric color calibration and for that i'm going to click on m42 and we have the orion nebula clicking on that pre-populates some right ascension and declination coordinates basically where it is and then i need to put in my focal distance which is 200 millimeters and my picks and pixel size which i think for the 294 is 4.99 micrometers and why is this necessary this is necessary because it needs to know the field of view of the image so it can identify each individual stars and compare them to a database of stars that have been analyzed spect like this whose spectrum has been analyzed and so we know what color each star is supposed to be and based on that we'll be able to find the right set of colors for that particular image and if i click on ok the uh the software will work it will identify the images it will do the plate solving and it will apply the photometric color calibration now from time to time it gives me a weird result like that and if i undo and redo it sometimes it works again it's a bit weird and here it is we've done it again so this is something weird if you get super weird colors after the first run just try it again and until you get decent colors and here we are we have decent colors on the orion nebula so we've gotten rid of that weird tint that i had which is great so i can close this we're done it took me is you know a third time's the charm really that was the third time i ran it and then it worked so you know little weird things going on here and there and the weird thing is you'll see each time the number of stars like 160 165 166 152 is a bit different i have no idea why so i just undo redo it until i get the right color bit weird but you know better software free and open source so that's still pretty good then i'm going to remove the green noise because we have a lot of green background here and it's basically equivalent to the pixel side scnr and here we are we do not have that green background anymore which is good and we can do more stuff we could do background extraction we don't really need it on that image but yeah we might have a bit of weird thing going on here so we could try to go i'm not sure how well it's going to work but you have a background extraction tool that is here and you can select samples in your image and you need to do that on the monochrome channels and i'm just going to select a lot of sample here a few samples at the back here and um yeah call it a day and that basically will use those samples to generate a background it will then subtract or divide from the image to remove like any weird discoloration that you have so after the background extraction well i think it identified a few weird colors there so i probably don't want to do that but maybe you know i could re-run the photometric color calibration to fix that and we would have gotten still rid of the gradient so that's a possibility and here we are we've removed the background so this is prior to background removal post background removal right so it might actually have worked like i think i can see a bit more nebulosity here so it's a bit like the workflow is a bit different than pixel inside so it's it's quite interesting uh but you know we can we can take what we have this is uh this is pretty cool you can do stuff like deconvolution as well by hitting on control and the scroll wheel you can see the result uh so deconvolution here we obviously have some ringing uh that is done so i would want to play with the parameters until that that ringing is is properly gone and in theory um it should like you know make the nebula a bit sharper which it might you know i'm not a i'm not an expert we could increase the iteration count all this this kind of stuff is doable i'm not sure whether it does a star mask automatically or not who knows what it does but you know there is the convolution i'm not sure exactly how it works but it's here right so it's still fun stuff that we can we can play with and uh for your transform medium filter this is for um i i believe it would do noise reduction basically uh so that would basically remove hot pixels if you have a lot of hot pixels like with an uncooled camera that can be something that can be uh useful and let's now do basically the histogram stretch so we want to stretch the image i'll go back to linear to see how the nebula looks like when it is linear and then i can click on this stretch icon here click on the auto stretch to the image and then i can either reset or apply it now i find i found that the scale thingy and moving the indicators is a bit weird but maybe yeah we want to stretch a bit less aggressively so that the core of the nebula is not over burnt or we can just like keep with the the auto stretch for now maybe i'll keep with the auto stretch but this is how you can kind of like amend it a little bit so you don't burn out everything uh too much and now our image is like this we almost don't need to do anything more but what we can do is we can do some color saturation and the color saturation seems to do a mask using the preserved background option here so it will only saturate more the nebulized stuff rather than the background and you can see it's very visible here how before saturation after saturation it did not affect the background but it affected the nebula and we can apply that and see that we indeed have much more color in here now we still have some green here so maybe i want to remove the green noise some more and here we are we've removed more of the green noise we have like a pretty decent nebula picture really on on m42 here and uh let's try some um contrast limited adapt adaptive histogram calibration which basically does it seems to me the same thing as local histogram equalization in pics inside so this is before this is after the image is more contrasty and punchy which is nice i am not sure what those options here at the bottom do but you know oh it seems this one will uh will increase the effect of the um of the transformation and maybe wow that's a lot it feels like i would want to do a bit more color saturation after that but you know this is a tool that is available to us and i think it is it is pretty sweet uh to have this uh like that and i can apply this and uh maybe you know i could do the convolution to try and diminish the size of the stars a little bit so we can go back to uh deconvolution zoom in a bit uh reduce the radius until we don't get those dark zones but we still get them so we're gonna abandon but you know it's like this i'm gonna try to go back to the beginning this is what we started with not a bad image but a bit purple and if i go to the end this is what we're ending up with so you know it's a very valid tool and having the photometric color calibration and uh the background extraction makes this tool invaluable this is really really awesome as far as i'm concerned and now i could right click on this image and say we're going to save it as a tiff for example and that will actually save it in your pictures folder by default although you can change the working folders in the options we're going to click the save button we've now saved the image and i could open up the for example to get further processing done to this image and here we have the image and so i can i can go and you know play with my uh my colors and play with the saturation play with the the exposure parameters so and like you know if i want something super punchy and clipping the blacks i can do that i can increase the gamma decrease the gamma i can do all that i want within to get a proper image and so i think it's a really powerful tool to have this cereal it's a great addition to an arsenal of tools and especially if you're just starting and you're using your phone or a standard pocket camera or a dslr and you don't want to spend a lot of money on software i think this is a great piece of software to start with without having to pay a penny to see like okay do i want to keep going with the the hobby or nuts it's still better it has its issues as you saw with the photometric color calibration i had to run it three times until i got a good result but otherwise you know i think it's awesome and with that um i think that's pretty much what i wanted to cover in this video if this kind of video interests you if you like astronomy astrophotography if you look like looking at stars if you want to get started in the hobby feel free to go down below click on that subscribe button and the notification bell because i think this channel is really just for you and you know as always feel free to go down click on that like button leave a comment down below with any suggestions that you have what i should be doing how i can use this piece of software better serial which which is awesome and uh you know anything like that i read all of the comments and i answer most so as always thank you so much for watching remember whenever you can to look up at the stars and i'll see you next time

Channel: Cuiv, The Lazy Geek

Views: 14,780

Keywords: Astrophotography processing, astrophotography siril, siril processing, siril tutorial, astrophotography free software, astrophotography free processing, siril astrophoto, pixinsight alternative, pixinsight for free, gimp astrophotography, siril astrophotography tutorial

Id: dEX9KbbzALc

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020