Getting Started with Pixinsight (Tutorial)

hi guys it's our Dylan here just coming to you with a quick picks insight tutorial a bit of a primer a bit of a really quick overview because it's a the spaceship kind of software you get in there and the dashboard is just massive and unwieldly and you don't really know where to start so i'm gonna give you a quick overview and i'm gonna work on this stack of images i've already stacked them so i'm not going to go through the image calibration stuff we just jump straight into to pick the insight itself so i'll give you a quick overview of pigs insight it was written by mostly spanish developers the emphasis is on non-destructive non manipulative image enhancement for our documentary style photography of space it's it's not really about photoshopping the hell out of something it's about really touching up the image to to bring out the the natural elements the the natural image that that we see of space it has a high level of control and the processing algorithms are really really excellent and it's one of the reasons i jumped to fix in sight and never looked back because i really don't like the user interface very much it's quite um it's quite daunting it's quite fiddly and i could i get where they're going but it's it's kind of weird i it would be cool if their head like a UX guy that was just on top of that that it just feels a bit funny to me currently cost about 230 euro which works out to about 350 australia naught to 60 USD with today's exchange rates it's got lots and lots of tools it's a massive program but you don't have to know all of it you don't have to know all of this in here and a few of the things that I use are highlighted in here and that's that's probably way more than you need to know to just get an image looking okay a quick chat about the interface though it's not okay what I mean is normally in a program the standard convention is you want to do something you bring up the tool to do it and then you hit okay and it does it but because of the way this is programmed the tools are like instances these dialogues are programming instances with a set of values which can be saved and reused so you can have the the instance sitting there open and then drag it on to one image then drag it on to another image so we end up with these little tools down here the triangle which is where you drag the settings that you have in this dialog onto the image that you're working or the square which means just do it it's sort of like okay but that's usually for when you have when you have certain tools just want to do something to a set of the images like calibration isn't like that and that's the du button this little circle is a preview so sometimes tools will give you a preview so you can tweak the settings and see but I'll show you how it how it works as we go I just wanted to let you know because beginners get into this and they see these icons they see these icons and it's it's not really clear which ones are important it is actually probably the triangle is the most important because that's the one you use to to drag the settings onto your image yeah and there's this process log you'll see this later the process log comes out it just gives a massive amount of detail which you don't need but kind of makes you feel cool because the code just whips across like the matrix and it's uh it's very detailed and quite amazing so here is a stack I've calibrated these images so I've applied darks and whatnot to numb and stack the image and if you're a CCD user then you're probably familiar the images that you get are quite dark and you have to stretch them before you see anything now we use the screen transfer function for this it's a long way of saying stretching it stretches the histogram and we got the RGB channels here and the luminance channel and you can find it just here and screen transfer function and the process Explorer but everything is all the way also in this some process menu as well so if you know where it is you can go go through and find it from there but in this case we're just going to hit this and we're going to use its little nuke button here which is the auto stretch and it's a really great job it really does you can tweak it if you want to but once you hit it it just stretches really nicely and brings out all that detail that was hidden visually as you can see this image needs to be a work so let's see what we can do the first thing I'm gonna do this really doesn't matter you can do this at any time but I'm going to flip it because it's not the right orientation so we just use the geometry and you're there for that come on there we go and obviously it's a bit green the colors aren't quite right so I'm gonna go into color calibration I'm gonna open up background background neutralization and I'm gonna go back to color calibration and open up color calibration as well now this is only for a an RGB image so if you're working with a DSLR or color camera this is when you would use this sort of stuff a lot of people do narrowband or mono imaging so that your working black and white images and you can skip this completely you don't obviously knew this now I'm gonna open up a third one which is s CNR and I find that between these three they get the image looking natural its color just becomes natural okay so here's our image in our three color tools and it's best to do them in a particular order start with background neutralization then color calibration and then s CNR so background neutralization will basically analyze the dark here and try and neutralize the RGB channels and suppliant we just drag this triangle from the corner which will take the settings from here and apply it to the image console pops out it's looking much better now it's removed a bit of that cast you can see that the dark areas are looking more like grays now now we're going to color calibration the same thing I'm just going to drag the triangle on to apply at the settings and you'll notice I'm leaving these tools at default settings because they work really well at the default settings especially the color calibration starting just makes everything quite neutral and balanced you can tweak them up later in Photoshop or whatever if you need to the colors on me but to get a nice benchmark here just that nice starting point we'll apply these three so I've applied the first two and it's fun to look like a regular space photo now right SCN are we'll get rid of this slight green cast in the middle it looks like a green cloud running over the whole image this you know you can think of there's like a green noise removal so I'm dragging that one on from the corner triangle onto the image and that is looking pretty good this is this is pretty good data it's from a color camera which is very convenient obviously you don't need to do any of these color calibration things with mono images but one thing that is my next step when I'm doing a space photo is star reduction and you'll see that the stars are quite overwhelming now I've shot this with hub star depends on your exposure length but the longer the exposure length or the the more sensitive your equipment is to light the bigger these stars can really blow it out and it's great we've got a lot of a lot of detail in there but it kind of removes the impact of the nebulas which are sitting behind here and we really want to draw that out so here's the next little thing you need to learn about pics inside it is this preview tool this little button up here and see that up here allows us to just take a slice so we can't writings without damaging the image or destructively changing the image I'll open up the preview creates this little tab here so I'm taking this section which I want to play with and I'm going to the preview tab and now we can just work on this that allows you to speed up the time as you try things and it doesn't damage the original image what we're gonna try and do now is a star mask so I'm gonna go to star marks and I'm going to use these settings aggragate and binarize I'm going to turn this down to one one one and push my noise threshold up to about 1500 now another weird little thing about fixed insight is the sometimes you get pre-processing or local support areas that want these shadows and mid-tones values and that comes from the stretch that we did before so this stretch is only for four what we can see on the screen hasn't actually damaged the image and I can turn the stretch off at any time but he missed button down here it goes back to the way it was so we have an action we applied the stretch yet it's just doing it so that we can see what we're doing now if I go down to the little spanner down here we can get the shadow and mid-tone values and it's weird you know this is what I'm talking about with the the user interface none of this is labeled this doesn't say shadows until you hover over it with the tooltip so it's hard to know but I found that this is really kind of essential to know as you work your way through pix inside because a lot of tools will want these values you've got to pull them from here so we're going to copy out the shadows value and yeah again oddly we have to close this window to actually get back over here paste it in gotta go back to the spanner get the mid-tones value here okay and put it in mid-tones here now we're going to take these settings and apply it to this image which will generate a mask which is a black and white or a monochrome mask which we're trying to protect some areas because remember we're trying to get to the star addict reduction step here there we go it's generated a star mask I'm not too happy with it because it looks like it's getting a lot of stuff other than just the Stars now pix inside it does have this cool thing where you can take take one image and as you hold it it's transparent so you can see what it's doing you can see that all those white spots correlate to two stars because they we're trying to just get the stars protect everything else that we can apply our star reduction to only the stars I mean there's a lot of stars here and it's getting them all I think it's probably getting a bit of noise as well so I'm gonna just pull it back just a touch or rather put the noise threshold up a touch and try it again you see it crunches away for quite a long time which is why we're doing it on a little preview because if we had to do it on the big image we'd be waiting forever and and this allows us to just do these small little tweaks see if it's working and then try again okay I'm gonna see and I hold this over my image and that's something pretty good we've got a lot more of the background they're protected so I'll show you how this works masking is kind of essential to know in all programs in Photoshop or fix inside or whatever you use masking is is really essential it's going to go back to our actual lagoon stack here and my cases for them to be whatever for you I'm going to drag these settings onto the full image and this will generate a mask with all of those stars cut out and the the dark areas protected and then I'll show you how to apply that mask and there we go that's pretty busy all we have to do to apply the mask is click on it and drag it down here which it doesn't seem intuitive at all either does it like I haven't told you that you have to get that out you know if you know the mask you can also do it this way by this is the active window van Gogh masks select masks and then we can drop that down as well either way will work the short hand is just pulling it down to here there we go it looks kind of weird right but essentially all the red areas are protected so anything we do to the image now only affects what's popping through which are the stars a good way to see it is to invert it as well so if we invert it you can see it almost looks like a stylus image some of those big ones aren't there they haven't been captured by the star mask but it's covered up all the other stars leaving us for just the nebula areas so I'm gonna let this protect all those black areas and let us work on the stars only but we don't usually you don't want to look at that all the time so you just turn off the show mask yeah so the mask is still applied we just don't see it which is great I'm gonna go back to our preview and I'm going to load up another tool the morphological transformation tool which is a long way of saying star reduction and I'm just gonna go default values and drag it straight on to my preview remember the preview is non-destructive so you can just try things out in fact if we change the settings and then drag it on again actually on undoes the the first one you did then applies the new one so you can just keep tweaking dragging tweaking dragging until you get something you like so you'll see there I've if I reset this stars looking quite bright and then I drag it in them and watch what happens they they dimmed significantly and that looks pretty good you could go you could get pretty heavy-handed with this and put up the iterations if you want to pull them down further and further that looks pretty good if you go if you get if you're too heavy-handed though you can get ringing around the Stars which kind of looks a bit weird so anyway I'm gonna I'm happy with that now so I'm going to take these settings and apply it to the main image that looks much better I'm gonna stop the tutorial here before I do I'll show you how to save this image because remember it's not stretched yet so we can't have an image that looks like that so what we want to do is apply this this stretch to the image destructively so we can save it as a as a tiff and then you can open it up in Photoshop and do what if you need to in there so we use the histogram transformation tool for this and this is a weirdly unintuitive step as well we have to drag the triangle from the screen transfer function over to the histogram function which if you watch that that changed which is the only real way you know that something happened then you're gonna drag the triangle from here from the histogram transformation tool over onto the image when we do this stretch it it applies that stretch but remember we've still got this preview stretch on as well so it's actually going to be stretched twice once actually stretch stretching the data and oh we've made a mistake you'll see there I've left like the mask on so thankfully we can just undo that image undo I'll turn that mask off and we'll do that again antek enable mask that's off drag those settings from Instagram transformation tool on to the image you see it looks ridiculous because it's got two stretches we're going to turn off this preview and that's what it looks like it's actually been stretched so now we can go save as save that off as a tiff and then open it up in Photoshop and continue from there now there's a whole lot more I could have uhm showed you in terms of the tools normally I would go through and then do in fact I would invert that mask and then do TVG D noise to reduce the noise in the image I would also do some deconvolution using a point spread function and it there's so much stuff you can do and as you start learning the tools you develop a workflow but if you just want to get an image out quickly that's a this is a really nice way to do it essentially what I've just done is opened it up giving it a preview stretch I've then color calibrated the image then I've created a star mask for the star reduction which I applied to the stars only then I turned that preview stretch into an actual stretch so that we can see everything and now I now you can just save the image so that's about it for this tutorial I don't just don't want to make them too long I'll go into more detail about pics in site workflow and maybe drill down a bit further into just individual tools as well but hopefully that's a good kind of beginner's intro to pix insight to show you how to just get up and running quickly and come to grips with this software okay thanks guys bye bye

Channel: Dylan O'Donnell

Views: 39,348

Keywords: pixinsight, tutorial, beginner, astrophotography, colour calibration, star mask, star reduction

Id: SSFCB-WyXK4

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2016