PixInsight: New Image Blend Script

hi everyone welcome to the channel today I have a new script that I'd like to show you it's a script written by Mike Cranfield in collaboration with myself called image blend now image blend as the name says allows you to blend two images together in some really great ways there are some other scripts and picks Insight that allow you to do a similar kind of job but this one has a different approach and it's one that adds extra ease of use as well as flexibility and so I'm going to be showing you how to use the script today as well as reveal a few secrets that I normally keep hidden at Adam block studios.com so just a few Secrets though if you want to see all of them in fact this script I believe is actually a new Gateway that will allow both Legacy techniques that haven't been used for many years uh to now become available in pix insight as well as techniques that have yet to be described but they will be and they are uh certainly described and demonstrated on my site at Adam block Studios so become a member there if you like the material that you're seeing here and with that let me just show you how the script works and all of the cool features that you can take advantage [Music] of I'm very excited to show you a new script that is available in pix Insight it's called the image blend script like the name says this allows you to blend two images together there are other scripts in pixin sight which perform a similar kind of operation but this one this script has a slightly different approach one that I think adds flexibility and ease of use gives you the very best possible results this script was written by Mike Cranfield Mike and I work together to develop what you see here and I'd like to show you a couple of examples of how to make it work recently I've been working with Comet data let me just show you the images it'll help to understand how to utilize the script here we have a Starfield this is the comet subtracted version of the data so we just have stars and then I have the starless version of just the commet only image data let me go back in time to show you what it looks like when this image is in its linear form the final forms that I just showed are stretched images so here in its linear form you can see the streaking because of the residuals of stars and their Halos uh the residual streak pattern of a fixed pattern noise that's in the data that's very common and it's the it is the element of the Comet data that we need to minimize when we blend these two images together and that's what makes this blending tool so great is that this data is a little different than what is normal because we have Sky values we have background values in both images this is different than when you have a Stars only image and you're adding the Stars into uh perhaps a nebula where you had extracted them the Stars only image in that case has no background it has zeros that's not true here and what we can do is change the degree that one background or the other background in either one of these images is going to show in the Blended result that's what makes this so powerful now I'm going to go forward in time here and show you this is the stretched version of the data and you can see in the stretched version you can still see the streaking right so what I did is I smoothed the streaking by applying a mask to the comet and the comet has not been affected but everywhere else it's been smoothed out quite a bit so that's where this data kind of begins now I can go into the script and show you how the script works and blend it together so we'll go back into image blend here and uh I'm going to select the two images so we have a a section here for the base image and it has controls these controls are the same kind of controls you find in histogram transformation where you adjust the highlights the the Black Point the white point and the midtone values the same is true down here in this section where we have our blend image the other image that we need load it has exactly the same parameters and controls as far as the histogram here and the fine adjustment now the blend image also has an opacity slider which I'll demonstrate in just a moment let's go ahead and load them now as far as which one is our blend and our base in this particular example that doesn't matter but I'm going to make the star field my base image so here's the Starfield image and then I will make the blend image the comet image Comet RGB and what we see on the screen and this is the important thing to understand is we're looking at the Blended result of these two base and Blend images well why are we only seeing the comet it's because our blend method which is the last section down here at the bottom is set to be replaced replace is the simplest kind of blend where we replace the base image with the blend image and if we do that at 100% opacity then we're going to just see the comet but we can adjust the opacity here and then we're going to see the base image kind of showing through a little bit um uh of the blend image now I'm going to reset this because that is not the kind of blending that we want to do another element of this preview area that should be appreciated is that we can control the screen uh stretch functionality of what we're looking at currently as I mentioned before we're looking at already permanently stretched images so there is no screen stretch being applied we don't want one if we did this image is going to look very very ugly but if you're looking if you're using linear images if you're looking at a linear image in terms of being able to make visible what you're working on you will need to apply some kind of screen stretch so like many of the other scripts that Mike has created it has a similar method of adjusting the screen transfer function where you assign a Target background and then you can make the image as bright as necessary to see what's going on I will toggle it on but you won't be impressed because my permanently stretched image is going to show you how I have blurred the background with mmt but protected the the uh the comet otherwise it's not being blurred at all because I didn't want to just you know blur it by too much and then you can also do an unlined stf still an stf that's not going to affect my image way very much so I'm going to turn I don't want to look at that anymore so I'm going to turn that off here then is my Blended excuse me it is my permanently stretched version of the Comet image now let's go ahead and blend well there are many blend modes down here that we can take advantage of and if I show you the list you will probably find them very familiar if you have used other very famous photo edit software this list is going to look extremely familiar to you which shows things like darken and lighten we have the screen blending mode of course we have overlay we have soft light all of the various different ways that we can blend images together are available to us here but what sets this apart from other methods of blending images in pix Insight are these controls that we get to use let me show you then with the the actual method that we want which is the screen blending mode here I'm now blending these two images together this is the Blended result using screen and what I can do is I can now brighten let's say the comet image and if I do so that'd be great if I can make the comet you know appear brighter but it's also going to make the background brighter in the comet data and so when we screen these two together we can see in the Blended result how the that background is showing up so what we're going to ultimately do is choose some level of brightness that we want the comet to appear as and then if I can still see the artifact what I can do is raise the black level of the Comet only image that's being Blended because I'm not going to touch the Starfield in this case and if I rate let me just show you if I raise it enough you know the tail is just going to disappear and if I continue to raise the Black Level I'll just be black clipping the comet basically which is not what we want to do so uh you want to find the right black level that does not show us the background but shows us the tail and everything else that we want to see to the best of our abilities that we want to see of the Comet now sliding this might be too coarse an adjustment so if we have our Black Point set here with the fine adjustment through its sensitivity uh High sensitivity we can then make adjustments here here at a very very fine level I probably don't need to be that fine quite yet so maybe I move it down here now I can see the tail but I don't see any of the artifact so maybe I continue to brighten that is to lower my black point a little bit until I reach the point that I'm happy if I lower it too much you know once again I'll start to see uh the the artifact starting to show through so I'm going to stop at some point and say that's the final result that's how you use this tool you can modify one of the other images in real time now it's not a permanent uh adjustment here until we actually say to Output the image and we create a new Blended result there is only one other area that I haven't mentioned and that is there is a another mathematical filtering effect that we can have with images this is important for certain kinds of operations that you might want to do and I'll demonstrate one particularly clever example in just a moment another nice feature of the script is that if we exit the script and then we re-enter it all of our values everything will be remembered uh and that allows you actually to do other kinds of small adjustments if you create an image and then you can make another adjustment let's see what it is to Output the image here so we do have checked uh to create a new image we'll go ahead then and do it by running the script and now on the desktop I have image blend where I have my Comet this is Comet lemon by the way uh my finally Blended result you can see there's still some artifacts here at the edges but overall it's a fairly reasonable Blended result before we leave the topic of comets let me just mention that of course comets sometimes are not moving very fast so instead of streaks you have glows where stars and other elements have been removed you need to minimize those glows in order to come up with an image like this and this is the one that you're going to blend with the Starfield data what I was alluding at earlier is that there is a simple route that sometimes people take when processing their Comet images it is that they remove the Stars perhaps from an integrated image and then they blend those stars in with this Comet only image but there's a problem with doing that the problem is you don't get the background and that's why it's important that's why this blending uh operation that I'm showing you works so well with this kind of data if you had a galaxy in the image or nebulosity it wouldn't come with the removed Stars so combining just the starson image doesn't do the job and I've become a bit of a specialist now for Comet processing if you would like to learn more about the very best ways to process Comet data please visit my site this information is located in my horizons collection of videos at the end of the day when I put these two together it resulted in an image like this now it's a small telescope so the galaxy in the background is very small but I couldn't have done the job had I not used image blend to put the two together in the way that I just demonstrated I'm real excited to show you this next example of how image blend can just be so powerful this is data that I took years ago back in 2018 if I were to do it again today boy with all the tools that are now available I could do a much better job however with image blend I can demonstrate just a quick and easy Improvement to this particular image that I think demonstrates really well the power of both bringing Legacy techniques techniques that just haven't been seen for 20 years as well as new techniques that haven't been seen yet let me show you what image blend can do if we go to utilities go to image blend bring it up one of the themes of image blend not only is it to take two completely diff different images and put them together but also you can take the same image and operate on it with a different blending mode and in different ways let me show you what I mean here's the example of this galaxy NGC 29 97 so I'm going to go to the image which is a what RGB this one and I'm going to load it in both places like this now in working with Mike Cranfield one of the desires that I always had was a particular technique that was very popular 20 years ago it's different than any that are available in pix insight and uh I always wanted to see it somehow used again within the realm of pixon sight and now it can be it's the use of What's called the high pass filter so under filter options here you can see that there is this um new selection here for highpass and the way it works is that it's going to create a version of this image that uh captures a particular uh spatial scale the way it really works is this highpass filter actually creates a like a gaussian blur subtracts it from the original image and then that this is what we're looking at here kind of the residuals of those differences between the image between the Blurred and the original at a particular scale produces this kind of weird looking image actually and the way you use it is you want to find a particular radius that captures the information that you want to enhance so if I wanted to make perhaps the dust lanes and some of the brighter regions of this galaxy stand out I I find a a filter radius that captures that information here in the high pass uh result and that's what we're looking at here uh but this image of itself is not terribly useful what we want to do is blend it with the original remember the original image is still the Galaxy right so we want to blend it with the original image with a particular blending mode and the blending mode and this again was used years ago is overlay so now let me show you the difference between the original I'm going to use the control key this time you can do a control click and that will turn on and off the preview here's before and here's after it's a contrast enhancement type of operation now at this level there are a couple of things that I will note one is that you will see that there is an enhancement around the Stars the Stars themselves become brighter and also a bit harsher around the edges so I won't take time to do this now but you can imagine removing the Stars before you make an enhancement like this that will avoid all kinds of star problems I'm going to tell you another secret and these are the things that are available on my website at Adam block studios.com anytime you make an enhancement where it's a contrast enhancement two things are going on this particular kind of contrast enhancement will make certain elements of the image brighter than they originally were and also certain elements of the image darker than they originally were let me just zoom out here and show you uh the original image as it appeared before I had zoomed in and if we do a before and after you can see when we're not zoomed in at you know 300% or something like that that we are really making a very dramatic contrast adjustment here but there are tools for example in pix Insight that look to darken particular kinds of structures and that's a typical desire in an object like this where maybe we just want the dust Ling to stand out but we don't want to brighten the other elements of the Galaxy up very much more so what can we do well we can use the secret the secret is the following let's go ahead and create this image and I'm going to give it an ID of um so we're going to call this overlay full so this is the full overlay image if you will and let's go ahead and hit the it's the full enhanced version now it's been saved to the desktop I don't need to exit the script though now what I can do is just load it because I've uh just created it so I go to Overlay full here and there it is but here's what I want to show you we can now take advantage of another blending mode here's the by the way here it is before I should say and let's turn off the high pass you don't need to do a high pass now so this is what the image looks like in terms of the enhancement here is the original image here here's the enhancement but what if we didn't want elements of this image to become brighter we only wanted to take advantage of the overlay enhancement for the darkening aspects we can do that now again I've loaded the the full overlay result this is the newly enhanced image um and then I have my original original image but we can choose to use the blending mode of darken and check this out now we're not affecting anything like stars or other elements of the Galaxy we're only making those elements that in that higher contrast result became darker so let's do the before and after here and you can see that now we're bringing out the dust Lanes in the Galaxy without the detriment of over brightening anything else in the image so let's just go ahead and save this one as overlay darker like this and I can do a similar kind of operation by doing lighten these are the elements that were brightened uh due to the overlay technique so I will call this lighter like this uh and then you can imagine doing the following you could load for example the darker image here the lighter image here and then what we can do is create a final image that might be on the order of 25% from lien and the other 70% showing through uh as the base liage base image in this case which is the darker View and this I can output as my final enhanced image I'll exit out of here now I have generated some intermediate things just for purposes of uh well I'll just I just move them out of the way just for purposes of showing you but what I want to do now is look at the original and then look at the final and you can see the adjustment that was made so I will do this and this let's zoom in a little bit go like this put one over the other and then blink the two images and that's the modest enhancement that I made using image blend and if I didn't actually explain anything it's something that can be done in seconds so I hope you enjoyed seeing the new power of the image blend utility of the image blend script it has a wealth of opportunities I'm only demonstrating a few of at least 20 different kinds of operations that you can perform using this script and I will be demonstrating all of these new possibilities at adom block studios.com so I encourage you to become a member and learn more about new possibilities and processing uh now through this Gateway of image blending within pix Insight I hope you enjoyed the presentation I think you can see just how powerful a script like this can be in fact I'm considering making a course in pix Insight now that the script is available just on image blending alone so look for something like that in the future and until then clear skies

Channel: Adam Block

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Id: j14lPwcNeeo

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024