Pixinsight Tutorial - LRGB Galaxy Processing Workflow - Free Data

hey there guys how's it going today we're going to be taking a look at processing lrgb galaxies in pix in sight let's jump straight in and I'll take of you exactly what we're going to need if you want to follow along with this tutorial you'll find in the description box down below a link to this particular folder m106 lrgb tutorial hosted on my Google Drive this contains all the data that I'm going to be processing in this tutorial so if you want to follow along with me side by side using the exact same set of data which which I highly advise if you're just getting used to pix in site please do download that it's completely free of course uh and then you can work along with me you want to work on your own data though that's absolutely fine but you will of course in all cases need a few different tools installing to your pixeling site so we're going to need gradient expert installed and integrated into pixeling site there are a few tutorials online on how to do that I have a video on my channel as well doing that you'll need spcc that's spec photometric color calibration installed and ready to go on your pixeling site again this is another totally free resource but it's a great tool it's worth the effort to set up again tutorials online on how to do that I won't bore you with it in this um you will need ghs that's generalized hyperbolic stretch which is my favorite stretching method bar non at this point in time again once uh once you get that downloaded and installed we should be just about ready to go aside from a few final tools so this is going to contain some paid software in my case uh the Exterminator tools from Russell Chrome and that's blur exterminator star exterminator and noise exterminator I've used all these three tools extensively I would not wish to process without them anymore I'd sooner quit astronomy because they just bring me so much more enjoyment it be like losing a hand at this point so take from that what you will I do have affiliate links to those down below so if you wish to support my Channel at no extra cost to yourself then it would be massively massively appreciated and a huge thanks to those of you who already have done that now with all that said let's jump into this processing tutorial if you want to select the data drag it all into pix in site and just minimize the window that you just took it from you should notice that all the data loads in along with the tools if the tools AR visible for you you'll need to right click click and click arrange icons and that should bring them all into view the first thing I want to do get everything actually neatly arranged so I'm going to select the luminance window whichever window you have selected will appear in the top left when you click window and tile Windows as you can see so I'm zooming out just using the mouse scroll wheel to make sure the whole image is visible in all cases I will now open stf and in turn just by selecting each image and the little nuke icon on SDF going to go through and just do a screen stretch on all these images so I can see exactly what's going on and then we know what we can actually do with this image and what we need to tackle next so the first thing that's really plainly wrong with this is there are huge stacking artifacts on these images now these all need to be gone so to do that I'm going to use Dynamic crop just double click that and drag from the corners until you've cropped out all of those stacking artifacts if you wish to zoom in at this point and take a look and make sure you know you're not giving any of this low signal to noise ratio kind of salt and peppery looking stuff on the side please do so but just make sure you've got all the stacking artifacts gone we can't really leave any in place as it throws off uh later tools um once that's done don't go ahead and hit execute right away what you first need to do is use new instance just drag and drop that onto your other three images once that's done you can safely hit the tick and then all four Images are cropped to the exact same common area our next step is going to be to combine these images I used to leave this till a little bit later in my older tutorials but these days I'm doing it straight away uh so to do that we're going to select first the Luminous box and put the appropriate image in there in the r you guessed it we want to put the red in the G we want the green and in the B we want the blue go ahead and apply globally okay so that's finished just moments later go ahead and close down that lrgb combination tool I am going to apply now an SDF just a screen stretch to this linear data so we can take a look at exactly what we're working with if you wish to minimize visual clutter you can go ahead and and either minimize or close those other windows so I'm just going to drag them off the screen and I'm going to make this one main window a little bit bigger so we can really see what's happening right obviously we've got some gradients to deal with in this thing so at this point you've got a decision to make if you've got an up-to-date pix Insight install you could opt to use gradient correction which can give fantastic results if you are willing to work with it and kind of you know input the exact parameters that you're going to need which change with each image uh but it is doable so that's the results with gradient correction and applied just at defaults wouldn't expect you'd get great results from that but it hasn't done bad I'm right clicking and undoing because I am actually going to use myself scripts toolbox and as I mentioned before gradient expert that's my general tool of choice it doesn't work quite as well as grading correction if you take the time to D grading correction in but if you're just going to use things at default like I tend to do CU I'm a little bit lazy it generally Works quite well so gradient expert now is running and in just a moment's time we should have a finished image there you can see it's brought us up a preview of the background model that it extracted from that so all the main gradients appear to be gone close that down we have a color cast introduced to the image but we can just click reset on the stf right there so apply a fresh one and it's now back to looking normal so uh yeah I think that's done a really good job it looks to me like most of the gradients are gone it is a very easy to use tool so uh as I say there's no wrong answer to this but if you're a little bit lazier like me uh or you just want an easier option great an expert The Next Step anyway is now going to be opening up script and pl solving this image using image analysis and image solver now this was taken um m106 is the Galaxy so we're going to search for m106 in here hit search and select the appropriate database file if you processing a different galaxy of course you'd search for that and if you have stacked up your data inside Pi in sight most of this metadata should already be sorted for you as um as it is it seems to have put most things in for me it may not for you so if you do need to enter this information this was taken with a 2.4 microp pixel camera so you'd enter that right there and if you need the focal distance it's 642 it was taken with an a spree 120 with a 0.77 times reducer and a 183 mm Pro in case you wanted to know go ahead hit okay don't worry too much about the popup it's just letting us know that because we haven't specified the observation date some of the parales may be slightly wrong that's finished as you can see it solved the image we can now use spcc now this image is solved you could use this complete defaults if you know a little bit more about what you've done the you know you've taken the image with you should select it so the quantum efficiency curve is going to default to the ideal curve however I know that I took this with an imx183 so I am going to select it the filters I used as well should be somewhere on here yeah and sure enough um astronomic deep Sky filters so deep sky red deep Sky green and deep sky blue you don't have to do this you could have left those at default and you'd still get a great result but again as I said I know what I took them with so why not input them and get it as a little bit more accurate if I can so that's now finished you could choose to not have this graph pop up but if you know a way to interpret it maybe you do uh I wish to have it shown but there it is generate Gra graphs go ahead reapply the SDF and sure enough the image is looking pretty well color calibrated right now uh we can certainly work with this now as I mentioned at the start of this tutorial we're now going to start to use some uh paid software in the note of blur exterminator noise exterminator and star exterminator in my case um I do have affiliate links to these down below please don't think that that's um G to kind of affect what I'm saying to you in any way I was shouting the virtues of these tools long before I had affiliate links um but if you do wish to use them it would help me out at no extra cost to yourself and a huge thanks to those of you who have used them as I said before makes a huge difference um going to go ahead and just apply at defaults on this I'm not worrying too much about trying to dial everything in because I just find these tools they kind of just work there we are didn't take long at all thanks to GPU acceleration and uh take a look at that wow if I just cycle back and forth for you ever so quickly look at the lane detail in that Galaxy all those Dusty lanes are just popping up this little nebulous region right at the top here that used to look a little bit like a kind of a smudge now it's clearly a little region in nebulosities it's incredible what blur exterminator can do um it changed the game for me and just upped the amount of enjoyment I was having by a huge amount really so uh give it a go free trials for these things noise exterminator uh see what you think you know what I mean now this comes on and it's default Doo's value is a little bit High generally speaking unless you have very noisy data uh in my case I'm going to drag it down just a touch it's not an exact time about 75 0.75 rather let's try it at that and what I'm really going to be looking for at this point is if it's just looking plasticized you know it's just too smooth it actually looks good at75 so I'm going to leave it alone and not worry about it anymore but if it did look you know too smooth you might want to just back that off a little bit and try again really doesn't take long but here's the effect that uh noise exterminator had as you can see all that background kind of color model noise that traditionally used to give me a rather massive headache to deal with it's all just gone in one movement it's uh it's incredible at this point if you wish you could pull the stars out with star exterminator by using generate star image and unscreen stars I'm going to delay just a moment before doing that uh because I want to give this in a PR preliminary stretch with ghs first so I'm going to go ahead reset the screen transfer function view open up ghs open up a preview and with the background region selected just left Mouse button in a a region that you know to be dark on the image if you need to stretch The View again you could you know what I mean and then select that said region we'll just use that and click Send to symmetry point so that's send to SP going to go ahead and start to up the stretch factor until I can see things in the image not going to apply just yet I'm going to open up a zoomed preview window by clicking the little icon just right there and I'm going to drag a window just over the main object of interest in this so M16 right there at this point now I'm going to increase that stretch factor to the point where everything I want visible in in the image is visible but it's not like this you know it's not overbaked so around about not worrying too much about highlights right now around about there I think looks good for me uh as you can see now the highlights are overblown in the car this galaxy don't worry just yet going to drag in a closer preview just to show you what I'm doing now using the local intensity slider I'm going to drag that across to the right just a little until that core is no longer overblown as you can see the effect this is having is I just cycle it back and forth fire it's no longer overblown but the Galaxy remains it's how it should look that kind of dynamic appearance of Darker regions brighter regions if you go too far with local intensity everything starts to flatten out and you lose a lot of Pop from your Galaxy images so do take your time with this don't worry about rush in this step because this is one of the most critical steps I would say in the whole thing good check I think is to just cycle back and forth preview off and on you can see that bright car it's only just only just blowing out now so it looks about perfect to me about as much as we can possibly stretch for that first stretch so I've gone ahead hit apply now I'm going to hit reset next up as you can see the histogram if I just boost the size of this ever so slightly for you the histogram Peak itself has been pushed way across to the right so naturally we've got a lot of gray values over here which we're now going to get rid of by setting the Black Point freshly so I'm going to use the transformation type as linear stretch this window up for you again and I'm going to drag the left hand uh side of the histogram right there just across steadily towards that peak's base so you don't want to cut into it and clip your blacks as that's just going to look ridiculous but you don't want to leave it back here as well because that also looks silly so what you really want to be looking out for is you see this value right here low clip Point LCP just clipping a few pixels it's absolutely fine there so I'm going to leave it at that that's absolutely fine it looks good is the most important thing it looks good on the preview window right there going to hit apply and now I think at this point I'm going to pull out the Stars before con continuing on just one more little stretch star exterminator generate star image onscreen Stars apply okay now that's finished I'm just going to move my stars across to one side take this image once again and with ghs we're going to give it one last little stretch so with a preview over m106 itself going to up the stretch factor ever so slightly and this time I'm going to drag the local intensity and just reset it by the way just left of center so you can see I left it where it was move it to the right we're going to have trouble as I move it to the left it's going to tame that stretch just enough to the point where we now getting more of the Galaxy visible but the background isn't massively suffering hopefully you can see the effect as I just cycle back and forth I like that next step I'm going to leave it intact and I'm going to take one more stab now at setting the uh the kind of black point so one again fresh preview I I apologize if this segment seems laborious it kind of is a little bit but it's worth the time you know taking a few moments to actually try and get this as well as you can set um this is where you're going to make or break your image really so I'm going to allow a small amount of clipping there on the the low values it looks absolutely fine to me nothing dramatic is happening on the the actual image itself so I'm going to settle at that now I am going to put the stars back in before I process any further so to do that I'm just going to use my own star rescreening tools these should be included for you if you downloaded the data if not there are multiple other tools out there to do this with um I'm not saying my tools are any special they really aren't so I'm going to drag the stylus over the starus image Stars over the Stars image and then rescreen over any of them and there you go we've now got a rescreened star result I'm just going to clear some of this visual clutter and we can finish off our processing so now I'm going to make use of masking uh for the case of this you could use individual color masks if you wish uh and I do advise that you play around with those but for this first mask I'm just going to use processes mask generation range selection open a preview select screening and then dragging the lower limit over to the right we're going to start to see what happens to this image so you can see the the kind of Tipping Point where the background is just starting to go we want to take it a little bit further than that until just m106 and its extensions are encircled the very brightest stars are in circled that's absolutely fine and any other notable regions uh have been preserved within this Mas I'm going to boost the smoothness just enough to the point where if you note some of these smaller stars going to start to just be lost into the background it's absolutely fine you've got a wide range of acceptable values on this you know this is acceptable this is acceptable this is acceptable this is not kind of thing so uh hopefully it's just a decent visual representation for you go ahead and apply close everything down and now we're going to take this mask drop it on our image just over there right below the uh identifier and now with curves in my case that's what I'm going to use for this and preview window and saturation selected I'm going to start to boost the color in this image just a little bit so I appreciate this is probably quite hard to see so I'm going to zoom right in once again on m106 hopefully you can now see and by bringing up the middle of that saturation curve up towards the top left it's going to start to add some color into this image all the color values are now being boosted so before and after it's a kind of a subtle stretch but don't be afraid to take this in steps you don't need to do it all in you know one gigantic leap first time take your time now a little bit more it start to appear now that we can see um these nebulous regions are popping out from the rest of the image as actual red as they should they are predominantly hydrogen Alpha and with perhaps one more stretch in the bag let's see if it can take that if I just reset the tool so that's how it currently looks think we can go a little bit more that's starting to look pretty good to me do take your time as I say don't don't don't really Rush this segment as you could you know go way too far let's say like that and have things start to to look a little bit cartoonish and drawn as such but up there is perfectly acceptable it's just kind of what's what's there if you will so I'm going to apply that and I'm going to settle at that as you notice because our mask included those brighter Stars they've also been boosted in saturation too and it's led to a really pleasing appearance for this I think this processing method leads to quite a natural looking Galaxy which I really like um I know some people love to process the galaxies to the absolute Max nothing wrong with that if that makes you happy you know that's what you need to do but for me I like a nice natural looking Galaxy and I think that is that that's what I've achieved with this now in my case for this particular Satur there is a little bit of green cast Over the image probably Remnant light pollution that kind of thing so I'm just going to attempt to remove it with SNR and that's done a pretty good job probably a little bit strong so you could go ahead and actually change the amount of scr I'm going to use it about half strength that looks more satisfying to me and my uh non-color calibrated eyeballs but it looks good on my monitor and that's all that really matters so hopefully this is giving you guys enough that you could follow along with uh this kind of thing and get decent result from this data and then moving on to your own there's plenty more of this kind of thing to come I hope you've enjoyed this processing tutorial and i' just like to say as always thank you ever so much for watching thank you all for your support uh everybody on patreon YouTube memberships you guys are absolutely fantastic and all the people using my affiliate links too uh you all helped to keep me a flow every month and I really do appreciate you so uh as always anyway that's about it thank you for watching hope you enjoy and I'll see you in the next one close guys

Channel: lukomatico

Views: 6,849

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Id: Jk2T_P9dldg

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024