I have version 1.8 Ripley I think that's
the newest version it'll let you know
about updates new version of pix insight
released one point eight point six I
haven't gotten it yet so oh maybe I have
I'm not sure what that meant but usually
it just gives you a little thing about
updates and then if you want them you
can check them and say you know update
after I finished working on this okay
let's go ahead and look at what we have
so in the pics insight there's a really
handy tool called blink it's under
processes all processes then this is
just an alphabetical order and I'm going
to choose blink and I'm gonna open up my
folder of lights and click and
shift-click to select them all
it's going to load all of those files up
for me here and a list over here in the
blink window
all right so here we go all the files
are loaded here in blink and what I can
do now is I can just quickly step
through them by hitting the down arrow
or just clicking on one and this is
helpful for a few reasons
one we can sort of evaluate the sky
brightness as the night passes because
it applied an auto stretch to the first
frame here and then if we can see down
here we can see the sky got a lot darker
so when that happens you might want to
wait the files that have the darker sky
higher than the files that have the
brighter sky and there's different ways
we can do that especially if we use the
process called subframe selector I'm
probably going to do that in this video
just because it'll take too long to
explain everything but the main thing we
want to do in blink is just evaluate the
frames for focus and for tracking issues
especially with light weight mounts like
I was using there might be some tracking
issues here these all look pretty good
sometimes it's hard to see exactly
what's going on until you zoom in stars
look pretty good there and you can
basically just quickly click through
these and just take a look at the stars
like in that one they look a little bit
more streaked and actually in those two
right there and let's say you wanted to
then reject those frames you can just
say let's move those selected files to a
new location with this little button
down here and you could just make a new
folder that's like rejected frames
something like that I'm gonna keep those
in they didn't look too bad let me go
all the way down here to the bottom and
make sure my focus is still okay focus
looks good here okay but on this final
one ice clearly see there's a problem so
see eight three five one looks okay but
when I go down to eight three five two
there's this little artifact on all the
stars zoom in even more so you can see
what I'm talking about here come on
there we go
so you see how there's that little line
coming out of all of the stars that's
usually an indication to me of probably
I hit the Mount somehow by stepping too
hard near it or actually manually
running and do it or something and so I
would not want to use this frame in my
final stack because it might mess things
up so I would then just not use this
final one when I'm stacking these but
most of the rest of these look pretty
good so I'm probably gonna use all these
but you really do want to blink through
your frames make sure that there's no
big surprises if in one you notice there
was maybe like a satellite trail or a
airplane trail that probably would be
fine because through the stacking
algorithm it will automatically reject
those pixels if it only shows up in one
or two frames so let's go ahead and
close out a blink go up here to no over
here on the left-hand side to format
Explorer go into DSLR RAW format
Explorer and click Edit preferences and
what I like to do before I do any
calibration is just set this to pure raw
so you just click on peer raw right down
there it turns off any image flipping it
doesn't try to debayer before
calibration at deep layers after
calibration that's what this create raw
 CFA image means and you go ahead
and click OK to accept that and now
normally what I would do is I would go
through the processes of subframe
selector image calibration image
registration image integration all these
different processes separately to
make my fully calibrated stacked image
because I like to sort of do it all
manually to see what's going on as I go
but because this is a beginner video and
I don't want to make it too long I'm
gonna use a script and a lot of times
the scripts take a bunch of complicated
processes and picks inside and combine
them together to make the whole thing
easier so I'm gonna go to script batch
pre-processing and choose batch pre-processing and this is very similar to
like deep-sky stacker you just load in
your lights or flats your darks your
bias and it basically takes care of the
rest for you but just like with deep-sky
stacker if you want to you can go in
here and go into more advanced topics so
I'm gonna go ahead and add my lights
here just select all of those except for
the last one because we didn't want that
last one 8 3 5 2 click open all set
select my flats
I'll select my darks I'm just clicking
these little add lights add flats add
darks buttons at the bottom and add my
bias or offset
okay we have all those loaded now I'm
not going to generate drizzle data even
though normally I might because I don't
want to get into that right now let's
check our integration parameters here so
percentile clipping that is not the one
we want basically it gives you an idea
of the best rejection algorithm by just
hovering over it right here and there's
different options based on the number of
frames you've captured and for over 25
frames or something like that
I think linear fit clipping is the best
so I'm going to choose that you might
want to change some of these parameters
depending on what you see in the final
stack but a lot of times you don't know
until you do it so I just leave those on
the default for now everything else here
looks good over here we want to tell it
that these are CFA images that means
color filter array such as a Bayer
pattern which is on all DSLRs so I want
that on Bayer mosaic pattern you can
leave that on auto but the most common
one is our G G B and V and G for the
debayer method is fine this probably
doesn't matter if it's checked off or on
but we're not using fits file so I'm
going to go ahead and uncheck that okay
and now we have to pick a reference
image for our registration and I
remember the first one looked pretty
good so I'm gonna choose lights and pick
that first image basically that's the
one it's gonna look to for registering
all the other pictures against the star
pattern if we did subframe selector we
could mathematically know which was the
best one in terms of focus but since we
didn't I'm just going to use the first
image I shot because
that's right after I focused meaning the
stars should be in good focus there and
then I'm gonna choose an output
directory here I'm just gonna make a new
directory called pix insight process
okay this all looks good I'm gonna go
ahead and click run it'll give me some
warning about you know you might you
might want to integrate the lights
yourself using image integration process
that's fine we'll go ahead and click
continue and then just let it roll and
this takes a while we're just going to
let it do its thing and come back in a
few minutes here
all right once that's over we can click
exit there and say we want to exit that
then you get a file open go into this
process folder find master if you want
to look at any of these if you notice
any problems you can but me
the main one we're interested in here is
the light master so light binning one
dot X is f I'm going to go ahead and
click on open brings this up this is in
a linear state so if I click on this
little STF auto stretch button over here
we can sort of see what we have and
you'll notice the background here is
very red that's normal that's the the
light pollution and basically just the
channels being a little bit out of sync
here if we click on the actual screen
transfer function process and we link
the RGB channels I'm still red ok
nevermind
ok but the next thing we want to do here
is we want to go ahead and extract the
background here so we're going to go to
processed background model ization and
usually I just start with the automatic
and see how well a job that does and so
we're going to subtract the background
and go ahead and just apply that
okay so here's what the background looks
like basically pure red and here is our
image without that red background now
it's a good starting point but it did
some strange things here I think it over
corrected the middle seems darker here
and then there's like a ring around that
which is a classic thing with automatic
background extractor so I'm gonna go
ahead and move that over to the side
here and try my own hand at this just
using this is a reference so I don't
accidentally put a point on any
nebulosity but I'm gonna use dynamic
background extraction so I'm gonna go to
process background model ization dynamic
background extraction go ahead and click
on this to tell it that this is the
active window here then I'll just go
ahead and use these default parameters
and see how it does I'm gonna go down to
sample generation and click generate
okay so with the default it didn't place
too many samples and it placed one right
in the nebula so a little bit off there
so let's go ahead and play around with
these model parameters a little bit I'm
gonna increase the tolerance to one I'm
gonna increase the smoothing pact factor
to 0.5 and down here under minimum
sample weight I'm going to decrease that
to 0.5 and click generate again okay so
that gave me a bunch more samples but
it's still not having samples down here
at the bottom so I'm gonna increase the
tolerance just a little bit more 1.3
let's say and generate again well we
still don't have any samples down there
at the bottom but that might be fine we
could just crop that bottom part away if
it's too hard to model that part the
other thing I'm going to do here though
is I'm going to look at
where there is no Buhl ASSA tea here my
automatic automatically subtracted one
and I'm gonna get rid of any samples
that are in that nebula part so I'm
gonna move this one out of the way that
one looks fine this one is probably a
little too close I'm going to move that
out of the way this one is definitely in
the dust there so I'm going to move that
over there
okay the other important part to do with
dynamic background extraction is
starting with this sample up here in the
top left I'm gonna step through each
sample looking at this screen right here
on the dynamic background extraction
panel and just make sure that I don't
have anything like this where it's the
big star is basically taking up the
whole sample like that because that will
throw off the model then I might
manually place a few samples down here
and the lower part as well okay yeah
I'll go back up here to the top oops
click on this one try to there we go
step through
there's another one that's on a big star
so I'm just gonna move that a little bit
over you can see I'm doing this pretty
quick just looking for if any are
hitting well on this one you know has
two stars right there in the field so I
might just move that off to the side a
little bit I basically just want these
samples to be modeling the background
and not stars or nebula
features okay looks good I'm just going
to put one down here in this corner you
can add as many manually as you want but
you don't have to add too many or it it
sort of throws off the models usually
simpler is a little bit better okay I'm
gonna go ahead and choose subtract here
and apply
all right if I look at the background
looks like that
look at this you can see I'll just get
rid of this I'll minimize this if I
compare that to automatic you can see
the automatic sort of created this weird
ring effect well by a dynamic background
extraction looks a lot better in that
regard there's no ring effect it looks
pretty good out here towards the edges
there's still some artifacting and noise
and things but we can just go ahead and
crop that away right now let me go ahead
and get rid of this a B E I'm gonna go
ahead and go up here to process geometry
dynamic crop click on it then reset it
and then just drag in from the sides
here to get rid of all this sort of
noise on the edges
and apply and that's looking quite a bit
better the background is still a little
bit blotchy but this is super stretched
so most of that is just noise that we
can that's going to actually disappear
once we do the real processing okay next
thing we can do here is I'm gonna go
ahead and save this I'll just call it
put it in my process folder here and
I'll call it integration DBE drop
alright now what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna extract a luminance which you can
click on this little button right up
here it says extract CIE L asterisk
component but that may basically means
extract illuminance and I'm going to
open up screen transfer function and
histogram transformation I'm going to
apply the screen transfer function drag
that down here by the little triangle
and apply it on the histogram reset the
screen transfer function and now I have
a stretched luminance right there I'm
gonna reset my histogram transformation
here and with this luminance in the view
and basically just continue to stretch
that a little bit so that this histogram
peak is right at about mid like that and
this is basically just what we're gonna
use to put on as a mask when we apply
some noise reduction I like using a nice
highly stretched mask like this to make
sure that I'm not going to accidentally
overly smooth any of these nebula
features this is actually maybe even a
not quite aggressive enough so sometimes
I'll also open up curves here and just
open up a preview and just really try to
make sure that all the nebulosity part
is gonna be protected against this that
looks good okay
so I'm going to go ahead and apply this
and invert it mask invert mask and now I
have a nice mask that's protecting the
red is the part that protects and
letting in a little bit of noise
reduction which we're going to apply
next on to the sky so I'm going to go to
process multi scale median transform I'm
going to increase the number of layers
to six turn on noise reduction on all of
them
and basically with the smaller scale
structures we want to apply more noise
reduction so you increase the threshold
well do I don't know ten or something
like that on that first one and you just
sort of decrease it on each one so I'm
going to do nine seven five three two
and one something like that and just go
ahead and apply that on this masked
version here this is my favorite noise
reduction thing to do while the data is
still in this linear format like this
and basically this is just like a
blurring kind of noise reduction it
takes a very crunchy noisy looking stuff
and blurs the pixels together a little
bit
I guess they call it smoothing but it's
basically blurring
and the multiscale part is that it it
blurs on different scales and you can
set different amounts of blurring based
on the scale of the structure so what
I'm doing here is the very small
structures are getting more blurred
together while the bigger structure is
less blurred together okay I'm gonna go
ahead and remove that mask and you can
see that it made the sky a little
prettier a little bit more smooth
looking and so the next thing we want to
do is apply some color calibration to
this so I'm gonna go to process color
calibration photometric color
calibration we can search coordinates
and just type in m40 to search it finds
it you say get and it puts in the right
Ascension and declination for you for
focal length
it was 360 and pixel size so 3.7 to 360
focal length knows the RA and Dec good
good good for white reference I almost
always use g2v
star and I'll go ahead and apply that
basically what this does is it plate
solves the image it then pulls up
catalog data and linear fits and changes
the colors in RG and B so that the as
many stars match the catalog data as
possible in the field and then it gives
you a nice plot showing you know how
many of your stars agree with the found
stars and so here it's telling me that
it found 319 reference stars of those 25
have
problems but that means it still has
almost 300 stars to try to match the
color against and it's gonna take all my
colors and match those against those
catalog stars so very nice little color
calibration tool built into pix inside
here it's fairly new I think like year
and a half to two years old maybe and it
works really well for me some people
have had trouble with it but I've always
found it to work really well okay so
here's our white balance function plots
you can see for the most part the Stars
match up against this slope and then
there's a few outliers but that's okay
now it looks really weird right there
but that's because we just have to reset
the auto stretch so I just turn it off
and turn it back on and for the most
part you're probably not going to be see
much difference there but once we fully
process it it should really help with
getting accurate color alright so we've
done that one more thing I like to do
here on DSLR images like this is to
neutralize the background which the way
we do that is we make a sample here of
just the background with no stars in it
just through a preview you just click on
a little preview button you drag out a
preview and then you go to color
calibration background neutralization
you set the reference image to your
preview and you apply background
neutralization again doesn't seem to
make much of a difference but it helps
later on and then I can just kill that
preview reset my auto stretch there we
go
all right next up what I'm gonna do is
I'm going to apply one little thing more
of noise reduction which is SCN are
green because I see some green noise
here in the image
I usually don't set this to the full
amount I do something like 60 or 70 and
you just apply it and it takes out some
of the green and green noise in the
image all right now we can go ahead and
apply stretching
we could try math stretch which is an
easy way to do this you basically just
tell it what is the background and then
it stretches it for you but I'm gonna do
stretching by hand because I just like
doing it by hand so I'm gonna open up
histogram transformation here reset it
open up this one DBE and then I'm just
going to take this middle slider and
move it over here until I can see the
little histogram peak come up over a
little bit apply it and you can see that
applied an initial stretch and I'm going
to just do that again
and now I'm gonna really back off and
reset the black level here and that
might be good enough for now actually be
interested to compare that to a mass
stretch let's just see what the two the
difference is here so I'm gonna undo
what I just did let's go ahead and make
a copy of this just by dragging it out
by the little tab over here on the left
hand side I'm gonna rename this one mass
stretch and I'll rename this one HT for
histogram transformation
okay and on this one I'm going to do the
same thing I'm going to stretch it back
out again
okay so that was my histogram stretched
image like how it looks the most part
and then here's my masse stretch so with
mass stretch you're just going to first
define a preview of the background I'm
going to use this little area right here
again then you can turn back off the
auto stretch go up to process intensity
transformations math stretch for the
background reference choose that preview
and then apply it and it basically is
doing the same kind of thing I was doing
in histogram transformation but instead
of just applying those stretches those
stretches did the same image it first
masts off the background and so it's
just stretching based on what is not
background and then it also does it in
something like a hundred iterations well
yeah he was set to a hundred iterations
while you can see a histogram
transformation I did it in about four
iterations so sometimes it looks better
sometimes it gives the image a funky
look but while we're in this state of
getting ready to stretch the image let's
just try both and see which looks better
okay it's done you can go ahead and drop
the preview here and compare these two
honestly they're pretty similar the mass
stretch just brought up the background
level a little bit beyond what is called
for for this image so but it maybe also
retained the star color a little bit
better so if I can't decide between
these two I might just combine them with
pixel math so I can show that I'll just
do process pixel math and I'm going to
do the expression editor here do point
five times HT plus 0.5
times math stretch
all right and I want to make a new image
so under destination I'll say create new
image whoops click the plus I mean the
square to apply that okay
and then I get somewhere in between
those two which I actually think looks
the best of those three so cool I can
save this off
press command S save this off as after
stretch
and I think I want to try to remove some
of that vertical noise banding I'm
seeing there's a script for that under
utilities canon bandung reduction
there that did it so I applied it to
aggressively the first time because I
didn't know what I was doing I guess but
with a less aggressive mode it worked
pretty well for removing that banding
that I was seeing what else is left to
do we could try making a range selection
so I'm going to do mass generation and
range selection open up the preview here
increase the lower limit until it's
basically just selecting the nebula and
the stars make it a little bit fuzzier a
little bit smoother something like that
and then it comes out like this that's
taking up too much sky so I'm going to
open up my histogram transformation and
basically darken out the sky there okay
so I'll go ahead and apply this mask and
so now it's just it's just selecting the
nebula and the bright stars and I'll go
ahead and uncheck show masks so I can
see what I'm doing I'm going to open up
a curves transformation and just apply a
bit of saturation to all that and so you
can see let me reset it that's without
if I just sort of move up this
saturation curve a little bit it adds
more saturation to the object I'll go
ahead and apply it
this is showing me if I now applied it
again but that looks like too much to me
so I'm gonna tamp it down a little bit
here apply it again cool and then I'm
gonna go ahead and reverse the mask by
clicking invert mask and move this
saturation slider in the other direction
to desaturate the sky just a tad alright
and actually let me open up that one
more time I'm also just gonna bring the
reset this go to RGB k mode and I'm just
gonna bring the intensity of the sky
down just a tad to the brightness of the
sky basically don't want to clip it to
you know really black like that you want
to leave in a little bit but this is
where it was that's sort of a dull gray
I just like to make my sky a little bit
darker than that something like that
yeah messed it up try again grab it
right about there just bring it down
just a tad
okay I basically like it like this I'm
just gonna go ahead and save that off as
after stretch and curves but if you
wanted to try to define the nebula
features a little bit more we could
reverse that mask one more time
and we also would want to get rid of all
the stars actually let's just make a new
mask this okay so we could instead of
doing a mask that includes the stars
like that which we were using for
saturating to go back to range selection
open it up again and increase that
smoothness slider until all the stars
are out of it and it's just got the the
nebula part here
okay and then I'll apply that just to
show you which part of the image it's
working on here just there and what we
could do with this applied is go into
intensity transformations local
histogram Equalization and what this
does is it works it does a histogram
feature but just on the part we have
masked and it's sort of like a extra bit
of contrast it really sort of it's
similar to like the clarity slider in
Photoshop it just adds a bit of
sharpness and contrast at a local level
and this kernel radius is saying which
scale you're working on so smaller
scales it's gonna be a smaller kernel
radius bigger scales a bigger kernel
radius and then the contrast limit is
what difference in contrast between two
pixels do you want it to pick up on so a
contrast limit of 1 is not going to do
much at all two is going to be a lot is
twice as aggressive so 1.5 is usually
where I start and then the amount is how
much of it you're applying this is a
good one to make a preview over the part
of the image that you're working on and
then just bring up that preview in here
and so you can see by changing the
kernel radius it changes the fineness of
the detail that it's working on so for
this image I think something like 140
looks pretty good
I'm gonna bring down the amount a little
bit 0.75 all right go ahead and apply it
okay close out of that out of that drop
the preview and I can just click undo
and redo to see what it did helps if
you're really far zoomed in here okay so
just look at this detail right here if I
redo that's with the Histadrut local
histogram Equalization that's without it
so you can see how it just made the
darker parts a little bit darker adds
that local bit of contrast there's
another way to increase dark structures
in your image which is a script over
here script utilities dark structure
enhance so if you're interested in this
you can just try it out it uses a masked
approach and sharpens with multiscale
transforms and things like that
and I picked some pixel math expression
it looks like see what it does here
again these scripts are often using
processes and just creative ways so you
can pay attention to what they do here
and try to recreate it yourself
oh whoops you can't apply that to a
masked image let me remove the mask
try it again duh the reason you can't
apply it that script to a masked image
is because it uses masks and so it gets
confused if you if you try to apply it
to an image that's already been masked
because it already creates the masks for
you is the idea ok that's done so I can
hit undo redo and the main area where I
see that did something is look right
here under m-43 before and after so
basically just figured out where those a
little Dark Nebula were and made them
darker which it's nice it adds a little
bit of contrast to the image in a cool
way
ok so I'm pretty happy with this there's
definitely a lot more I could do with it
here in pix insight but I'm gonna say
that this is done so I'm going to save
it one more time call it first try P I
and then I'll also save it off as a PNG
file and it'll give me this warning
about your losing numerical accuracy by
making it into an 8-bit file but that's
fine
okay all done with processing our m42
here in picks insight if you have any
suggestions for future videos or other
things you'd like to see either with
processing or acquisition or gear or
anything just let me know in the
comments and I'll try to address those
thanks so much for watching
you
