Recent Articles in Fundamentals

In this video, for completeness, the Blink process is covered to demonstrate how to make quick animations. 

This lesson shows a way of out trouble with PCC. PCC depends on a plate scale solution in order to compare that stars in your data to the catalog stars. If plate solving fails, it would seem there is no recourse... at least until now. Try this method and see if it gets you unstuck. This lesson also demonstrates one usages of the Catalog Star Generator.

This lesson dives into the use of the Local Fuzzy Histogram Hyperbolization script and a technique for its usage. 

This lesson dives into the use of the Local Fuzzy Histogram Hyperbolization script and a technique for its usage. 

This lesson, taken from PI Horizons as part of an image processing example, demonstrates a fundamental technique of shifting the Hue of data using CurvesTransformation and Color Mask (if necessary). 

I consider this an important lesson! I made a common error which I suspect is very easy to do and might be a stumbling point for others. So I show the problem and the solution. This highlights the basic ideas behind ChannelCombination, LRGBCombination and ChannelExtraction. 

This lesson was quickly put together by request. Many people often ask me how I organize my files and what conventions I use. Well.. a mystery no longer! I do not think there is anything earth-shattering here. However, there are always a few tidbits to learn... 

This lesson demonstrates the basic usage of the DynamicPSF process in PixInsight. Some explanation of data modeling is mentioned here. However, review of the Image Integration Primer material will help as there is a specific example that uses DynamicPSF. 

In this final installment of the primer, we look at the most common measure- the Standard Deviation of a set of values and how it is useful to identify outliers.

This section highlights a fix to an error that might occur when using PCC. It deals with the focal length keyword in the FITs header taking precedence over the value inputted in the PCC form. 

Star Alignment in PixInsight is the main process used for image registration. Under the hood there is a good deal of complexity- however in terms of usage the default settings usually work making this step of image processing one of the simplest to perform. Thus this section highlights important concepts such as geometric transformations and interpolation methods which are important for image registration and other areas of image processing. 

This video is a lesson on the use of TGVDenoise- one of PixInsight's super tools!

This lesson demonstrates the usage of ArcsinhStretch- a process designed to manage color fidelity (and saturation) while brightening an image.

The controls for a Maximized view are located at the top right of the PI desktop. This isn't obvious, and in the case of the Real Time view- the subtlety could be a frustrating moment. 

This section takes a deep dive into Exponential Transformation. This process contains two methods for increasing the brightness and contrast of faint features. However, the details of how the methods work and how they are related to the free parameters is completely unknowable without documentation- which unfortunately does not exist in the program. This lesson offers a complete description of the tool and its usage. 

The information concerning the pixel math expressions for the two methods comes from Rob Kantelberg who published a webpage on this process in collaboration with Carlos Milovic. 

In this lesson, until otherwise persuaded/corrected, I rail against the sometimes used technique of "balancing" RGB data through the use of LinearFit. I explain how/why it somewhat works- and where it fails. 

This lesson shows the steps for matching the lightness of an RGB image to a Luminance image in order to facilitate blending with LRGBCombination. 

Batch processing of Linear Fit can be done using an image container or the BatchLinearFit script.