 Hello, this is Nico Carver from NebulaFotos.com, and this is part 2c in my video on capturing and processing the Andromeda Galaxy without a Star Tracker. If you haven't watched part 1 yet, please go do that first. Watch at least the first 19 minutes, and then you can come back to this video to learn about processing in Pix Insight, which is what we'll be using tonight. So I'm just going to go ahead and show you that I already have biases, darks, flats, and lights, and these are all the different files that we captured. And then I've also made just an empty folder here called BPP for batch preprocessing, and we'll show you that in just a second. So let's go ahead and open up Pix Insight. And Pix Insight user interface is a little bit hard to get used to, but we're mostly just going to be using processes and scripts. And so we're going to start with a script that's under the batch preprocessing submenu, and it's called batch preprocessing. Oh, I'm sorry. But we're mostly just going to be using processes and scripts. And so if we start under scripts and go down to the batch processing submenu and then go to batch preprocessing, this is a nice script for doing basically the same thing that Deep Sky Stacker or SIRL can do with their scripts of taking all your lights, flats, darks, and biases, and creating the calibration masters, calibrating your lights, registering your lights, and doing an integration, if you wish. So let's start by adding lights. Here we go. Just going to add everything in this folder. And then we just click through each tab and click the appropriate button down here at the bottom. Go into the right folder and add that type of file. So then I'm just going to add all of my flats and add my darks, add my bias frames. OK, and then with all of these things added, I just have to set a reference image for registration, which should be a light where I know Andromeda is roughly centered. I am confident that Andromeda is roughly centered in this first light. I can just hit the spacebar here on a Mac to just double check. And there it is. It's actually a little bit high, so let me just see here if I move that down. So I'm just going to pick my first light here, because I know that Andromeda was centered on the first one that I did. And then all the others will get referenced. All the other frames will get aligned to that one, because that's the reference image. And then I'll just set my output directory here, which we already established is BPP, the empty folder. And that's it. I can use all of basically the defaults in this script. They're all good defaults for this project. And then I'm just going to click Run. It will go through and do its job. And since I'm working on a laptop, and it's an older laptop, it's going to take it a while to do all of this, especially since we're talking about 1,000 lights. So I'm going to leave it overnight, and we'll pick back up in the morning. OK, PIX Insight has finished its work with the batch pre-processing script. So we can go ahead and now open the resulting light file right here, light binning 1. And here it is. Here's Andromeda. We have, obviously, some flat frame issues here. But overall, it looks pretty good. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to apply a crop. So I'm just going to go to Process Geometry, Dynamic Crop. I'm going to draw out a crop box like this. And then just hit the little Execute Green check mark button right there. That's good. Down over here, you have the Zoom to Fit and different Zoom options here. I'm just going to click Zoom to Fit, so it's nice and big. Perfect. And then I like Andromeda the other way around, 180 degrees from this view. So I'm going to go to Process Geometry, Fast Rotation, and I'm going to rotate 180 just by hitting the square icon down there. Perfect. OK, now let's go ahead and do a background modelization on this. So if we go to Process, Background Modelization, Dynamic Background Extraction, this is my preferred background extractor. It lets you manually set the points. To set it in its dynamic mode, you just have to click on the picture you want to work on. And now it's linked to this. And then I can just start adding points here, which represent the background, or the sky background. So I'm avoiding clicking on Andromeda, of course, but I'm also avoiding clicking on Bright Stars. And you don't need too many points to make a good background model. Actually, too many points can actually make a worse model because it tries to fit to something that doesn't really need to be overly fitted. You want it to be a gentle gradient more. So I usually just try to put one sample in each corner and along each edge in at least one or two towards the center of the image. And that's good. Let's go ahead and click into Target Image Correction, set the correction to Subtraction, and execute with the green check mark. It gives us the background, which looks like this, very blue. And here's our new image. So you can see it did change the color balance quite a bit. This image is a lot more blue, and this one is more green. It did still leave us a fairly nasty magenta streak over here. So let's see if we can run it again and get rid of that. So we might not be able to. I'm just going to close out this original image. And I'm just going to try running the dynamic background extractor again. So we first click on the image where we want to set our samples that represent the background. We set the target image correction to Subtraction and then execute. OK, let's look at the background it extracted. Oop, yep, we definitely got the extreme magenta over there. So hopefully this worked. Definitely helped, right? Let me get rid of this. So here's before, here's after. Not perfect, but definitely an improvement. And we can continue working on the background sky a little bit here with a luminance mask in a second. OK, next thing I want to do is I'm going to do a photometric color calibration. So this is under the Process menu. And then under the Color Calibration submenu, you have Photometric Color Calibration. And I'm going to use just the default of an average spiral galaxy. We're going to do Search Coordinates and Search for M31. Click Search. It finds it. You click Get, and then it puts in the coordinates right there into the right ascension and declination. I'm going to click Acquire from Image to find the observation time. And then the focal length was 200 millimeters. The pixel size was 4.8 microns. You would have to look these up for whatever you shot with. I'm going to leave everything else default and just hit the square to apply this to the image. What this is doing is it looks at the actual stars in the image. It just figured out what those stars were based on the star patterns. And then it looks up using a service called Visier, which is a French database of stars. And it looks up their color. And then by knowing what their color should be, it can apply a white balance function to this image to get a more correct color. So that's the photometric part. Photometry is basically a study of stars' colors. So here's our white balance functions. Basically, it's fitting the stars to a slope and then applying the white balance function based on what the colors of the stars should be. I'm going to get rid of that. It does change things a little bit in a weird way because this image was already stretched and then it applied the color calibration. So I'm going to go ahead and unstretch and restretch the image. And that gives us a little bit better sense of where we are. OK, I'm going to close out of that. The next thing that I want to do is I'm going to apply a Luminance Mask. So to create a Luminance Mask, you just can click up here on this little button that says Extract L Component. And you can see it's not stretched. So the first thing that we have to do to actually make it into a mask is stretch it. So I'm just going to open up a histogram transformation. Choose that Luminance Component from this menu here. And I'm going to stretch this image just by taking this mid-tone slider, bringing it over like this, then taking the shadow slider, bringing that over. OK, until we have something like this, so it's basically just now a loom version of this one but stretched. And then I'm going to apply that to the image here and invert it. So I'm going to go up to Mask and choose Invert Mask. So now it's protecting the light areas, the red protects. I'm now going to turn off the showing of the mask by going to Mask and clicking on that Show Mask. And I'm going to do a little bit of noise reduction. This is a type of noise reduction where it's basically smoothing out fine noise. So if you go down to Multiscale Processing and then go to Multiscale Medium Transform, we're going to turn it up to six layers. And basically, each layer gets to bigger and bigger structures. And so we're going to apply the most noise reduction to the smallest layer. I'm going to do the Max, the maximum, which is a strength of 10. And then for each subsequent layer, I'm going to bring that down a bit. So do something like 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1. There we go. And then I'll just go ahead and apply that by hitting the square. OK, it's done. If I zoom in here and look at the background now and turn that off and back on, you can see it's smoothed out that noise in the background. OK, the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to use that same mask, have that same mask applied. And I'm going to open up a Intensity Transformation, Curves Transformation. And I'm going to desaturate the background a little bit, like this. And then I'm going to invert the mask back. So now it's applying to the stars and the galaxy. And I'm going to saturate those a bit. OK. And now let's go ahead and take off the mask. So I'm going to go ahead and remove it. And let's stretch this image from linear to nonlinear, meaning taking all of the pixel values and actually stretching them. Because right now, the only reason we're seeing anything here is because we have an auto stretch applied. So I'm going to go ahead and turn that off, just clicking the Reset button right up here, the little red X. And then let's open up a Histogram Transformation again. Let's apply it to our image right here, the double DBE, I'm going to reset it. And then I just take the mid-tone slider, bring it way over here, and do the same thing again. And then I'll use the mid-tone slider in concert with the shadow slider to start stretching out this histogram peak. Too much. Let me undo that. OK, that looks good. All right, next up, I'm going to basically separate out the galaxy from the stars so that I can do some work on the background and bring out the saturation of the galaxy without blowing up the stars. So we're going to use a process called StarNet, which I have added to Pix Insight here. But if you download the latest version of Pix Insight, it comes with it. I'm going to set the stride to 64. And go ahead and apply that by hitting the square. OK, so StarNet finished up. It didn't take too long, maybe just like 10, 15 minutes. And it did reveal a lot of what we call walking noise or color model in the background here. But it also revealed a lot of detail in the galaxy. You can see we even captured some of the cool spiral dust arms coming into the core here. And so I want to protect the galaxy detail that we have here, but take out some of this noise by darkening it. So to do that, I'm going to create what's called a range selection mask. So we've got a process mask generation range selection. And click on this little open circle right here to open up a preview. And then we take the lower limit and bring that over until basically just the galaxy is selected like that. And then I'm just going to turn up the fuzziness a little bit and the smoothness until it looks like this. And then I'll apply. And that will create a new image like this. This is the mask that we're going to use. Because it did get a little bit of the corners here, I'm just going to use the clone stamp tool under, what is that under? Painting clone stamp to get rid of those corners. So I have to turn up the radius. I'm going to turn it up to 50. Then I'm going to press Command and, whoops, Command to set a source. And then I'm just going to paint black into these corners here to get rid of that. And I think we have a little bit too much down here too. And I think we have maybe a little bit too much down here as well. So I'm just going to OK, we'll apply that. OK, and then let's see how this range mask looks. I'm just going to apply it to our picture here just by dragging this tab right over here to drop it on. We have to turn on the show mask to see what it looks like. And I think that looks really good. It looks like it's just selecting the galaxy. And so with just the galaxy selected like this, I'm going to go ahead and go to Process, Intensity Transformations, Curves Transformation. And I'm going to turn up the saturation of the galaxy. Do that a couple times. Good. And then I'm going to reverse this mask. So I'm going to do Invert Mask. So now the galaxy is the thing that is protected. And I'm going to go to Intensity Transformation, Curves Transformation again. And this time I'm going to take the saturation way down. And I'm also going to go to the RGBK curve and take that way down to darken that. I'm going to do that a couple times. Perfect. I'm going to now turn the show mask off. OK, I'm going to undo that last one. There we go. So I went a little bit too far with that last one. So I'm going to go ahead and just undid it. Now with the mask still on, I'm just going to try to sort of hit an in-between where we've reduced the brightness a bit. Let me actually turn on a preview so I can sort of get a sense for this. So see, if we go too far, it starts looking bad. So I just want to go far enough. I think that is probably it with this sky background. OK, I see a little bit too much green noise in here. So I'm just going to take off the mask. And I'm going to hit this with Noise Reduction SCNR Green. I'm going to turn it down to about 0.3. OK. And now I want to go back to, let's find it here. Whoops, I messed up. So I didn't create a copy of my star's image. So let's create a copy now. So let's just drag out this one. I'm going to call this Starless. We'll call this one Stars. And let's just go back in our History Explorer here before I ran StarNet. So I just double-click over here to the action before StarNet in the History Explorer. And you can see that brought back all of the stars here. Now, in this image, before we did all of this work, you can see we still have that sort of red fringing. So we already have this range mask, which is good. Let's keep that. But we now have to create a star mask. So the best way to create a star mask is with StarNet. But that takes a while. So I'm just going to use a slightly worse way, which is Mask Generation Star Mask. And I'm just going to use some settings that usually work for me. So I bring down the mid-tone slider, bring down smoothness, turn up the scale a little bit, turn down large-scale growth. And I do usually use binarize. So let's see if this works. OK. Let me go ahead and make this the same size. And let's see. I think that's pretty good in terms of a star mask. Let's go ahead and apply it just to make sure. And I'm going to invert it. Yeah, I think that worked pretty well. OK, so now I know this is a little bit complicated. I'm going to remove that mask. We actually want to combine the range mask and the star mask. The idea here is we want to create something that selects everything except for the background. So we're going to combine these two things with a simple pixel math expression. So I'm going to go to Process Pixel Math. And I'm just going to do star mask plus range mask and do destination create new image. OK, we get this. So this is just a straight addition of this one plus this one. Perfect. And then I'm going to apply our new mask to the image. And I'm going to invert it. So now we have all of our stars and our galaxy protected in red. And now I can apply a curves transformation where I take out a lot of the saturation and darken the background quite a bit like that. Perfect. OK, and then the final step here is we have our starless image. And I'm going to rename this one again stars. And we want to combine the two back together. So I'm going to do this with pixel math again. OK, and this formula is going to be a little bit funky. We use the tilde operator quite a bit. This is the invert sign in pixel math. And we basically want to do an inverted copy of the stars inverted times the starless image inverted. Or another way of saying this is you invert both images, you multiply them together, and then you invert that back. And this is a screen blend mode, basically. I'm going to use the destination thing to say I want to create a new image and then I'll apply it. OK, and that gives us that typical of a screen blend mode where it does brighten the image quite a bit. But now we will take the image back down with another curves transformation. OK, and then I'm just going to do I'm going to use my range mask one more time to just bring up the saturation and the blues of this image one more time. So I'm going to go to intensity transformation. I'm going to use color saturation. And I want to bring up the blue parts without taking up anything else. So let's try that. Let's do a preview. Yeah, I think that looks good. Let's apply it. And let me take the mask back off. It's sticking out a little bit too much with the background. I'm just going to put the mask back on here. I think it's just a little bit too bright now. So I'm just going to do that. So I just took a point sort of in the mid-tones and brought it down just a little bit. And I think that looks good. OK, let me remove the mask. And this is our final untracked Andromeda with Pix Insight. I think it's probably our best yet, but I do know Pix Insight quite well. So it's not surprising to me that I can probably get the best image out of Pix Insight compared to the other programs. So let's go ahead and save this. If I want to return to it in Pix Insight, I would just save it as M31 and use the XISF file format or the FITS file format. Either one works. And for saving elsewhere. So first, let's apply an ICC profile to it. And so I'm going to choose Image 19 here. And I'm going to say Convert to SRGB, Apply. And then let's save it off into a JPEG. So I'm going to do File, Save As, choose JPEG here, and do Save. And I'm just going to turn the quality up to 100. All right, there it is. This is Andromeda as processed with Pix Insight and taken with Canon 6D 200 millimeter lens on a fixed tripod. Hopefully, you've been able to follow along with the craziness in Pix Insight. It's sort of a beast of a program. So I'm still trying to get better at explaining how it works and doing it fast enough that the videos don't go on for many hours. So anyways, this has been Nico Carver from NebulaFotos.com. Till next time, clear skies.