Some thoughts on PixInsight vs. StarTools and stacking

General discussion about StarTools.
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midwayexpress
Posts: 69
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2013 9:42 pm

Some thoughts on PixInsight vs. StarTools and stacking

Post by midwayexpress »

I downloaded PixInsight this afternoon mainly to compare its stacking functions vs. CCDStack. Inevitably I tried to process a couple images and I wanted to pass along my thoughts for future development and to help potential customers of StarTools.

In terms of stacking itself I found PixInsight to be incredibly slow compared to CCDStack, DSS, MaximDL, and Nebulosity and it produced an image that provide impossible for either StarTools or PixInsight to color balance correctly. The other downside of PixInsight is that it creates a TON of large excess files like Nebulosity. A stack of 90 Atik 490 frames took about 23 gb's of space and 45 minutes on a Core i7, 32 GB RAM, SSD machine. CCDStack takes about half the time and hardly any space. That said the stack quality in terms of noise and elimination of trails and hot pixels is much closer to CCDStack and MaximDL. In the FWHM department CCDStack, PixInsight, and DSS are all about the same. MaximDL is about .25" behind and Nebulosity a full .5".

When it came down to flattening StarTools is a clear winner. WIPE is many times better than ABE or DBE. It takes at least two passes to get ABE and DBE roughly close to StarTools and even then StarTools is still the clear winner.

StarTools is also a clear winner in the Deconvolution and HDR department. I only spent 3 or 4 hours with PixInsight in this department but I couldn't find a way to get any of the HDR or Deconvolution modules to produce similar results.

When it comes to stretching PixInsight works a lot like photoshop and I think that is a bad thing. It is hard to use and hard to get the precise curve you need. Heck even Nebulosity is better at getting the stretch correct.

In the color correction department PixInsight has less options but seems to produce better results. A comparison below shows the same CCDStack wiped, stretched, and then colored using a star mask and default settings in PixInsight color correction. StarTools when using scientific color just can't seem to generate the same blue. Also notice the noise in StarTools seem a bit higher for some reason maybe more stretching?. Also notice the lack of pink rings in the stars in PixInsight. StarTools also tends to result in either red/orange stars or blue stars whereas PixInsight will give you a few yellow ones as well.
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Finally, in everything but stacking and HDR PixInsight was faster. One reason might be memory utilization and tracking. PixInsight utilized almost 8GB of my 32GB whereas StarTools tends to utilize about 1.8 GB.

My conclusion is that CCDStack is probably the best choice for stacking right now and StarTools is a far better tool for image editing.
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