Official StarTools support forum

What kind of light pollution do you have? LP filters are becoming less effective because of increasing use of LED lighting. The old orange Sodium and white Mercury lights are being quickly phased out - driven by power savings offered by LED lights. Pollution from broadband LED lights cannot be block...

Either way you're going to be introducing a colour bias - due to the LP (probably Red) or due to the filter itself (probably Blue or Green). You would have to discover for yourself which you find most objectionable and/or easy to correct during processing. I have an IDAS LP filter which I used to us...

... Don't mind the weird purple artifact on the left, it appeared in both the sessions I tried using the TRF-2008 reducer, so it is probably from that. Strange though, a TeleVue lens causing reflections, but I've never seen it without that reducer. Do you have a LP filter between the reducer and th...

Have you tried increasing the size of the Dark Anomaly parameter during the wipe? Set the temporary AutoDevelop to ON and check a variety of values and their effect on the final result.

ChrisH

Nice colour balance and core detail in your M74 Che

ChrisH

Galaxy colour looks a little too blue in the second version - and the stars are green! StarTools offers the option to clip the Green channel to either Brown or Yellow which would correct that.

ChrisH

It's probably a compressed TIFF file then - StarTools won't open a compressed file. TIFF files saved from AstroArt do the same thing. I just load them into PhotoShop and then save (over-write) making sure the format is un-compressed TIFF.

ChrisH

It's a good point - and something I mentioned some time ago. If using a mono camera the future processing and channel combination requires that all channels have the same geometry, so currently you have to manually ensure that is the case by carefully setting the crop borders. The auto-crop function...

It seems that StarTools processes and saves everything as a colour (RGB) image? Even if I load a 16-bit mono FITs or TIFF file it still ends up saving it as a colour image (at 3x the size). Is there some reason for this behaviour or am I missing something?

ChrisH

What are the specs of your laptop - how much free memory? DSLR images tend to be large so choosing to bin it 2x2 first before anything else would probably help.

ChrisH