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'stretch image as is' alters the image

Posted: Sun Feb 16, 2020 9:16 am
by alacant
1.6.386

Hi everyone
If I load an already stretched image into Develop and choose 'stretch image as is', the loaded images is changed from 'as is'. E.g. the background gets darker.

Would it be possible to leave the image literally 'as is'?

Cheers and thanks for the continued improvements to ST. It's amazing.
Steve

Re: 'stretch image as is' alters the image

Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2020 1:35 am
by admin
Hi Steve,

The 'Redo global stretch' and 'Stretch the image as-is' choices pertain to the source of the image. E.g. in the case of 'Stretch the image as-is' , it takes the image 'as-is', and then alters (stretches) it per the parameters you give it.
Any modification you may see may be due to normalization of the image, so that the full dynamic range is used. Is that what you are seeing?

(and thank you for the kind comment - ST is about to get even more amazing with a brand new Decon module... stay tuned!)

Re: 'stretch image as is' alters the image

Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2020 7:45 am
by alacant
admin wrote: normalization of the image, so that the full dynamic range is used. Is that what you are seeing?
Hi Ivo
Yes, I think so. The reason I'm confused is that when I choose 'as is', it removes any skyglow I've added; the background goes black and we can see the histogram is left clipped again. This is particularly noticeable after tracking has been turned off and we don't then have a choice for 'as is'.

My quer has been prompted by the bell-shaped-histogram stuff on SGL:
http://forum.startools.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1698
I'm finding that without skyglow, the histogram -say in GIMP levels- is sometimes touching the left after a ST process.

Cheers,
Steve

Re: 'stretch image as is' alters the image

Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2020 2:46 am
by admin
alacant wrote:
admin wrote: normalization of the image, so that the full dynamic range is used. Is that what you are seeing?
Hi Ivo
Yes, I think so. The reason I'm confused is that when I choose 'as is', it removes any skyglow I've added; the background goes black and we can see the histogram is left clipped again. This is particularly noticeable after tracking has been turned off and we don't then have a choice for 'as is'.

My quer has been prompted by the bell-shaped-histogram stuff on SGL:
http://forum.startools.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1698
I'm finding that without skyglow, the histogram -say in GIMP levels- is sometimes touching the left after a ST process.

Cheers,
Steve
Indeed, this is expected behaviour; it takes the image as-is, and then normalizes it in preparation of further stretching (thereby making the first bin of the histogram that contains any values touch the left side of the histogram).
There is/should be no clipping however. The Skyglow parameter simply adds a pedestal value.
E.g. you can simply add back the Skyglow/pedestal to create space between the left side of the histogram and the first bin of the histogram that contains any values.

You can use the Dark Anomaly Headroom to widen the left portion of the "bell curve". In other words, you can keep 100% of the dynamic range allocated to anomalous "darker than real background" values. Or you can choose to reduce this "useless" allocation of dynamic range so other values (containing actual detail) can use it.

If the previous explanations weren't clear, let me put it into an every day analogy;

You run a store named "interesting-detail-n-backgrounds-r-us". You have limited amount of shelf space (histogram bins). You get lots of different RAW materials from your supplier - far more than your shelves can hold - and it's up to you to put these materials on your (limited) shelves in a way that offers a good varied selection. How many different grades of background and interesting detail materials you display on your shelves is up to you.

You noticed that your customers are not really interested in stuff that isn't a nice background or interesting detail. Really, that’s to be expected - it's not the point of your store. Nevertheless, you decide to keep a tiny bit of stuff around that - you're pretty sure - is not really background or interesting detail (e.g. outliers, anomalies, dead pixels). So you decide to allocate a tiny bit of shelf space to it, just to satisfy the few customers that might be looking for it. <--- this is the Dark Anomaly Headroom

Some people are a bit short and can't see the upper shelves. And some just stubbornly refuse to crane their necks. To accommodate these people you can decide to leave those shelves empty and cram everything into the remaining shelve space. <--- Skyglow/pedestal value

Does that help?

Re: 'stretch image as is' alters the image

Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2020 7:20 am
by alacant
Does that help?
Hi
Thanks. Yes. that's a lot clearer. There are many traditionalists (photoshop users maybe?) who look at the histogram rather than the image and think that ST images are clipped. It's that sort of explanation that we need on SGL. The histogram bell shape thing really threw me!
Thanks again.