| Are starless images OK? | |
|---|---|
| Starless images are OK, with the right subject. | |
| Starless images are NOT OK, regardless of the subject. | |
| I'm sitting here on the fence, watching what other people vote. | |
| Login to vote and view results. |
10.10
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I personally don't mind starless images, but their novelty gets old kind of fast. Maybe its me, but I like to know where the light sources are in nebulosity, but I am more from the science side rather than the abstract artist side. The true power of creating starless images and starmasks, in my opinion, is the ability to leave the stars out of processing operations you are condutctive that might otherwise create artifacts with the stars. My biggest example is deconvolution - get your PSF from the stars, but then apply it starless - then the stars will be completely free of artifacts. Ditto, other non-linear process. I always stretch by putting the stars back in the image so that I keep the brightness balance correct (using GHS, of course.). So i might take them out in linear, put them back in to stretch, take them out for, say, HDRMT, and them put them back in at the end. Sometimes, using LRGB, i only put the RGB stars in the otherwise LRGB starless image. Dave |
0.00
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| If you were to get in your starship and travel to the object you are imaging, how many stars would be in the way? This is how I see starless images. There is no right or wrong answer I suppose it is subjective. |
8.42
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I don't think they should be banned but I don't *like* them. The modern star removal tools are great for making masks (DSO-only-mask, stars-only-mask, etc) but still some care must be taken. Often enough those neural nets pick up galaxy cores or small distant galaxies or HII regions as "stars". They can be somewhat useful for temporary removal during processing (remove, edit, add back) but there even greater care must be taken. Rarely is the removal truly artefact free and the edit step may very well "enhance" that artefact. Requires a great deal of time to check for small defects this can introduce Often, a mask is a better idea. Any sort of intensity transformation is right out and better served with GHS. But as a final product, no I can't say I like those starless images at all. Stars are orientation points and give a sense of scale. Good stars are what make a decent picture great. Removing stars OTOH can seem like clipping the blacks - trying to hide issues. Reduce them a bit perhaps if they are crowding the scene but even that can get tasteless fast. |
4.82
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Benny Colyn: Perfectly put. I have noticed that these tools do create artifacts, and whatever you remove has to be replaced by something. Sometimes even reducing stars leaves odd artifacts that you need to deal with. Anything removed has to be replaced, and many times these star removal tools get it wrong. |
8.04
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Personally I dislike starless images. The stars are supposed to be there. I also dislike images that have obviously had stars removed and put back but they are so tiny as to be almost non existent. I am all for reducing the size of stars and making them less prominent as this helps to reveal detail in the nebula but not leaving them out altogether. I generally will not "like" a starless image. Carole |
11.01
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I do generally like to keep stars in my images as that is what we would see from Earth; a bit of star reduction does help accentuate a DSO though. That said: those stars are mainly in our galaxy and are not what you would see if you were outside of our galaxy and looking at the object from deep space. So, in my view both versions are OK .... you either want to show an object as we would see it from here or you want to show it as it would look outside of our galaxy. |
7.61
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Andy Wray: But......other than planetary/lunar/solar, most starless images here are of nebulas, and because they only exist within galaxies, an image from any vantage point is going to show stars, at least in the background. I think the outside of our galaxy viewpoint is intriguing though, mostly empty space with just galaxies and orbiting globular clusters in the "sky". A starless wide fov mosaic of a large number of galaxies at varying apparent sizes might be cool. Cheers, Scott |
