#TOPAZ DENOISE ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY INSTALL#

And in astro-imaging, subtle improvements are hard to get. I can see why the Hubble imagers love this technique.ĭon't expect big dramatic results. When you turn them off, in most cases, you'll see your stars and other structures are sharpened, but the image itself is not damaged in any way that I could see. You'll get a bunch of layers, which are iterations of the sharpening. You hit the Sharpen button and sit back for less than 30 seconds. You can choose Fine or Extra Fine rendering, and it's recommended to try Extra Fine. You slide it to the right until the focus starts to break down. You start by making slight adjustments to the Radius control. I expected it under the Filters menu, where most of my plug-ins live, and I thought the installation had failed.

#TOPAZ DENOISE ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY INSTALL#

You install the software, and it shows up under the Plug-ins Panel.

Of course, it doesn't mean it will turn mundane images into Hubble-like images, but it can certainly sharpen good data into really good-looking data. Instead of performing up to 50 steps manually in Photoshop and calculating radii with a calculator again and again, the plug-in automatically generates the first result after a few seconds. It uses the same technique and math that NASA and ESA imagers use on the Hubble photographs. Kaltseis has teamed with Picture Instruments to create a plug-in that can get you the same results at a reasonable price without all the anguish and complications. I usually adjust the mask to fully block stars and highlights and allow 80% to apply to the background.This plug-in is based on some very complex algorithms that imagers have used for years, but using them was complicated and slow. So my normal approach is to is use a reversed luminance mask to apply noise reduction. There were no settings where the stars were not chewed to bits! So clearly Topaz is not a solution for all images.Īs you mention, it doesn’t make sense to apply noise reduction to areas that contain sufficient signal sample to begin with. The smaller stars are totally destroyed in the few images I tried processing.Īfter the positive results with my NGC5566 data I tried the new model on M14. I'm not sure it's an improvement over the previous versions. In the Topaz GUI, the stars develop a slight pixelation effect that resembles under-sampling, and they are distorted around the edges after the image is saved. I tried the newest version, and I found that the Severe Noise model with Sharpening = 0 still chews up the stars, but in a slightly different way. The ability to turn off the AI sharpening completely is huge to me. It's great for dark/dusty nebulae, maybe better than anything else out there? However, I don't want Topaz touching my stars or the midtones/higlights of the image, where the S:N ratio is already good. Generally, I'm impressed with what Topaz can do for problematic noise in the sky background and the shadows of the images. That's exactly how I have used Topaz AI on a few of my images, except I use a 50/50 blend of Topaz and standard noise reduction to achieve a natural-looking result that is somewhat less noisy the the standard NR permits by itself. 'I typically apply noise reduction like this with either a mask or opacity of about 80% Leaving 20% of the noise seems to maintain the integrity of the image.' I downloaded the latest version of Topaz AI and gave it a whirl. Kevin, thanks for posting this information.

Topaz denoise astrophotography