Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

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Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by rigel123 »

Probably not applicable to a ton of people but if you do animations, particularly long animations where the sun makes a fairly significant change in elevation during the course of capturing the AVI's, then this might be beneficial. A number of us over on Cloudy Nights have commented how many long animations show a change in brightness the longer an animation is. Since the sun is typically rising there is actually an increase in the actual intensity of the light so the histogram naturally shifts towards the right until it is at its highest point and then it will shift back to the left as it begins to descend. I have looked for a solution to balance the histogram through all of the frames and finally came upon a solution using PixInsight and its Batch Linear Fit function. I used this technique on the 90 minute animation I recently posted of the SE limb this week and it did a great job as there was a large difference in brightness from beginning to end. It's a rough video tutorial as this is not my forte', but it should get the point across of how simple the procedure is. You might notice a misstatement at the beginning when I say '..using Autostakkert for capture..." when I meant alignment and stacking! Anyway, hope this is beneficial for some:

https://youtu.be/IKZmipr0mYs


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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by marktownley »

That's excellent thanks Warren! I'll leave it here for a couple of days for exposure and then transfer it to the reference library.


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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by Montana »

Thanks Warren :bow
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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by torsinadoc »

Nice. There are a few tools that are helpful with solar imaging. I will use it sometimes for making pseudoflats. I like restoration filter for sharpening and denoise with or without masks.


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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by minhlead »

Oh and I have something to add: if you are using a Quark (or something with un-uniformity) when you do animation with meridian flip, the animation will have a "jump" in gradient on the flip point: the brightness gradient change when the image flip upside down . you'd want to use the Local Normalization (remember to turn up the scale setting to at least 256 to avoid messing up finer details). The Local Norm will help you sync the brightness gradient of the frame through out your imaging session.


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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by rigel123 »

Glad this can be helpful! Great suggestions Alan and Minh, any chance you could PM me step by step on your additional actions so I could experiment?


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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by minhlead »

rigel123 wrote: Fri Dec 17, 2021 11:59 am Glad this can be helpful! Great suggestions Alan and Minh, any chance you could PM me step by step on your additional actions so I could experiment?
You just open the local normalization process, pick a good frame as references and then choose the frames you want to normalize. The frames must be aligned together with the limb stationary (it wont work if the limb jumping around). Then choose the export norm file as "Always" (otherwise it'll only export a text file contain normalization data that you use on intergration process). Then press run and wait for the process to finish.


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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by MAURITS »

Thanks for sharing Warren.


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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by rigel123 »

minhlead wrote: Fri Dec 17, 2021 12:23 pm
rigel123 wrote: Fri Dec 17, 2021 11:59 am Glad this can be helpful! Great suggestions Alan and Minh, any chance you could PM me step by step on your additional actions so I could experiment?
You just open the local normalization process, pick a good frame as references and then choose the frames you want to normalize. The frames must be aligned together with the limb stationary (it wont work if the limb jumping around). Then choose the export norm file as "Always" (otherwise it'll only export a text file contain normalization data that you use on intergration process). Then press run and wait for the process to finish.
Thanks!


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Re: Tutorial: PixInsight to balance histogram in animations

Post by rigel123 »

Thanks Maurits!


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