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Unlimited Preview Functionality
Most processing tools in PixInsight are quite sophisticated. As to our knowledge, there is no way, with today's available personal computing resources, to offer a fully usable real-time preview interface for most of these advanced image processing tasks. Or, at least, there is no way, known by us, to do so without telling you lies and/or without imposing some severe restrictions to the way you could work and interact with such real-time previews, which in turn would limit functionality of the whole application.
To keep PixInsight free from these limitations in a consistent way, we decided to implement a multiple preview system that works by defining temporary subimages where you can try out any process or sequence of processes. Preview objects don't work in real time: you have to apply a process to them, and then wait for the process to execute in order to see the changes. However, since the user can define a preview's size and location, previews can be small, so previewing is usually quite fast.
Accurate Previews
There are more key benefits derived from this system of preview objects. One of them is accuracy: you can be sure that anything shown by a preview object in PixInsight is exactly the same thing that you'll get when you actually apply a process or a sequence of processes to your image. Preview objects are not approximate: you get previews that not only seem like the final result, but that are exactly like the final result, pixel by pixel.
Modular Processing
But perhaps the most important fact about PixInsight's previews is modularity: you can work with a preview object virtually as if it was a normal image. You can view and modify a preview's histograms, its statistics, obtain precise readouts from it, transform it into a new image, and you can reuse its processing history to apply it to other previews, to other images, or to save it for later usage, just to mention a few things.
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