M51: PI vs. DSS & PS

[the Elf]

Hey folks,

now that I have PI I rework my old data. The story:
I do daytime photography since more than 30 years now. This year in january I bought my first telescope and took my first images with my DSLR. Until then I had refused processing images on the computer. Like in the old days I did my camera settings and the image was ok. As you can't do astro photography without procesing it was this year that I tried to work with photoshop for the first time and I spent days and days to process my images. One fine day I decided to buy PI and so far I spent more or less the same time with PI. I find PI much easier to use and the image attached shows a comparison of my results. The upper half done with DSS and PS, the lower half with PI. I am not saying one cannot achieve the same result with PS, but I hat a lot of trouble with PS and the far better result with PI was much easier. The difference is just amazing!

[Warhen]

Elfie, I was known as a Photoshop guru before turning to PI several years ago. Though I understood PS, I always had a feeling of overwhelm like a kid in a candy store. With no logical path, it was "Ooh, what should I throw at this now..." Like you however, I'm now faster in PI and also experience a certainty in what should be done, and when. 

[the Elf]

Warren et all,

having a clear path what to do when and a fundamental understanding of which tool is _designed_ for it is one very important benefit of PI. PS tools are always designed for something else but someone accidentally found it has some nice effect on astro photos. To pick up the candy story, one fine day a French man accidentally dropped suggar in a hot pot and invented the "bonbon".
But there is a technical side as well: being a developer of optical test machines I once made a quick and dirty "save the world" hack using an 8bit int image library because it was available. I expected trouble but not that much for the simple task. Then followed a long hacking on my calculator and a very long discussion what numerical format to use as we had to migrate some 200 image processing algorithms. The key question was floating point or integer. As we need everything in milliseconds and fast FP operations have not always been available for a low price we went the integer path and can use look up tables very often. For the astro task I have absolutely no doubt: should I design image processing software for that, it'd be FP. Thus I was quite dissapointed to find integer only in Photoshop and still today only 16 bit for all operations and 32 for just a few. I am conviced, this is one reason for the difference in the above image. Here is another example.

best, Elfie (Nobody calls me Elfie. This is a Warren special.)

[the Elf]

Oooops, I didn't tell which side is which programm... *lol*