Frank,
Let me analyze your original post:
i use Theli for my data reduction, and start imageprocessing with already color calibrated Fits Files, out of Theli.
The Channel Combination always fails, and produces very bad looking RGB Images, with totally wrong colors. It seems like PI interprets the Fits Files somehow wrong.
What happens here is that Theli is generating FITS files incompatible with PixInsight. Have you asked the author of Theli why his application is not compatible with PixInsight? Have you asked him about the possibility to modify his application, in order to make it compatible with PixInsight, perhaps as an option?
You have a problem with data generated by a competing application that you prefer to use, ignoring what PixInsight has to offer, since that would mean a change in your workflow. Therefore, since Theli can't be wrong (of course), PixInsight must be wrong (of course), so
your problem with a competing application becomes our problem. That's not fair.
PixInsight is a powerful,
open-source development platform available to any interested developer on four operating systems. We have thousands of commercial users around the world in 90 countries. PixInsight is the result of a very hard work during more than 15 years to build a strong product, despite the fact that the environment has been, and still is, against it. I'm sorry if we have "destroyed" a vivid Theli community, but this is business and we have to sell licenses to live and to maintain this project alive. No, we haven't asked the author of Theli if he wants to work on PixInsight.
It is wrong to say that Theli makes "no competition at all" for us. Any application that provides similar tools or solutions to PixInsight competes with PixInsight in a small market niche. If those applications are being used instead of PixInsight, even partially, or even occasionally, they are eroding our future survival options. In the case of freeware and open-source applications, the situation is much worse because we cannot compete with them in price terms.
There are almost daily comments like "Is PI worth the $$$?" on other forums and communities. From the beginning of our business, we defined our commercial license in a way that makes PixInsight an extremely cost-effective solution:
- With a single license, you are allowed to install the application on any machine you own, on four different platforms.
- With a single license, you have
lifetime free access to all application updates (ie, no additional cost since 2008).
- PixInsight costs less than a single good eyepiece. The price tag is not comparable to any single vital element of your imaging equipment.
- PixInsight has been designed specifically for astrophotography with tools that fit the particular needs of the astrophotographer.
- PixInsight is an open, cross-platform, modular development platform, with a much more advanced, efficient and versatile architecture than any application in our competition, where the development of creativity is consistently promoted through knowledge and analysis.
We know that the above statements make PixInsight apart from the competition. We know the strength of our product and, as a business, we don't need and don't care about any opinion that assigns a problem
by default to our product. This forum is
not devoted to that type of discussions, especially if they are about competing products. Please solve your problems with Theli in its corresponding forum or with its support service.
Back on the topic, the problem you are having with these images is very easy to solve in PixInsight. PixInsight expects floating point data in the [0,1] range by default. Since these images use a different range (which is unknown and undocumented, BTW), you have to define a custom default input range of floating point data in the FITS Format Preferences dialog. If the data have negative values, define a negative lower bound. For example, something like [-100,1000] should be more than sufficient, judging from the frames that have been uploaded in this thread, but you'll have to make tests to be sure. The custom range has to be sufficiently large to accommodate all of the input images you want to import. You could ask the author of Theli about the output ranges employed by his application; if he can provide you with a consistent range, you can use it on a regular basis to import that data in PixInsight. Otherwise you'll have to guess and make tests each time.
These interoperability problems are a consequence of using an obsolete file format, which comes from the age of punched cards and magnetic tapes, in the 21st Century. You could ask him to support XISF, an open format that we have created and developed in PixInsight, where all of these problems cannot happen.
So as you see, PixInsight is flexible enough as to import these frames that you have created with another application. Other applications, maybe including Theli, are not equally flexible. You'd have gotten this answer from me the other day, if instead of accusing us of being "wrong" without any basis, you had uploaded a sample of these images just asking how to open them correctly in PixInsight, without putting other products and "third party applications" in our face.
