Batch RGB Combine?

[james7]

Is there any way to do a batch RGB combine within PixInsight without writing a custom script? Basically, what I need is the inverse of the BatchChannelExtraction but with the ability to specify input lists for each of the monochrome red, green, and blue files. The output would simply pair each of the channels to produce a set of RGB files.

Here is an example:

input file lists:
red_1, red_2, red_3, red_4...red_n
green_1, green_2, green_3, green_4...green_n
blue_1, blue_2, blue_3, blue_4...blue_n

output:
rgb_1, rgb_2, rgb_3, rgb_4...rgb_n

The file naming isn't an issue, since I have tools to do batch renaming. I also don't need to specify any out of order pairing, just process the files in sequential order.

I have way too many files to do this manually and it doesn't seem possible (given my limited knowledge) to do this with either Pixelmath or with a file container.

If there is no relatively easy way to do this in PixInsight can anyone recommend another tool? I've already looked at PIPP and it seems to have the same limitation, you can specify a form of "batch" channel extraction but then there is no way to reverse that operation.

[oldwexi]

Hi James, can you tell me what would be your next step with these created RGB images
each consisting  of 3 gray images. Most processes afterward prozess the 3 channels anyhow
separately.
Image Integration delivers no difference if first done vertically and finally horizontal
compared to first to be done horizontelly and finnally vertically.

So, i am interested what do you want to achieve. May be knowing this
can open a road around the blocking issue you are mentioning. ?

Gerald

[james7]

These are from a series of 1000 frame mono videos of the moon that have been registered by PI's FFTRegistration script and now I want to combine them into a set of RGB files so that they can be processed (in color) with AutoStakkert! They need to be combined into RGB so that I can use AutoStakkert!'s MAP and RGB registration options. I need RGB images since it appears if you try to run AutoStakkert! on the mono files then you can't get the channels to align properly after the fact, I think because the MAP processing is introducing distortions in the final mono images. However, I'm hoping that if I submit RGB files to AutoStakkert! it will maintain and even improve the registration between the three color channels.

In any case, I think I've found software that will do what I need, MATLAB (kind of a Pixelmath on steroids since it allows operations on file-based images). Unfortunately, MATLAB is kind of expensive but they offer a free trial period so I think I'll be able to use that to verify whether my process will work to produce high pixel count, high resolution RGB or narrow-band color images of the moon.

I also tried to use Photoshop's video Timeline feature but that part of Photoshop seems very buggy and feature limited and I couldn't find any way to combine channels from two different videos or timelines. It might be possible to do these operations in Photoshop using its batch processing feature and a custom action to combine the channels, but the batch processing in Photoshop seems to be limited to a single file path or directory and I need to work on three sets of files at one time.

[james7]

Well, it looks like MATLAB is out since they won't allow me to download the free trial and I'm not going to pay a minimum of $200 just to see whether it might work.

So, it looks like I might have to write my own software to do this seemingly simple task.