Hi Warren,
Your post is now perfect; thank you for editing it. Thank you so much also for adding a note on our next
PixInsight workshop at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA.
As professional software developers, one of the elements that condition our work is the fact that our market is composed chiefly of amateur astronomers. For this reason our users often see us as amateurs, and hence they sometimes expect us to behave as amateurs, but we are not—cannot be—amateurs. Although we love them, astronomy and astrophotography are neither our hobbies nor something necessarily funny for us. Bear in mind that nothing is helping us. At the contrary, we have to overcome a number of obstacles and challenges that invariably put us in a disadvantageous position to compete in this market. Each achievement, each little success or milestone with PixInsight costs us a huge effort. At the risk of being repetitive (I already have said this recently on this forum), there are no jokes here: we have to sell licenses to pay salaries and invoices.
I invite you to make a quick test on this forum. Log in with your forum user account and search for the words PixInsight and Photoshop. As of writing this post, the results are: PixInsight generates 30 search results and Photoshop 438. Admittedly, some results for Photoshop refer to posts or sentences that criticize the application, and there are probably many more posts and sentences that refer to PixInsight as "PI" or similar abbreviations—although then we should count also posts and sentences referring to Photoshop as "PS", as well as posts criticizing PixInsight. Not a rigorous statistical result by any means, but a worrying finding to say the least. As you probably figure out, we are not sponsored by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
what is good for astrophotography in general is good for PixInsight
As a software development company we have a vision and a mission with PixInsight. Quoted from the
About Us page on our website:
Astrophotography is a unique mixture of art, science and technology. It is documentary photography, where retouching, painting and other arbitrary manipulation practices have no place. Our mission is to help you improve your imaging projects through the development of your image processing knowledge.So our concepts of what is good for astrophotography may differ.
what is good for astrophotography in general is good for PixInsight, because, eventually most roads will lead deep-sky astro-imagers to it anyway.
Unfortunately, our experience tells us otherwise. Some software applications are ideal vectors to spread retouching and manual manipulation practices that are incompatible with astrophotography in our opinion. There are also applications promoting the concept of "black box" where "you don't have to think because we already think for you". None of these roads will lead people to PixInsight without a considerable prior effort to forget wrong concepts and bad practices. Good education can be useful. Bad education is never useless: it always hurts.
I also value your support and your friendship highly, as well as those of our users and forum members; we would be nothing without them.
