StarTools

I"m finding that as I reduce star size (magic) in the final stages of processing, the fainter stars lose their cohesion and just end up looking like smudges and or noise. I want to heal out these fainter stars from the beginning. I've played around with the auto mask settings but I can't find an option to isolate very faint objects only. Thanks in advance!

Richard

Setting "Feature Size" to 1 in the mask editor should start selecting smaller features only, while increasing Filter Sensitivity will help with how many features are selected.
Once you got a mask that you're reasonably happy with, you can, as a second step, make sure that the "bigger" stars are definitely not selected.

To do that, run Auto Mask again, this time setting Selection Mode to "Highlights>Threshold", pick a Threshold (for example anything brighter than 75% of dynamic range) and set "Old Mask" to "Subtract New from Old". This will subtract the "big stars" that we will be detecting from the mask that was already set (which is the mask with the small stars only, but perhaps with some small bits of the big stars still selected).

Click "Do" and if all is well, you should have roughly the same mask (with the small stars) but this time with absolutely none of the "fat" brighter stars selected.

Hope this helps!

Thanks so much. You must be an incredibly busy person - with your singular tech support.

Richard

You must be an incredibly busy person

You don't know the half of it!

My 'main gig' is this startup at the moment (with crazy capabilities like these). It's an AI-driven "anything" builder, built from the ground up just like StarTools. 1stbase.ai has been huge project, spanning 19 different platforms, formats and media, but we're almost there. The StarTools website actually runs on a very early version.