Would like to get started but ...
Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2015 3:18 am
I have read good things about StarTools and have downloaded a trial version. But I seem to be behind the eight ball from the start in that I do not seem to be able to properly open my calibrated files for processing.
My 64 bit PC runs Windows 7. I use an Atik mono camera which creates 16,572KB fits files. I use Atik's program Dawn to calibrate and stack the captured lights to produce an image in tif format (typically about 8,000KB in size). Tif is the only format that is output by Dawn. If I open that tif file in Photoshop I see that its mode is shown as RGB color and 8 bits/channel. But when I try to open it in StarTools I get the message “Could not read file. Make sure image is a FITS file, an uncompressed, IBM PC byte-order TIFF file or a PNG file”.
Using Photoshop to change the tif file's RGB color mode to Greyscale and/or changing the 8 bits/channel to 16 bits/channel and trying to open the saved result in StarTools only produces the same result “Could not read file ...”. Using Photoshop to save the tif file as a PNG file does allow me to open it in StarTools but I note that the PNG file size is quite a bit smaller being just over half of the tif file size. So I assume that quite a lot of data may have been lost in the conversion from tif to PNG which is not really what I want.
I am comfortable using Dawn and, as things stand, because of the matter outlined above I am doubtful that StarTools will suit my purpose but any advice will be most welcome.
My 64 bit PC runs Windows 7. I use an Atik mono camera which creates 16,572KB fits files. I use Atik's program Dawn to calibrate and stack the captured lights to produce an image in tif format (typically about 8,000KB in size). Tif is the only format that is output by Dawn. If I open that tif file in Photoshop I see that its mode is shown as RGB color and 8 bits/channel. But when I try to open it in StarTools I get the message “Could not read file. Make sure image is a FITS file, an uncompressed, IBM PC byte-order TIFF file or a PNG file”.
Using Photoshop to change the tif file's RGB color mode to Greyscale and/or changing the 8 bits/channel to 16 bits/channel and trying to open the saved result in StarTools only produces the same result “Could not read file ...”. Using Photoshop to save the tif file as a PNG file does allow me to open it in StarTools but I note that the PNG file size is quite a bit smaller being just over half of the tif file size. So I assume that quite a lot of data may have been lost in the conversion from tif to PNG which is not really what I want.
I am comfortable using Dawn and, as things stand, because of the matter outlined above I am doubtful that StarTools will suit my purpose but any advice will be most welcome.