StarTools

It is possible make more than one "undo" operation? After several processings, I noticed that sharpening created artifacts around my stars, but it was some time before. I could not undo back to before the sharpening operation.

Hi Gustavo,

I hear you.
The end-goal for StarTools' Tracking feature is to make every operation sequence independent, just like the global stretch is now (i.e. you can redo it at any time). 1.3 provides just a small glimpse of what's possible, but the end-game is much bigger. Once this has been accomplished, multi-step Undo should (hopefully) simply not be necessary - instead of recording multiple steps, the history is recreated algorithmically.

StarTools Tracking feature shifts around a lot of data on your harddrive (easily measured in Gigabytes for big images per undo step). Keeping disk usage and bandwidth requirements down (and thus keeping the application responsive and fast) is another (technical) goal that we aim to achieve this way.

Hope this explains some of the reasosn behind what we're trying to do!

admin wrote:Hi Gustavo,

I hear you.
The end-goal for StarTools' Tracking feature is to make every operation sequence independent, just like the global stretch is now (i.e. you can redo it at any time). 1.3 provides just a small glimpse of what's possible, but the end-game is much bigger. Once this has been accomplished, multi-step Undo should (hopefully) simply not be necessary - instead of recording multiple steps, the history is recreated algorithmically.

StarTools Tracking feature shifts around a lot of data on your harddrive (easily measured in Gigabytes for big images per undo step). Keeping disk usage and bandwidth requirements down (and thus keeping the application responsive and fast) is another (technical) goal that we aim to achieve this way.

Hope this explains some of the reasosn behind what we're trying to do!

I like the fact that you are very quick to respond to the inquiries of your software's users, that says a lot about you and gains loyal customers. I feel comfortable with you at least acknowledging the fact that several undo operations are not possible right now, but could be possible in the future. You should add in the manual some encouragement to save often, if it's not included already.

You should add in the manual some encouragement to save often, if it's not included already.

Unfortunately, saving does not save the Tracking state while Tracking is active - it merely saves the current state of the image. This 'problem' ties in with the same reason for not having multiple undo steps - the amount of data per image that StarTools keeps track of in the backgrond is staggering!

I guess you could say that chosing flexibility over having less Undo steps is by design;
StarTools makes up for the lack of Undo steps by offering 'meta previews' - i.e. you putting a lot of complex steps into one module and letting you commit only when you're happy. This way less Undo steps are necessary; the typical granularity of small surgical operations and filters in programs like PhotoShop or PixInsight does not exist in StarTools - less can go wrong.

Update: as of 1.3.5 alpha, we now have a 'Restore' feature which lets you revert to a selection of specific scenarios. While it is not a linear undo as found in classic image processing software (because StarTools doesn't process things linearly), it is a very nice way of quickly creating multiple interpretations of the same data set. For example, you can now revert to when the data was linear, wiped and deconvolved, and just focus on your stretching and dynamic range optimisation, without having to go through any other stuff.