StarTools

Hello,

New to the site and purchased Startools about a month and a half ago. One of the greatest investments I've made on this journey. Thank you doesn't even quite sum it up.

The description for my suggested feature may not be 100% accurate, so I'll expand a little bit.

I load my image ready to start processing in StarTools.

I go into AutoDev to let it get stretched to oblivion and "Keep" it. Illuminates everything wrong with the image.
I turn off Noise Tracking to enable the Repair, Lens and Heal tools. Having the image completely overstretched makes it easy to spot, well, "spots".

I start building my mask which I'll use in Repair to correct oblong starts. Sure, Automask is a good starting point, but it'll never catch all the "fainter" objects which Yours Truly gets to go an fill by hand. Takes a while, but worth it.

No, I never use this technique on globular clusters

Now my mask is built. I try to use "restore" to get the image back to it's state when I first loaded it into Startools. I'm not able to go back to that, or save the mask use when I reload the image.

I suppose being able to save a couple of different masks associated with a specific image file would be pretty awesome. We'd have an extra option alongside "Autogenerate mask", "Autogenerate conservative mask" "keep mask as is" "load mask from file". Something like that.

I have to say that the Repair, Lens, and Heal modules are absolutely wonderful. They take so much of the headaches out of image processing.

Hi Ionia23,

That's an interesting way of going about things. Though I'm not entirely sure what you're up to - even though I think I get the underlying concept.

Any time you are in Mask, which you can get to from the main screen or from within any module that utilizes Mask, you should have a whole range of control buttons across the top including save and open. I tend to pick jpg for my saved masks, just because the size is so much smaller. And I've reused saved masks repeatedly.

Assuming you aren't actually healing or repairing right now at the very outset, you can click on Mask right after the first AutoDev is kept, thereby allowing you to see that initial stretch and build a mask. It's not quite the relentless stretch of Wipe, but yeah it can be pretty strong depending on the data.

But just for scientific testing purposes, I did it exactly as you stated (I think) - open file, autodev, turn off tracking, heal, make mask, save mask, cancel, reopened the file again from scratch, autodev, mask, open mask. And there it was again!


Granted, because so many things can greatly or slightly change during full processing, I can't say that a mask generated at the outset will truly apply to the data later on, even assuming the same binning scale is even kept.