StarTools

Hi everyone
I find the automatic colour module -before denoise- works great. After however, I find it difficult to get the same effect -clicking on a star rarely produces the same results after as before.
I wonder why it behaves differently afterwards...
Anyone?
TIA and clear skies,
Steve

Hi Steve,

Color calibration needs to be performed on linear data, which is only available during Tracking.
In any other application, in fact, it is (should be!) the first thing you do to your data while it is still linear.
In StarTools, Tracking allows you to do the color calibration at any time because your data remains in a super state while Tracking is on (the engine knows what your data looks like in the linear domain, even if you've already processed it).

Once Tracking is off, those capabilities are gone and you will be applying color corrections to non-linear data (that is - if the image was processed). You should never do that with the aim of trying to correcting white balance, but it may be useful for some other things.

Tracking is an extremely important (and unique) ability of StarTools and is the reason why it's so easy to achieve better results in less time when compared to other software. I highly recommend reading up on it if you haven't done so!