Thanks to everyone telling me to start using projects, or a blank project template to save my process set and settings. I’ve avoided it because of the HD space it uses, and still think the workspace could be persistent by default, but it does sound like it will solve that gripe :)
I transfer all my Astro files to 2 10TB hard drives one main and a back up so nothing stays on my C or D drive if i want to work on a pic i import the complete file work and return keeps things running Smooth and fast.
@dylan love the show, another excellent episode. would you ever be interested in doing an interview on my show? I've always admired you and would love an hour to pick your brain and get to ask you questions you don't typically get to talk about on your show. we're on Spotify, apple podcasts, etc. I just recently started uploading to RU-vid so not much of a base there yet, but the Spotify channel is doing great.
What I have done to get 'default' settings to my liking is open up the processes that I use most frequently, tweak their settings, and save it as a project w/o any actual data. Then to start up a new session, I load the project back in then bring in my data afterwards.
My biggest mini-gripe is how the yes/no/cancel options seem to be worded exactly opposite to many other programs. eg. if you have unsaved work and are exiting, in photoshop(and others) "Do you want to save before exiting?" , Pixinsight "Unsaved data will be lost, do you want to exit anyway?"
I know this is a very uncommon perspective on the user interface, but her we go: I am a professional astronomer. Not optical astronomy though. I'm doing what we lovingly call astrophotography for teaching at the university and as a hobby. From my academic experience I'm also used to writing software/working with source code. I do not have a single minute experience in Photoshop, just a little bit in Gimp. As such, I find the PixInsight user interface very intuitive and useful :D
Haha yes see I get what they’re doing because I’m a coder too .. so I can almost see the instances and objects they’re playing with in the UI.. but as a UX designer too my heart breaks haha
Totally agree with everything. One tip I have to offer is use the Save Project option. It allows you to save your current pixinsight state with all tools and images open. Helps for when you want to shut it down and continue later. You can even use it to create a base project with all your settings pre-loaded. Not a great solution by any means but hope it helps.
@@DylanODonnell projects are great. I create a project for each target, then a workspace for each session and save often. Project saving and loading can take a bit so for some targets, I have a project per year. i.e. M42_2023, M42_2024
@@skyguy1728 you would think ....but adobe invalidated my lightroom 6 licence and forced me onto subscription. So I guess it depends on the trustworthiness of the developers.
Yeah like Photoshop users. People either use a different software or pirate ps. If pixinsight did subscription, people that like a 1 time payment will go elsewhere. Though if I'm not mistaken pixinsight has a new payment when a new version (2.0,3.0) comes out
@@SirDerpsalot1 I'm 100% not paying again for PI if they will do that for a new version. There are so many good alternatives nowadays. Compared to all the astro gear, I know PI is not that much but it's one of the things I still regret paying for.
I've yet to buy it, using Siril instead, but definitely want Pixinsight. I'll buy it later down the line when I have a more sophisticated astrograph and can seriously justify it over Siril, but at this point in my journey I don't think it will make my images any better. I appreciate this video, it's bound to be a good resource.
I would highly recommend grabbing the trial.. i started with Siril, and PI was a drastic game changer! I love Siril, but only because I am a die hard open source enthusiast, so mad respect there... but try PI when you can 🤣
What Brinkoo7 said - its a game changer no matter what hardware you are using. Do some up front homework on how to use it then give the trial a go. I would be very surprised if your images don't improve significantly and you end up reprocessing everything you had already done.... ask me how I know lol
I got PixInsight back in 2021 and fell in love with it instantly. It just made sense; maybe because I've got a mathematics/computer science background. I tell people that PixInsight is Mathcad for astrophotography. It's eccentric at times, but definitely makes life easier. As for GPU, I use Linux, and you can get the GPU acceleration turned on, and it's a quantum leap in processing power.
100% agree with just about everything you said... especially the gripes. The worst is when I lose my process window and have to reinstall to get it back. That said Adam B has been my PIS sherpa for the last few years otherwise I would still be back at base camp. Also shout out the great work by Bill Blanshan!
I earlier hesitate to buy this as it was very costly. But once I tried it and purchased it, my astrophotography start to improve, learned more about astrophotography and most importantly, started to love my gear.
Bought PI early when I started Astro and very happy I did. Annoying at times,definitely, but I wouldn’t use anything else now. Adam Blocks tutorials on PI were so helpful in the learning process for this software. Cheers Simon
Yes, naming convention is incredibly important to understanding. Glad you pointed that out! I didn't buy it, not just because its expensive but the user interface was complicated and I was pretty sure I would not be able to remember how I did something a new moon ago 😵💫 It was very much like Photoshop which has the nerdiest interface of all the photo editing software.
Things i absolutely hate: - The blink process: The process to delete bad subs is so freaking annoying i hate it so much. Just let me delete the subs directly already, the recycle bin exists for a reason - All the processes that require loading files (blink, subframe selector, imageIntegratione etc): An option to recursive load a directory instead of having to loop through all the subdirectories manually to load files would save so much time - The dynamic mode is just a joke, i hate the way it locks views and if i forget a dynamic tool open (eg BDE or dynamic crop) is so freaking annoying - WBPP doesnt separate the frames by gain and i am forced to do it manually - A layering system would save me so much time instead of having to buy photoshop and regularly switch there to perform some basic stuff (eg masks creation) Pretty sure there is a lot more but i cant recall anything else for now
Use the windows search within the open dialogue to find all files of a certain type recursively, *.fit, *.xisf, *.drxz etc. The pain then comes from the really, really bad windows display of the search results...
I wish they had better support for multi-night sessions when dealing with several sets of flats and filters. Adding and reprocessing data to an existing target is not straightforward.
Great video Dylan! In my opinion, Pixinsight is just as important as any other gear in your bag. What's the point of having a big telescope, the greatest mount, and all the different gadgets, if you don't have a quality tool to process the images you spent hours or many nights capturing? It boggles my mind that people will spend thousands of dollars buying gear and then balk at purchasing the software that will truly make their image special. Especially since the Pixinsight software is basically the price of a single filter in some cases. Always love your content, keep up the good work!
The UI is confusing for a programmer as well. I'm a retired programmer and yes, I'm a dinosaur that started with cobol and ended his career with java, but I still find myself going back to Siril. After each imaging session, I say to myself, and now you're going to do it in PI, but I give up, and go back to Siril. Maybe it's because I'm not patient enough and want to see the result asap. Even with the help of the 'Insight PI' book I cannot overcome the steep learning curve. g.
Absolutely, it is a must. I use Astro Pixel Processor and PixInsight, and finish in Affinity Photo 2. I prefer no subscriptions, like Adobe. Can't do without Star Xterminator and BlueXT. Works much better with my new RTX4080 Super. Used to take me a whole day! I save regularly. Agree on scripts v processes. I save everything in projects all setup. I love your M16. Hit me up if you want help with projects.
I have used Photoshop for 30 years. But I knew if I wanted to really go for astrophotographers I needed Pixinsight. I was not disappointed. Despite the awkward interface there are so many tutorials as you said to overcome this.
Thanks Dylan! I will wait for Pixinsight to apply your suggested optimisation changes before I invest. You are such a legend mate and I love your observatory - super cool. Take care bud.
Oh, I am a "novice astronomer" who is about to receive my brand new Skyrover 130 Reference telescope. It has a strehl of 99, so it is apparently great but I am yet to use a telescope. I thought it would be a hobbie for life so I saved and saved then hoped in at the deep end head first! Should I purchase the Ioptron CEM70 mount to drive it, or have you an improved suggestion? My instrument is not a toy but rather a 6,400 investment, plus I have to spend a further 2K for a Reducer Flattener, along with a Quartz Star Diagonal and three Saxon Cielo eyepieces. Your expertise regarding the best mount for my baby is most appreciated. I thought to also buy a ZWO ASI Air Plus to assist with guiding. Many thanks for your kind reply Dylan. Did you like Trevor Jones' recent video about the Milkyway here in Australia? Enjoy your weekend!
When I came into this hobby I had no image processing software experience at all. I was recommended Photoshop, so I tried that. Watched lots of videos (Trevor Jones' videos were instrumental) and could never get the hang of it. So I tried PixInsight and because I had no prior software experience I didn't get why people were calling the UI clunky. Long story short, I find PI quite straight forward and do all my processing in it- there is nothing this software cannot do that others can imo! Cheers
That's a good point! Once you get your head around the interface it's fine, but for a newcomer it lacks intuition so you have to be shown at least once before it makes sense :)
the UI is exceptionally good. Class leading UI software design imho. Yes, you need to spend the time to learn how to use it. But that's ANY software. I've worked in IT for 15 odd years, and have used every O/S out there since the late 90s. I showed PI to a mate (who also works in the IT industry) and he was blown away by its UI and was nothing but fully impressed by it.
Whaaaat @davepastern? I started in software also in the early 90’s and I have never ever been as confused by an UI as with PI. I wish I had the software experience you had bc it would make my life so much easier…apart from Dylans examples on the weird behavior when to use “Global” or where to drag -and-drop an instance to, also things like simple stuff as: i have setup all my icons on my workspace and want to save them and have them from now on every time i open the program….nope: me, as an IT guy had to watch several videos to figure out that i have to save them in an external file and every time either load explicitly that external file or change my startup icon to be that external file - come on, you cannot tell me that this is truly intuitive…and btw: i do not think the other software do a better job here - Siril is its own UI mess in its own right. I just am surprised why it seems that developers for Astro stuff seem to be completely out of touch with more or less standardized UI guidelines but all seem to come up with complete new approaches on where to place menus, user-interactions or settings…they ALL should get simply a decent UI/UX designer in their team and overhaul the whole UI - it is simply a catastrophe for any newbie…
@@philipps3988 it's not just astro software that has UI design issues, all software does. When you adapt to the PI UI way of doing things, you'll love it.
My biggest gripe - random placement of OK and CANCEL buttons. Who in their right mind decided to just have random windows switch those two around for no reason? Also, what kind of a monster puts CANCEL on the left and OK on the right?!
Love Pixinsight and star learning that 5 yr ago from some tutorails from your early videos. Now i even use it for pre processing solar images, before imppg solar and lightroom. Clear skies mate. Cheers.😀
I bought PixInsight in 2020. It’s now 2024, and my telescope still isn’t remote controlled so I haven’t collected any new data in over a year. I’ve reprocessed old images dozens of times and gotten better and better with it as time goes on.
I've been doing ap for about 18 months and I finally bought Pi I regret not buying it sooner. Not only because of the price increase but because of how amazing it is. I've gone back and re-edited some of my older photos and they're night and day different.
Thanks for a splendid video Dylan, just what is needed, though one thing I just discovered recently is the ‘save’ and ‘load project’. It is brilliant. Often when something comes up and you have to go somewhere, like pick the grandkids up from school, save the project, and when you load project again later when you’re back home, it’s all there again, process icons, on screen partly worked images, just as you left it before. I’m surprised you didn’t mention it. Just to agree with you about scripts and processes disappearing overnight though, I agree, Starnet2 was re installed.. again after a major update from PI, but the next time I opened it up, Starnet2 was gone again 😮. FBPP is very fast, comp with WBPP, if you’re in a hurry. Something you might do a video on is , When Image Solver won’t solve ? What do you do except go back to the good old Colour calibration process? Thanks again for your super great fantastic Astro vids, I love ‘em. ❤
Thanks Dave! Yes, Image solve drives me nuts sometimes but especially that it to - isn't persistent. If it fails and you've manually type in the coords and date you have to start over again every time.. which is like 9 fields or something. Super annoying. There has been some improvement on the script working with re-combined images, I think because PI now preserves the meta data better. You're right about the project feature.. I should start using it. Thanks for the tip!
@@DylanODonnellHi Dylan, I have tried entering the co-ords etc in the image solver manually but it still didn’t work. I’ve noticed too when preprocessing with the WBPP the plate solving fails occasionally and so I put it down to the quality of my stack data. Perhaps Pix is a little bit elitist lol. The last image solver fail was with an image I took of M57 using a 250mm F4 Newt and to bump up the magnification I added into the light train a 50mm x2 Barlow. The stars in the corners were distorted because I missed out my coma corrector by mistake so put it down this . I don’t really blame Pix in this case, it’s a really fine program for nearly every else .😊
it took me many years to upgrade to pixinsight from photoshop and DSS, mainly just to be able to use blurxterminator, but now that i’ve started learning it it’s been so worth it. it was also hard to justify nearly 500 canadian pesos and a new (used) computer setup just for software, but the way i justified it to myself was asking whether i could get more improvement for the same amount of money if it was put into a new camera or lens/scope instead, and of course the answer is a resounding no. upgrading to pixinsight is worth several thousand dollars of telescope in terms of how much it’ll improve your images
Yup. Drives me nuts but can’t work without it. And at my level, having WBPP and the various Xterminator programs and the automated scripts, it’s really not that long or tedious to crank out a photo. Unlike a few years ago with “create a preview, tweak, redo. . .”
I'm on the trial version right now. Having to look up how to save an image with changes applied and actually having to save and load your "Icons" extra has made onboarding really difficult. Is it extremely powerful? You bet it is, but you also need a high end PC! 64 GB RAM at least (preferably 128? What?!) My 9700K and RTX 2070 can't keep up. Every little change takes seconds to apply. In Photoshop you change a slider and it's instant. So Pixinsight is not just the 300 € but also the high-end PC with fast NVME drives, fast and tons of RAM and a fast CPU (paired with the high power consumption that faster CPUs bring even in idle - not fun in Europe)!
As a 70 year old technically challenged beginner imager I have no doubt that pixinsight is an invaluable tool . However I’m not going to commit to something that takes so long to get competent with .
I was just about to add the same comment! I have no problems with most new technology but from the tutorials I have watched about this software, while giving brilliant results it looks to me to be aimed at people who are really comfortable and enjoy playing around with computers. My images are for my own personal gratification and as I'm very happy with Affinity together with some JR macros and RC plugins I'll stick with that. The only down side for me is it doesn't run blur exterminator, but the way things are progressing I wouldn't be surprised if someone brings out similar software that can run either with affinity or as a stand alone program
It's about 10% the cost of my OTA, even with some paid-for add-ons. There are some things you need to allow for: 1. The learning curve is steep. Expect to spend 30-40 hours learning how to use it. 2. Sometimes they use strange words for things, e.g. integrating instead of stacking, which is what everyone else says. But it's Spanish software, and, frankly, their slightly off-beam English is a heck of a lot better than my Spanish. So I forgive them. 3. You will need a powerful computer to run it. My PC cost 30% the cost of my OTA.
I held on to doing my processing in photoshop for far to long. I know my way round PS ok and already had a subscription because of normal photography (grudgingly as Adobe pulled all other models for newer versions) so I tried and tried to get good astro results from it. The cost and horrible GUI put me off trying I but I finally bit the bullet and it was one of the single biggest improvements I think any 'upgrade' has given me in my astronomy journey! I don't regret purchasing it at all. All your gripes about it though Dylan are spot on, and a lot of them are easy to solve, not sure what they are trying to prove by not implementing a better GUI, or upgrade process. Almost like they revel in it being complicated!
The one thing I have never yet tried though is stacking in PI, I still use APP for that and from what I can make out APP is still streets ahead of PI for stacking in terms of results and how you do it through the GUI. Maybe I'll try it at some point but REALLLY put off by the thought of having to learn a clunky stacking interface.
To me personally mate it’s about justification. If you are at it every night, learn it, and better yourself and your images. If you are taking subs once a month, stay with DDS and Siril? If you can justify spending the money, go for it. For me personally, I wanted to know that I could process images before I spent big money on a telescope? Cart before the horse so to speak? Why spend a boat load on a big light sausage, and not be able to process what it was spitting out? 😜 love your work mate. Great subject!
100% agree - a great bit of kit for those "cloudy nights" - one additional thing I'm surprised you hadn't mentioned @dylan is that NASA uses PI for processing their images. I've seen imaging teams discussing their latest JWST creations and recognize that (in)famous PI UX in the background on their screen. Man I hope they don't go subscription, the one-and-done aspect of the purchase was a big bonus (coming from a FOSS guy).
In the past we had different teams building the SW from diff parts of a wireless basestation, with some shotty TgPM's not watching the farm. So the modem cmd was "debug level set" to pull logs, the radio cmd was "set debug level" sigh....
The money I spent on PixInsight and the xTerminator tools is very possibly the best purchase I’ve ever made. For a one-time, lifetime cost, this software is literally over-the-moon awesome.
I'm an very-young astronomer just over 14 now, When I started using Pixinsight,it's like a elementary student taking a calculus exam,but now (2.5 years later) I'm feeling very comfortable using it,definally better that Photoshop,especially BXT,NXT and SXT.People usually buy PI with 3 people, so each can only pay 1/3 of the price.
I don't remember WHO on the interwebs said it to me, but it changed my relationship with Pixinsight... "Pixinsight isn't a program. Its an operating system for your astrophotography processes." That changed the way I interact with it. It helped a lot. But yeah, even with that being true, I agree with 80% or more of your points. It could be better if it wasn't trying so hard to be Pixinsight.
I would love to start using it but my biggest problem is the price, personally I can't justify spending that much money on something I would use once a month and that's not even 12 months a year put the subscription does sound more appealing to myself
I’ve tried most of the cheaper or free alternatives and unlike most, find PI to be the most intuitive. It just happens to mesh with the way my brain works.
Hey Dylan ! Great video :) Quick words about GPU acceleration. As a Linux user, it's a pain. I have to manually remove files in order to make things works. Plus, Linux world is moving to a brand new "rendering layer" (From X11 to Wayland) and Pix is not yet compatible with it due to missing absolute windows position (or something like this). So, I suspect dev teams are currently working very hard on what will be version 1.9 (or maybe 2.0) and we all be happy when it'll finally come out! *Crossing fingers*
Serious question - is there decent processing software out there for someone who actually prefers the night sky and astronomy over photo editing? I don't want to piss around with software for hours for each image. I don't want a program that takes years to learn. There is a learning curve to anything, and experience matters, but sometimes it feels like nobody even sees the stars in this hobby because they've automated all of the data collection and spend all of their time tweaking curves.
Not all of us.. I try to looker deeper into the images (and have a few videos doing deep dives on targets).. but being an editor helps. If that’s not your bag, an automatic telescope might be good to that end.
@@DylanODonnell That's even worse. Park it outside and walk away? I'd sooner just quit the hobby. I'm buying equipment to try film - pictures will be shit, but at least I'll be doing something to make them. I appreciate the response; it wasn't intended to be overly critical to you, just to be clear. It just feels like all of the astrophotographer/RU-vidrs whose work I enjoy are doing more and more about processing and less and less about astronomy.
I am in the middle of my free PI trial period. This program strikes me as a Frankenstein. Probably built over a long time with parts and pieces being grafted, inserted, and stitched on where ever they seem to fit. Sitting at a computer playing with software is my least favorite part of astro imaging, but I realize that my images won't improve unless I bite the bullet.
Can't afford it, seen it in action, don't like it...reminds me of the early versions of Blender. The UI is a pain!!! I don't mind learning new stuff, but I don't want to have to go through the pain that something like PI can put you through. I'll stick with APP. It does all that I need and if I want to get more creative, I'll just use another bit of software in conjunction with it. It's horses for courses, I suppose. Although, you can call me a luddite!!!😝
I tried Pixinsight, even with tutorials I was not abled to understand the software, I would like a simple to use few options software just to do a basic processing. Any suggestions? thanks.
I find Affinity Photo pretty easy, a bit like Photoshop but available for a one off payment that definitely won't break the bank ( think I paid around £50 here in the UK for it ) very simple to use and there are free macros available as well as some RC plugins. It won't run Blur Exterminator though.
As a relative newbie it doesn’t sound like I should get Pixinsight. Im using Siril which is complicated enough so PI sounds like an expensive nightmare!
I bought it when the exchange rate was more favourable, and glad I did. It can be an incredible program. But honestly, today? I would use Siril with Graxpert, starnet etc. I like astrophotography, but without scripts, I wouldn't have the patience. Work all day on computers as is. I *know*, I picked the wrong hobby. Have it on Linux now, and it runs circles around the Windows version, at least for now.
100% agree with it all! And when you run a script, that fails because the updater didn't put it in the right place or made duplicates which you have to hunt for and delete just to get a single script to work..... but in the end I love it. Historgram stretching far exceeds Photoshop level stretching.
Exactly .. we put up with the shortcomings because the algorithms are so good heh. That reminds me that the Image solver script, if you put in bad coords and it fails, you have to start over and peck out the god damn coords and date manually all over again.
As a former Programme Mangler in Software Development, I get very sweary when using Pixinsight. The User Experience drives the design of the UI and I can't fathom why they've not had a really talented UX/UI working on this The trouble is, now that it has a wide userbase, any wholesale revision will cause peoples heads to explode. It's totally all over the place and is far from intuitive. That little triangle thing really boils my piss. WTF? The lack of GPU support is nuts. It's a no-brainer and why it's taken them so long to consider it is crazy. I really love it, but frequent crashes, inability to save preferences and a gazillion other things make using it often frustrating.
Yes! I’m a web dev (mostly frontend but a lot of backend too) and I spend all day thinking about making things as easy as possible for people. I’m glad you feel the same way about that triangle. What a bizarre implementation!
I'm getting a hang of it, although there is a large list of processes and scripts in PI, that to be honest are quite useless. Here is my major gripes ever since I use it: 1. A process that has no preview. And it can take a while to show me what it does. The name is unclear what it does, I have no idea what the sliders an checkboxes do, and there is no freakin preview!!! No, I don't want to undo/redo if it takes forever. 2. As you said, I cannot go back and have my usual processes saved as I left them. I always have to re-adjust the denoise levels, readjust the stretch level and so on and so for. I KNOW I can save it as a "project", but it takes forever to load a saved project, even with a very powerful desktop. 3. The menu system is absolutely ridiculous. If Adobe would've come out with this, Adobe would be bankrupt and Adobe would fire the programmers. To not only blame PI, I have to say Siril (I know I shouldn't bash free software) has also a very weird- to say the least- interface and a way of processing files, so I'm guessing this is a European thing?
You should save your Image session as a PROJECT i do this about 10 times during an image processing session especially after major processes that way if it does crash (not happened to me yet) i have the Project and ALL my adjustments ready basically where i was if it crashed! It doesn't take long top save and it will restore your Session as you left it! I just keep overwriting the file until im done with my image!
I'm hoping I can use my amd gpu, I've heard it can be done. I think maybe using rocm but that's beyond my skill. Would be nice if the program could use it in future
Thanks Dylan, I totally agree Another infuriating bug of Pixinsight for Mac users: you cannot just use cmd A to select all files in a directory, as in all other programs. I had a glimmer of hope in the last update since cmd A seemed to be at last working but no, it selects only some of the files in the directory. Just crazy !
It’s a gaming computer I built (there’s a video about it!) 32gb ram / 3070 GPU / AMD something or other.. liquid cooled .. it runs most games on max settings :)
I just recently took the plunge and got my first astro rig, took about 5 hours worth of HA,L,R,G,B data of Carina nebula. It was a heap of fun getting the data and learning my new rig. Since the shoot i have watched about 10 thousand youtube tutorials, and tried multiple softwares. Pixinsight is the only one so far that i have had any kind of success but only with the HA data. Very frustrating part of the process lol.
I’m about to buy it within this month (still waiting for the trail to expire). But one thing I definitely don’t like/ still getting used to is resetting. Especially for the curves.
@@DylanODonnell exactly! It’s not something catastrophic but just annoying. As a newbie I did had a scare moment, the first that it happened to me though 😂
Hmmmmm. Awful user interface? glacial processing speed? non-standard terminology? Messy menus? Regular unexplained and unrecoverable crashes? Not convinced - I will stick to Siril for now...... Although if they ever do a budget version of PI that just lets you run BlurXterminator and nothing else, I might change my mind.....
I agree with everything you've said. It never ceases to amaze me that people will think nothing of shelling out $1K or more for a new piece of hardware, but will balk at a fraction of that for software, when it is the software post-processing that has the a far bigger impact on the quality of the final image. Not to diss hardware; you need both. But mediocre hardware and PixInsight will produce a better image than world-class hardware and mediocre software.
Dylan - just drag the triangle to the PI desktop. Process saved with those settings for that session. You can save the process icons and load them on startup too. The latter gives you a good starting place, and you can then drag a duplicate of that saved process icon with the modified settings for that processing session to the PI desktop. The UI is really very well done, but you do need to take the time to learn how to use it and sometimes think outside of the UI box. Once you get used to the PI UI, you'll realise how shit other UI designs in software over the years has been.
Don't forget the fairly stiff PC requirements needed to run this software . I know a lot of people don't think twice about spending $$$ on computers but if you've been using an older stable PC with Free Astro Software you will have to add the cost of a new PC to the cost of PixInsight . Just saying .
Point #10... That's called projects (I double checked see --> file menu --> projects). But I also never use it. Some one told me about it. It keeps record of all the changes, actions and intermediate "swap info/files". That said... I didn't know and had to be told... (plus the amount of disk space additional claimed for this is substantial)... By sharing your project, you can showcase what you have done by someone else and forward steps and go back in time etc, but be warned, but as mentioned you will need a lot of additional diskspace...
When I chose PixInsight it was a) cheaper and b) a no brainer. It is silly to spend 1000’s of €/$ on hardware to get good subs and then not spend a a few 100’s to create a good (decent actually) end result.
Definitely no human centred design took place when they developed the UI :D If I dont use the software for a few months I have to look up a video of how to apply a histogram stretch to an image Every freakin single time. One of the most frustrating and annoying programs to use, but yes it is still definitely worth it.
Not sure what processor you are using in your PC but there's an issue with Intel 13th & 14h Gen highend processors that causes random crashes. Its happened to me a few times also in PixInsight, but the issue may not be PixInsight. I'm running a 13th Gen i9 14900K. There's a class action looming by all accounts.
Wait Dylan are you still stacking without using weighted batch pre processing script 🤨? I tend to save my work as a project, when i do it reloads all tools and settings for the data I am working on. I save as a project often just in case of the occasional crash due to third party modules. I am that jerk that said Pix already supported GPU "because I had not properly investigated it myself since I had not had any data to process for months on end" Kind of annoying they put the fake box there hopefully someday then it will give me a reason to buy some Tesla GPU accelerators. My biggest gripe about Pix now is that it no longer allows you to choose your install drive an defaults to your OS drive which in my case is actually rather small and only has my OS on the drive. Every other software on my computer is on separate drives. Talked to them about it an they said it was bad practice and I just needed to upgrade my OS drive... NO so I still moved Pix back to it M2 drive where it belongs.
Yeh thanks for the tip :) my issue is that PI will just crash unexpectedly but I’ll try saving as a project anyway. Sounds like that should just be a default workflow .. and yeh I still like to go step by step not batched because I still like to tweak every step :)
@@DylanODonnell I have gotten lazy with preprocessing ever since going mono.. So many files / hours of stacking i find it nice to be able to get up and do something else or even set it to go as I go to bed.. Took me 6 hours to stack 200x180s of Ha on the 1st panel of a 4 panel Mosaic I have started on the Veil Nebula complex. I 100% agree having GPU do some of that lifting would really bring back my joy of processing. Sometimes I miss OSC then I see the mono data and say to myself.. I dont miss it that much 😉
6 hours! fuck me dead. Yeh see it should be able to handle big datasets better, especially now the trend is towards short exposures. And yep... mono for life :)
@@DylanODonnell I only shoot 180s or 300s Narrowband. When I do 300s because of running 7nm filters 180s works but sometimes I do 300s because lack of clear skies and I want enough data to make an image. An only 180s in Broadband if I shoot broadband
Having been in the PI community for a couple of years, one quickly gets the impression that the PI developers literally couldn't care less what users think about the UX. It's almost like a badge of honor for them. Their approach is that if you don't understand the convoluted mess, then you're the problem, not them - so f***k you. Any suggestions on the official forums to improve the usability are straight up laughed out of town. Gatekeeping of the highest order.
Huge gripe I have with Pixinsight, you can't fade an instance like you can in photoshop eg you create the next instance then want to back it off by 40%, can't do it.
Let's not forget that after an update, it removes all your lovely, gigantic GAIA DBs if you had them living in the PI directory. Sometimes you also have to re-enable the CUDA acceleration. Such a pain.
Oh man it's the worst. I have them in /my docs/ but for some reason the latest update doesn't like them anymore so I guess I need to download them again... but honestly that should be a click button process if I'm pulling it from licensed software.
Spending thousands of dollars on telescopes, mounts, cameras to capture data and then balking at $300 for the software to process it, literally the price of one filter, is ludicrous.
Future PI updates will only support CUDA. OpenCL will NOT be supported (as per the developers of PI). I'd rather an open system be supported rather than the proprietary CUDA but it is what it is. There is now "ZLUDA" which is a wrapper layer to allow AMD cards to use CUDA functionality in software. I haven't used it (I have an Nvidia card) so I can't vouch for how well it works. edit: I don't think I've EVER had PI crash on me other than when I ran out of system RAM. PI deserves the most cores and RAM that you can afford. The more the merrier.
@@DylanODonnell how much is plenty of RAM? 16GB ain't gonna cut it. 32GB minimum, 64GB better, 128GB preferred. Using NVME PCIe v4 MM2 drives as scratch drives is highly recommended to. That helps mitigate some of the disk I/O issues.
