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RegiStax V5 Manual and Documentation

1. Green tabpages can be opened and 5 o grey tabpages are not yet available Alignmentbox size 32 125 512 3 The TABPAGE CONTROLS these are 64 JRG TS 2 alata nay be a 7 all Alignment Method imes when the user is active at a S Default None if tabpage processing stage Multi 4 FUNCTION TABS on the leftside Region of interest and for wavelets also on the right fya Manual Aligment side you can find FUNCTION TABS Userdefined Alignment Box The topmost tab contains the func pe ana se tions that a user will use most often p _Processingarea 5 FUNCTION TAB GROUP Every function tab can have one or more groups of functions The groups have a CAPTIONBAR on top that states the name of the group and sometimes has additional buttons controls The GROUPS can be resized by the user The downward or upward chevrons in the groups in the example you see these on the rightside of the groupheader that states align settings allow minimizing and maximizing between user set defaults If the user wants to minimize the group this can also be done by simply moving the groupheaders The groups can also be dragged to be located at a higher lower position in the FUNCTIONTAB These settings are recorded and stored when you start RegiStax again it will be us ing the settings of the last time you used the program 6 TOOLWINDOW Several of the functions in RegiStax will make a toolwindow pop up with additional controls
2. Projectfiles can be saved for SER AVI without additional actions Projectfiles for single format files BMP JPEG etc can only be saved if the user has SAVED the set of frames as a RegiStax FrameList save from the framelist window SAVE as Will allow the user to save a project with a user defined name Note Project SAVE for single frame formats is ONLY possible after the user has first saved a framelist see framelistwindow Project LOADING for single frame formats will require loading the FRAMELIST first FLAT DARK REFERENCE BUTTON Pressing this button opens a menu with the following options LOAD DARKFRAME Allows the user to select a DARKFRAME will activate USE DARKFRAME and show the filename USE DARKFRAME Allows the user to activate deactivate the loaded DARKFRAME USE RAW DARKFRAME Will use the DARKFRAME as a RAW DARKFRAME for RAW Webcam images CREATE DARKFRAME Creates a darkframe from the current set of images no alignment only stacking NUMERICAL CONTROL DARKFRAMEFACTOR Allows the user to control the way a darkframe works Normal darkframes should use factor 1 00 default When this is decreased the darkframe has less effects LOAD FLATFIELD Allows the user to select a FLATFIELD will activate USE FLATFIELD and show the filename USED FLATFIELD Allows the user to activate deactivate the loaded FLATFIELD CREATE FLATFIELD Page 18 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Creates a flatfield
3. are stacked In single point alignment the lowergraph will not be visible Functionality of the uppergraph in single point alignment is comparable to the functionality of the lower graph in multi point alignment We will therefore only describe the functionality for multi point alignment The uppergraph has several controls to limit the number of frames Most used is the slider below the graph when you set this slider to a number of frames look at the statusbar all alignpoints will be set to this number of frames So when you want to globally change the number of frames alignpoint start with setting the slider in the upper graph The other control in the uppergraph limit to maximim frameno can also be used to limit the number of frames Be aware that when you use a lot of alignpoints it sometimes takes a bit of time to sort out which frames are used for each alignpoint The lowergraph allows the user to select an alignpoint with the alignpoint control and then inspect and change the frames used for this point The lower slider works alike the slider in the uppergraph and limits frames on estimated imagequality red part of the graph The left side slider allows the user to limit based on the recorded differences green part of the graph The settings of these sliders are recorded for each alignpoint so when you return to the same alignpoint the sliders will return to the position you have set them unless you have used the uppergraph to chan
4. associated FFTalignbox and user set alignbox will be shown in yellow on screen Using the DELETE button on the aligngrid will remove an alignpoint Alignmentpoints 43 Page 27 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Tab Estimate MultiAlign Panel Clear X In V4 we already had a simple alignpoint estimator in i o pM V5 functionality has changed and improved Alignpoints Estimate considerably ac Set Master Alignpoint one Methodi RegiStax uses a system with a master alignpoint during Alignpoint 6 i multi point alignment Alignpoint 1 is the master Estimate Method alignpoint This button allows the user to create a Alignpoints Matrix masteralignpoint and will prevent RegiStax from overwriting that point again during alignpoint Variable sized Alignbox estimation After pressing the button you should position an alignbox preferable NOT a user defined size on the most contrast rich area in your image This will be recorded and shown in the alignpoint grid using the letter M in the location where you normally would see the alignpoint number Minimum distance Method between points pix Currently we have 3 methods to create alignpoints Matrix is actually not a real alignpoint estimator method but simply generates a matrix of alignpoints using the user set alignbox or user defined FFT size x Method 1 and 2 are two different ways to estimate T possible alignpoint locations Method 2 is currently seen Matr
5. be used Although this method was mainly developed for aligning large solar full moon images it Gradiant ki Use pe blurirg E5 K Tracking Settings Lowest quality Track object Misalign Delecllevel Pradic track 0 70 Misalgn warning Ignore misaligned frames Processing area Hold settings mie 512 r Pixels Auto processing Use Resco Page 9 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 can also be usefull in several other occasions For instance if you have a large series of an object planet moon ISS that is jumping around over an otherwise dark image erratically The gravity centre can easily find the object as long as there are no other objects coming in out of the scene A bright object on a dark background works best when using this method After setting centre of gravity and setting the alignpoints the ALIGN button starts alignment c Aligning using filters Some images are difficult to align due to noise little contrast or other image artefacts RegiStax V5 has a set of 4 different filters that can be used together to pre process images before they are aligned the filters can be used in conjunction with both normal and gravity centre alignment The filters are active both during alignment and optimizing but NOT during stacking The filters are called by setting the filters checkbox which is located just below the Slider on the alignmentpage LEJ LA dja old s
6. can clear the graph by pressing clear under constructionNEW Create Stackslice This was developed to allow the user to inspect the effect of different stacksizes on imagequality without the need to go back to the stacking page and stacking again You NEED to set this at the stacking page there you will feed a control calculate stackslice After that has been set and STACKING has been pressed you can use the create stackslice function When the button is pressed you will see a slider appearing above the waveletimage That slider can be used to control the number of frames for the area around alignpoint 1 after changing the position of the slider you will see what it does to the area Using less frames will show less noise you can using this tool try to find a good combination of the number of frames and the waveletsettings you want to use When a good combination has been found return to the stackingpage uncheck the calculate stackslice function and set the number of frames you want to stack either using the stackgraph or using the stacklist Page 16 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 REGISTAX CONTROLS This is the RegiStax 5 guide to all controls Page 17 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Select MRU Project Flat Dark Reference Imageinfo Layouts LastLayout Set Skin AVIMODE Normal Pause Cancel Batch BUTTONBAR This set of buttons controls is visible at all times during RegiStax proces
7. feature is the maximum drift setting This is very usefull in multipoint alignment If any of the alignpoints drifts away more then the user set amount of pixels relative to alignpoint 1 it will be restricted to the shift of alignpoint 1 We refer to Alignpoint 1 as the Master Alignpoint Below the save load point buttons a new control is visible When openend use the arrowbutton on the rightside it will show the available saved sets of alignmentpoints that have the same name as the file that is being processing So if you work on an AVI called MOON avi and save your alignpoints with Page 6 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 names like MOON100points or MOON4x64 Registax will show those alignmentpoint files since they have MOON in their name Everything else is much as before Now the user can set points by hand simply set the alignboxsize and position a point at a location that looks rich in contrast After setting a point the panel shows the X Y position and the size of the alignbox FFT The user can set many boxes of the same size but also can mix them just select another alignboxsize and position the larger smaller boxes Its often wise to make sure that the master alignpoint 1 is located at the richest area in terms of contrast Also the alignbox of the master alignpoint should not be small 64x64 is the smallest usefull for this point The user can also use the User set alignbox sizes mixed In the image to the right you can
8. from the current set of images no alignment only stacking LOAD REFERENCEFRAME USE REFERENCEFRAME Allows the user to temporarily load a separate frame to be used as a referenceframe during alignment optimizing The file choosen single frame BMP PNG will be positioned at the 1st position of the slider during the setting of alignpoints APs After ALIGN is pressed the normal first frame of the set of images is used again and the referenceframe is only used as a reference The referenceframe must have the same size as the other frames Suggested use You would like to use multi APs on a planetary AVI but individual frames are too poor for alignment to be successfull Then you align in single AP or gravity mode process with wavelets and save the best resulting image possible In the next session you will load this result as a referenceframe place or estimate the APs and process now in multi mode You may get a better result than with a single AP LAYOUTS BUTTON Pressing this button allows the user to choose from 2 options SAVE LAYOUT This allows the user to save the current setup of toolwindows location and size for later usage RESET TO DEFAULT This will reset all the settings of the layout to the defaults COMBOBOX The user can choose previously saved layouts from this field SET SKIN BUTTON Pressing this button will show a menu of pre defined skins for RegiStax users can design skins and share them with others
9. screen is copied to when it changes The middle control tells if the copy should be at normal 1x or 2x enlarged size and the third control only usefull for 2x enlargement tells which method is used to enlarge Start by setting the wavelet settings or anything else at a starting position You can relocate the position of the area you are seeing by pressing CTRL and moving the mouse when you release the CTRL button that area will be shown compared Now switch the active panel that is being used from top to bottom You will see the middlepanel change and the lowerpanel gt will go black since top and bottom are the e Ben Clip lt Clip x same Kaie on In this case we have first relocated the area we are viewing and an then switched back to the top We also changed the settings of the wavelet sliders too much and the image shows on top how the current image looks in the middle how it was and below the difference between the 2 images Red mans the image got darker and green means the image got lighter You can copy the results to from the clipboard with the gt Clip button Page 44 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Resizelmage_Panel Original Flip X Flip Y Resize rato 10 Imagesize 320x240 320 240 Use settings Filters Bell B Spline cs Lanczos Mitchell Resize toolwindow The resize toolwindow can be used to save in 8 bits a copy of the current ima
10. see we set alignpoint 1 using a 64x64 box alignpoint 2 has a 128x128 alignbox and alignpoint 3 has something special The alignbox for alignpoint 3 is 64x64 in size but it also has a ZP zeropadding value of 11 This means that on all sides of this alignbox 11 pixels will not be used during alignment The alignbox is therefor 64x64 for quality estimation and 42x42 for alignment Smaller alignmentboxes are considered better to align on finer details When you use a lot of user set alignpoints its wise to record them when Saving them save points be aware that RegiStax also saves the number of reference frame you have been using to position So if you load the points again they will be at the same location and on the Same imageframe b Let RegiStax estimate Alignpoints In RegiStax V4 we had a way to estimate alignpoints the method uses was however not very powerfull In RegiStax V5 you will see things Alignpoints Estimate are a lot better aie To estimate alignpoints you need to select the ESTIMATE tab in the i Methodi multi alignmentpanel next to alignpoints When pressed you see the m Method2 panel to the right There are many controls you can use and most of gees or them are recorded so next time you dont need to set them again Starting from the top we have the button SET MASTER Variable sized Alignbox ALIGNPOINT When pressed the user can position a master alignpoint d ore sae ag Paie based on the size of the alignbox or user
11. set the colours If the estiamate is wrong its probably wise to reset to the original values The 3 sliders will move each colour channel to the left right in the histogram This is comparable to changing the brightness for a channel The 3 colourweights will compress expand the histogram this is comparable to a using contrast on a colour channel Using these controls can sometimes be a good way to remove a colour cast from your images in that case the settings used can probably be usefull again when processing images from the same camera Page 49 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 centre 51 contre 31 22222 2 Initial Step Gaussian 0 10 2 0 00 44 Set layers Set Gaussian Wavelet filter The wavelet filter tool allows the user to set the wavelet filters for the default filter top part of the tool and set the gaussian filters for all layers in a controlled manner instead of changing 6 wavelet tools you can achieve the same using 2 controls The default wavelet filter is t 5x5 pixels large and will be used to create sharpenend images Must users do not changes the filters but this tool allows you to change change the values of the filter matrix and load store the filters Changes are not recorded so at startup the default filter will be used The Centre 51 shows how much of the original pixels luminance is still present after a pixel is convoluted with this filter With a value of 51 you can
12. stacking SAVESTACK xxxxx yyy Saves the stacked image to filename xxxxx with extension yyy No directory should be used in the filename When xxxxx yyy is not specified the user will be asked to set the filename LOADWVS xxxxx Allows the user to load a wavelet scheme Wavelet schemes set the type of wavelets gaussian default the size of the waveletlayers the setting of gaussian wavelet filters per layer and also all the slider positions SAVEWAVELET xxxxx yyy Saves the wavelet image to filename xxxxx with extension yyy No directory should be used in the filename When xxxxx yyy is not specified the user will be asked to set the filename REALIGN Starts the realignoption from the wavelet page which turns the current waveletimage into a referenceimage PAUSE Stops Batchprocessing temporarily so the user can set controls Batch processing can resumed by pressing the CONTINUE button on the Batch window Page 20 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 ALIGNPAGE Extended Mode Use Extended mode for Colour Full Image FFT Graph Frame List pem e Default Avi 2Gb e Newer LRGB Zoom Registration Graph Vista Awi gt 1Gb Always TABCONTROLS Colour This will be automatically set if the autodect feature is on the user can set this also on off Processing in colour with B W images has NO advantage and will be more time consuming LRGB When colour images are used RegiStax allows the user to create a Luminance l
13. to the right shows the Align options area at startup Before Alignment Method you set alignpoints you need to decide to either go with the default 1 Default None alignpoint or use multi many alignpoints or no alignpoints at all Multi Alignbox size Before you start setting alignpoints select a good frame in the image 32 126 512 sequence that looks better than average If you have a large amount of i 64 296 drifting dont select a frame that is too far into the set of frames as this User set Alignbox 42 4 might give problems during the start of aligment In RegiStax V4 the referenceframe was allways the frame the user had located in the Align manually sequence of images to position the alignpoints on In RegiStax V5 we allow the user to load a referenceframe which serves two purposes first off all it allows the user to find the best alignpoints better for instance using the estimate alignpoints function and secondly it can be a far De Rotate better reference for the topology of the image Align using Centre of gravity When using the default method the user can only set one alignpoint The user also needs to set the alignboxsize the area used to estimate quality and estimate the alignment The last used alignboxsize will be default at startup If the User set Alignbox is checkmarked the size of the alignbox set by the user will be used The user will see when positioning an alignpoint a double box in this case The outerbox i
14. waveletspage the tab has become green A few common used controls expand to maximum imagesize when this is selected the final stacked image will be larger than your Original images It will be enlarged so that all shifts present in the stacked images of images will be visible Fast method when stacking multiple alignpoint frames RegiStax needs to decide for each frame where every section around an alignpoint starts ends for that frame Using fast method will make estimating these sections faster only once during stacking this will be estimated and this will be used to select which areas need to be stacked in each frame This is necessary since not every frame we used is amongst the best X frames for a given alignpoint By default fast method is ON Feather when stacking image with multiple alignpoints the sections for adjacent alignpoints might be shifted slightly different This can create overlap not a problem or gaps when stacking The feather feature enlarges each section with a few pixels in all directions which ensures that more overlap between adjacent sections is guaranteed Its wise to use it when stacking multiple points Sigma clip Stacking Sigma Clip stacking is mainly used to remove effects from hotpixels or cosmic rays You can set this mode by pressing the ACTIVE button in the caption of the SIGMA STACKING group Every frame will first be used to estimate for each pixel extreme values Afte
15. will Page 15 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 increase from 50 downto 50 20 30 Below value 30 wavelets have NO effects anymore at value 40 wavelets are 50 effective The functionality of LO HI gradient is much alike this the routine however is completely different Instead of clipping above below an intensity value RegiStax uses calculated gradient values The gradient is calculated based on the differences between pixels and their surrounding Pixels with a large difference absolute with their surrouding pixels get a higher value than pixels in equal intensity areas This allows often better control of the mask Think of 2 lunar craters with different average image intensity values in the LO HI Clipping method it will be difficult to have the wavelets not effective on each craterfloor since they are different intensities The LO HI Gradient will not be affected by the difference in average intensity and will allow less effects on the craterfloors NEW Denoise Dering Another new function This function allows the user to limit the noise in the image by reducing effects of the wavelets in layer 1 The user can set the amount of wavelets that need to be controlled this amount corresponds to the of all available pixels that are NOT effectively Showing the effects of the wavelets In the same toolwindow deringing is available the tool calculates areas of very high gradient and allows the user to limit the effects of the wa
16. will be overwritten You can also clear the 3 graphs by pressing the clear button The numerical control can be used to have thicker graphs line Page 51 of 51
17. will create less warnings The value corresponds to the correlation between the alignment of 2 consequtive images maximum is 1 Misalign warning Ignore misaligned frames Only when misalign arning is active messages will be shown If ignore misaligned frames is also on this will mean that any frame that creates a misalignment warning even if it is not shown will be de activated for further processing 4 Processing area group This control sets the size of the processing area that is used at the wavelet page Using a large area will demand more memory and a slower response to actions at the waveletpage The button hold settings will record the last used setting of the user Page 23 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 ALIGNPAGE a Qua ity settin gs TAB Current Filter Gradient2 E a Filter All settings on this page correspond to the quality SR rttrrettretsnrrensns estimator set on the Alignment options TAB F r On the top we see which filter is currently Active in this Classic Ti G case it is the V5 default Gradient2 Human 4t For filters Classic Human there are 2 modes the filterssettings can be estimated automatically default of by the user uncheck Automatic Factor wa For these 2 methods the filters correspond to limiting the quality estimator to use only part of the information Te from the so called powerspectrum The wn Com pression G2 powerspectrum is shown as
18. 2 0893 bm BMP 12 1161_bm BMP 12 1427 bmi BMP 12 0539 _ bn BMP 12 0317_ bmi BMP 12 1256 bre BMP 12 0093 bn BMP 12 1022 bm BMP 12 1109 bm BMP 12 1181 bm BMP 12 0808 bm BMP 12 1255 bm BMP 12 1369 bn BMP 12 0438 bm BMP 12 0761_bm BMP 12 0760 bm BMP 12 0969 bn BMP 12 0764 bn BMP 12 0978 bm BMP 12 1029 bn BMP 12 0145 bm BMP 12 1394 bm BMP 12 0383 bm TUTTU TUUTUU TTUTU TTT TUUTUU D izl b k k k k a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a il w ail il ail il il il il y il ha w il il il w il al all w il ha ha il ail w il il il w ail al il Page 30 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 OPTIMIZEPAGE 1 Optimizer settings These are the most used settings during the optimisation of images Fast optimizer NEW UPDATED In v4 we allready had a fast optimizer single run available but the x Fast optimizer search area 25 pr quality was not as good as the default optimizer In V5 the quality of Optimizer mode the fast optimizer is much improved It will try to find a best ES V5 style solution in an area of 25 pixels around the alignboxes in all Optimizer Difference directions When you do not use Fast optimizer RegiStax will be Squared Absolute using the Search area setting and will be doing a full scale search for the best shi
19. RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 RegiStax 5 Introduction This is the 1 version of a manual for RegiStax 5 This manual was written at the end of RegiStax 5 de velopment The examples presented in this manual are based on image sequences that were kindly Supplied by Bob Pilz Moonimages Damian Peach Saturn and Sylvain Weiller Mars INTERFACE We have been developing RegiStax 5 based on the framework of RegiStax 4 Many of the functions you are used to from RegiStax 4 are still available and can also easily be found in the interface In the im age below you can see several parts of the new interface You will also see many changes After startup the first major change is the interface To allow more flexibility in designing a rather complicated interface and to allow the user to keep things simple we had to redesign the interface again The image below shows the major features of the new interface The names in CAPITALS refer to naming conventions that will be used throughout this manual to state where a control can be found 1 The program BUTTONBAR this bar ee ence eee ek T me has functionality that is always avail 1 ect Load Reference Flat Dark Imageinfo Layouts LastL able s eeo i a _ Align 2 Jpimize Stack Wavelet Final About 2 The TABPAGES they Show the 5 Poo Colour Automatic processing w processing stages of RegiStax The s Align Limit RGI View full mege ow blue tabpage is the ACTIVE tabpage
20. Stax will ONLY align using alignpoint 1 all other alignpoints get the same shift estimation During optimisation each alignpoint will still be estimated Show alignmentzones When this is active you will not only see the alignpoints but also the zones that are associated to each alignpoint These zones will be the part of each image during stacking that will be used from a frame if that frame is selected for an alignpoint SAVE LOAD points Pressing either of these buttons allows the user to save the current set of alignpoints including the referenceframe number or load a previously saved set of alignpoints Alignpointfiles This control will show if any alignpoint files RAP exist with a name that starts with the same text as the file that is being processed Selected alignpointfile Frames300b RAP We have 5 alignpointfiles that have a name starting with the name of the file we are processing The selected alignpointfile is Frames300B RAP Alignpoints This shows how many alignpoints are in the current set Alignpoint grid This grid shows X Y FFT and ZP for each alignpoint FFT is the alignboxsize associated with this alignpoint If a user set alignboxsize was used you will see a ZP value ZP stands for zeropadded the user set alignboxsize is FFT 2 ZP During alignment the FFT alignbox will be used to estimate quality the smaller user set alignbox will be used to estimate image shifts The user can select a row of the grid and the
21. a red line during alignment a E o in the registration graph Raas For Compression the factor corresponds to a JPEG i se Cee compression factor Compression saves the image in the Gradient 2 Pixels alignbox for each alignpoint as a jpeg file using the compression factor The filesize of the resulting jpeg file E is used as an estimate of the image quality Gaussian Blur Radius an BlurDiF 4 Pixels The V4 default gradient measures difference in intensities between adjacent pixels within a given radius The default is 2 and normally this should not be changed Blurdif This method blurs the image with a gaussian filter before estimating image quality much alike gradient The new Gradient 2 has NO user controlled settings Page 24 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 ALIGNPAGE Options TAB This tab has most of the additional controls less often used available processed 1 Save image l an If the user wants to use a default sub directory to save 2 yireverr Stretch images after processing this control can be used The sub Pond will be AA the directory where the original THFIT stretch images were found Always Ask 2 TIFF FIT stretch Yes Tiff FIT images are 16 32 bit formatted image files that are m O Mo often not using the full span of bits available For instance camera s recording in 10 bits will save the result in a 16bit Bet Luminance Reset file this however creates rath
22. age sequence were displaced slightly often due to chromatic effects errors either in the camera telescope used or due to atmospheric effects This function will estimate a best shift to combine the RGB channels RGB balance when images show a colour cast and or a white balance that looks not ok you can use this toolwindow to change the way the colours are mixed NEW Masking this function was added at the last stages of development therefore it might not by functioning allways as expected The idea behind masking is that the user can either load or create a mask that can limit the way wavelets enhance the image For instance when you enhance the craterwalls on a lunar image sometimes you could enhance the craterwall further but at the same moment noise would be also enhanced on the craterfloor This control allows you to limit effect of the the wavelets mainly to the craterwalls keeping the craterfloor noisefree There are currently 2 methods available to create masks LO HI clipping and LO HI gradient Lo Hi Clipping simply sets the lo hi values of any image above and below which wavelets will be ineffective This is used in conjunction with the feather setting on the same toolwindow The feather controls how the wavelets are limited above and below the LO HI settings If you use for instance a LO setting of 50 with a feather of 20 all original image intensity values lower then 50 will show limited effects of the wavelets The limitation
23. anets When you use the wavelets to enhance part of the image you will see that at some Stage a darkened area appears around the star Using deringing with the darkside option can then be used to limit that effect The other case a brightned part near a dark feature is less often apparent Both controls have settings that show numerical values these values are only usefull in combination with the image you are processing There are no best settings since the effects these tools have on the final image is greatly depending on the stack used and the image quality noise of the individual frames De ringing Dark side Bright side Page 47 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 RGE Alignment RGE Align Area i Show Area Move Area Define Area X position Y position 4 0 A Blue 0 A Up Manual up Lt Rt Lt Rt Din Din Red channe Blue Channel Estimate RGB Align toolWINDOW Sometimes images have shifted colour layers after stacking this can be the case due to using different files for each colour layer and less then perfect alignment optimisation or due to atmospheric effects The RGB Align tool is a very simple tool to improve the image quality In the image above I have shifted to show the functionality the R layer 4 positions to the right This gives a red edge To let RegiStax estimate a best shift that makes a better colour composition you need to first set the area it is active on You can either show t
24. ate is too close to either the edge of another stronger alignpoint it will be neglected Finally we also have variable sized alignbox In this mode RegiStax will mix alignbox sizes to create a scheme with minimal overlap between alignboxes WHen you are not happy with the estimates simply change the settings and press estimate again Page 7 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 This example shows how the scheme looks when not using variable sized alignboxes Notice that alignbox1 is highlighted I Clear X Pbl Set_Master RE e E eS I eta Jj ints Matrix EE Variable sized Alignbox Threshold Deiectionimt Radue PNN opii sed ee Minimum distance 40 between points pix Free space to edge 10 4 This example shows how the scheme looks when using variable sized alignboxes The overlap between boxes is minimal this way In large smooth areas few alignboxes appear and near to rich areas many boxes appear o l Clear x Alignpoints Estimate Set_Master Alignpaint Method 1 l Abonocint Matrix Alignpoints i Variable sized Abgndax Threshold Detectionlimit Radius opa BA si Minimum distance c A mix of both A user can simply first set a group of alignboxes points using the estimate method and then still add several points by hand or remove points Adding them is like we are used to and they are based on the alignboxsize used To remove an alignbox you have to doub
25. ating a Luminance layer from the RGB layers When this is ticked the wavelets will be working on a luminance channel instead of on the 3 separate RGB channels Sharpening will be done on the luminance and the final image keeps the same colour by mixing the luminance with the original RGB colourvalues In the image below you can see what happens in this saturn image by Damian Peach when we use the green layer as a luminance Any mix of colour can be made to find what you think is best Colour Mixer Reset X Create Luminance from RGB F iw Red 0 W Green 100 F iW Blue 03 Use Luminance You can also directly create a B W image from a colour image based on the LRGB mix by simply setting Create B W image Finally there is a use luminance checkbox this should only be used when a real luminance channel was loaded using special luminance files Colour Mixer Reset X Create Luminance from RGB i Red 0 Green 100 Ww Blue 0 Use Luminance Page 42 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 WAVELETPAGE Toolwindows Zoomwindow Lanczos Press CTRL and Move mouse release CTRL to set zoomarea The zoomwindow can be used to inspect in more detail how processing works out for a specific area on the screen The zoom is always 2x enlarged and can be set to use Bell bspline lanczos or mitchell as resampling enlarging method You can reposition the location that is visible in the zoomwindow when you pres
26. ayer L Setting this control will prepare the usage of a luminance layer This can also be done at the stacking stage Full Image NEW This will enlarge or shrink the current image to fit in the screenwindow of RegiStax This does NOT decrease the images that are used during any of the processing stages Its merely a control to allow the user to see the full image When the user uses a large image without Full Image on you can drag the image press the rightmousebutton and hold drag Zoom When pressed the user will be shown an area around the current cursorposition in a separate toolwindow with a 2x enlarged image This makes positioning alignpoints accurately easier During alignment this window will serve another purpose it will be showing alignpoints where alignment warnings have appeared When the user uses misalign warnings the image in this window will be Showing where the original alignpoint on the referenceframe is located FFT Graph This is only usefull during the initial setup of the alignpoints setting this will show a 2D image of the FFT Fast Fourier Transform graph that will be used during alignment Ideally the user should see an area with redpixels in the middle of the graph Registration Graph This graph will show the powerspectrum and the quality estimates during the positioning of alignpoints and during alignment After alignment this graph is more important as it will show both the quality and the registrati
27. cking stage you will need to start alignment all over again Choosing too many for instance all will cost more optimizing stacking time but will allow you to search for the best stacksize You choose the number of images used for further processing by dragging the slider below the previewimage to the number of images you want to have used for every alignpoint If you select 200 frames this means RegiStax will find for every alignpoint the 200 BEST frames there is a difference with V4 at this point In V4 RegiStax would use the 200 best frames for alignpoint 1 and for all the other alignpoints it would use also 200 frames but they were not selected on quality In V5 we have improved this functionality now each alignpoint gets the X best frames available Page 11 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Press the Limit button the moment you have decided how many frames will be used This will automatically take you to the Optimizer page Align Limit WARNING After pressing LIMIT you cannot start alignment again Before pressing Limit it is possible to start alignment again if you are unhappy with the results of alignment Page 12 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Step 4 OPTIMIZING The optimizer is used to optimize the estimated shifts for every alignpoint in every frame the users has selected We explain in more detail how to use the optimizer in 2 often used modes a Simple optimizing b Using Create Referenc
28. d and to check where the alignpoints are located If the user decides a frame is not good enough to be stacked just uncheck the frame in the stacklist IMPORTANT when you stop using the stacklist be aware that the position your cursor is set on the Sstacklist also limits the stacksize You can see the stacksize in the statusbar its always wise to position the cursor at the lowest position in the stacklist Page 35 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 STACKPAGE Toolwindows Alignmentsections This toolwindow allows the user to inspect the distribution of the alignment sections This tool often is used when a user sees after stacking that one of the alignpoints shows signs of misalignment diffused areas At the waveletpage you can find out which alignpoint is in the area that shows the misalignment you can then step back to the stack page and call the alignment sections In this toolwindow you can simply uncheck any of the alignpoints and during stacking these will not be used anymore The effect of the size position of the alignmentsections will also be directly visible Page 36 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 STACKPAGE Toolwindows Quality Cutoff red line 551 Limit to maximum frameno 233 A e _ Poe oe eee Frames to stack 152 Low quality 86 45 Dif cutoff 1E37 Stacksize 152 Frames Stackgraph This tool can be used to limit the number of frames that
29. ding Images 2 Setting Alignpoints 3 Aligning 4 Optimizing 5 Stacking 6 Processing with wavelets Step1 LOAD IMAGES RegiStax allows the users three main ways to select and use images a Load images using the SELECT button b Load images using the MRU button c Load images using Drag amp Drop a Load tmages using the Zoeken in d eme a mage G00xGIC 8 gt SELECT button e Bae gees z F s dcr gewijzigd o E row be This is the most used option after COO Oe i Reeente locatiza pressing SELECT a dialog will be a P EMP 12 00C3 5 Li E presented to the user The dialog a gt will allow the user to load the T B EMp 12 0UU5 R Bihi EMP 12 000E following cork n single frame filetypes Le MIEMPI2 00c Campus PREMP 22 00s Eii CMP 12 0010 BMP JPG FIT 8 16 32 bits integer ME CMP 22 0011 l a Hetwerk ME raam a Ana and 32 bits floating Destandsrman awr 12002 o TIF 16 bits uncompressed PNG 8 Destandstypen Stil Framais hmp Arre 16 bits and the following Operen als sestand met be lt enmerk Aleendezer DSLR RAW image formats CRW CR2 NEF DNG MRW For single frame formats the user can choose a single file by simply clicking on the filename in the dialog When a file is choosen a preview can be seen in the dialog Double clicking the filename will load the file into RegiStax and process it also Most of the time the user will however want to user multipl
30. e c Simple optimizing On the optimizer page we are presented with several choices The most important for basic optimizing are the optimizer settings Below we describe the functionality of the most used settings Optimizer settings iw Fast optimizer Search area 25 pix Fast optimizer this is the successor to the single run optimizer from V4 But its a lot better and can be used instead of the older method The older method tries finding the best alignment position in a grid of possible positions set by the user search area If the Optimizer Difference user sets a search area of 4 that means the optimizer will be squared e Absolute testing a grid of positions 4 positions shifted in any directions This means an 9x9 grid of positions gets tested for each alignpoint The Ptmzer Limits Fast optimizer does not use the setting of the search area but Optimize until 1 A vo searches in a clever way Therefore we can allow it to search in 88 than improvement larger area the search area for this method is 51x51 positions but Search area A pixels it can search those a lot faster If you dont trust the result unchecking the fast optimizer will ensure you will find the best Graphs alignment shift but not fast V Difference Houen Optimizer mode V4 style fm V5 style Optimizer style for backward compatibility we have left V4style optimizing available V4style means that every alignpoint gets treated separately So for 50 alignpoin
31. e files was selected only the 1st filename will be shown and selecting that filename will NOT loading the group again So only AVI SER and RFL filenames in the MRU list will directly lead to the loading of a group i of frames All other formats will lead to loading a select MRU Project Flat Dark Reference I ingle f l single frame Align 1 test rfl 2 arl k 3 FrameslO0 avi 4 venus0003IndexWWW stack png o Regio l eee 5 FrameslLOOOUncompressed avi Alig 2 wD 6 testing_debayer png E N 7 testa bmp Aligi 8 m51 hubble BMP A 9 Jupiter 8 29 2008 3A png 10 aaavi Us c Load images using Drag amp Drop Drag and drop was used in previous versions of RegiStax by users that had problems selecting many frames in the RegiStax dialog The user opens RegiStax and also opens a separate windows explorer dialog In that dialog the user selects all the files of a single format filetype he she wants to process After selecting the files the user drags the files to the registax window and drops them overthere Several groups can be dropped onto RegiStax in succession to create a larger group Page 5 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Step 2 SET ALIGNPOINTS In RegiStax V4 the user allready had several ways to set Alignpoints In RegiStax V5 we have exten ded these options There are 3 ways of setting alignpoints a Setting Alignpoints by hand b Let RegiStax estimate Alignpoints c A mix of both Preparations The image
32. e images in RegiStax to align and stack This can be achieved by selecting all the filenames in the dialog using the default windows functionality for selecting multiple features in a list Using the shift key pressed a group of files can be selected by the user The user Starts this by selecting the first filename of the group then press the shift key keep it pressed and then bring the cursor to the filename at the end of the group that needs to be selected The user can also select files using the ctril key keep it pressed every file that is to be included in the selection needs to be selected clicked After selecting the files press the OPEN button in the selection dialog The filenames will now be loaded not the files themselves into RegiStax multiple frame filetypes Page 4 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 AVI SER 8 16 bits and RFL RegiStax Framelist format All these formats have multiple frames in one file and thus are the easiest way to process large groups of images The RFL format is new and was added to allow users to use large groups of single frame filetype images without the need to select all individual files again RFL files can be created when a group of files is saved as a framelist from the Framelist window Show Framelist b Load images using MRU most recently used This is new in RegiStax The MRU button will show when pressed the last 10 files loaded into RegiStax If a groups of single fram
33. e objects and also find them independent of any large ee movements Sudden camera movement This option can be used in conjuction with both default 1pt Alignment as with multi point aie alignment In Multi Alignment the centre of gravity will be Misalign 070 treated as the Master alignpoint all other points will be aligned Detectlevel es according to the expected shift the Master alignpoint has Lum threshold NEW This control works in conjunction with the Centre of Gravity Iqnore misaligned frames alignment the value reported is a cut off value Any pixel with a ee luminance below this value will not be considered during the sees ee Sze 512 Pixels Use pre blurring Lowest quality Track object Predict track Misalign warning gravity alignment This is helpful to reduce effects from noisy backgrounds De Rotate and Save derotated JPEG NEW Setting De Rotate will only be usefull when 2 or more alignpoints are used RegiStax will estimate rotation on alignpoint 1 and alignpoint 2 if possible try to position these points for de rotation as far as possible apart Using the Save derotated JPEG option will during stacking save all selected frames after derotation as JPEG Region of interest button NEW This allows the user to specify a Region of Interest ROI During alignment optimizing this region is not limiting processing but the stacking and wavelets will be limited to this region Scan
34. e value when using gamma This alSo corresponds to gamma 1 The user can change the gamma by either moving the red dot in the graph press the left mousebutton above the red dot and whilst keeping the button pressed move the dot to another location In the graph below we can see the new graph and the effect this has had on the image The graph is everywhere above the X Y line in the graph so all original image intensities are raised The user can add additional points to the graph by right clicking in the graph deleting a point can be done by left clicking on an existing point with the ctri button pressed The user can instead of using the graph also use the gamma setting to create a gammaz graph Pressing reset on the top of the toolwindow will reset all the settings If the graph was used the setting of the graph points can be saved for later usage using the Save button on top of the toolwindow The load button can be used to restore previously saved settings Load Save Reset X right click insert a point ctrifeft cdick delete a point double dick reset Linear Gamma overrules graph Page 41 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 WAVELETPAGE Toolwindows Colour Mixer Reset X Create Luminance from RGB Red iw Green i Blue Create B W image Use Luminance Colour mixing The colour mixer allows the user to change the appearance of colour images and even improve image quality by mixing This is done by cre
35. each alignpoint the total amount of frames will therefore be a lot larger than 50 When you use many alignpoints be aware that this will force RegiStax to use a lot of frames to create a reference frame After setting the number of frames alignpoint press Create Then the optimizer is launched and based on your settings will optimize the frames after that it starts SS ee stacking the frames After stacking the users ends up Create a Reference y at the waveletspage You can set the wavelets to increase the amount of Frames Alignpoint details in the image make sure that you are not also Create increasing the noise You can better proceed using a bo 41 Slightly blurred referenceframe than a referenceframe with excessive noise since that might mislead the alignment After setting the wavelets or other settings press Continue That will bring you back to the optimizer page You can now continue using the simple optimizer procedure as described above If any of the filter options see alignment was used the reference frame will also be filtered using these options Step 5 STACKING The stacking stage is one of the least changed sections in RegiStax 5 There are 2 modes of stacking default stacking no special controls needed and Sigma clip stacking Default Stacking Default stacking is very simple you only have to press the STACK Button RegiStax will stack all the frames and after stacking is finished you can go the the
36. ed in later p versions and is the default Gaussian filtering gives the user finer r control over the details that get enhanced v2 0 10 A s Waveletscheme A Two waveletschemes are available Dyadic will set a scheme where each layer uses filters twice the size of the lower layer 1 2 4 8 16 32 F soe 3 1 0 10 1 0 inear allows the user to control the way the layers increase in size The layerfilter size is based on the initial layer and will increase in F each next layer by the Step increment In the default setting initial layer 1 and step increment 0 this will make all layers have the TE SE 0 10 1 0 same initial filtersize In conjunction with gaussian the user can still F change the layers separately using the gaussian filter controls in the image at the default value of 0 1 5 1 040 10 Layer 1 6 and Preview These are the most used controls on the wavelet page Each layer has a set of details associated with that layer based on the filter that will be enhanced when the slider is moved to the right Rightclicking ona w Slider resets the value You can also uncheck a layer to remove that set of details from the final image You can inspect the details in each layer by pressing the preview button The previewbutton also carries Save the value of the layer slider In gaussian the user can set the Scheme Scheme gaussian filtersize Small filters will create a layer with very fine eT ee eee details and larger filte
37. egiStax would save the avi uncompressed which can result in very large files Now we allow the user to select a codec from the available set of the users computer The user needs to set the compression quality before saving the file For most codecs compression quality is at its lowest at O and at its highest at 10000 But this can be very different for your codec to use this feature be sure that you know how your codec uses compression Image size The avi that is saved can either be only the alignment area alignpoint 1 or the area which will have the full image on all frames in it This maximum area will be a lot bigger if your set of frames has a lot of movement as BMP This saves the result not as an AVI but as a set of BMPframes with a sequential number Sort on quality When this is set the frames will be saved in order of decreasing image quality based on the quality estimates of alignpoint 1 SAVE REGISTERED Pressing this will start the saving procedure Creating an integrated AVI This procedure allows the user to create a new AVI with less noise or with less frames Average of X frames This sets the number of frames that will be used together Method Moving average will create a new AVI where each frame is build using the number of frames set For each new RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Create AVI File y Codec Compress Qual 7500 Create registered sequence Image size 7 Alignment area Maximum a
38. either has to do with noise or very good imagequality fine details The frame quality stated is the frame quality of the alignmentbox for alignpoint 1 using the user selected quality estimator The graph below shows how the registrationgraph looks like after alignment has been done Images are ordered according to the quality estimate for alignpoint 1 red line and also the difference in image intensity between the referenceframe and the frames in the sequence are shown in green The same type of graph will be seen during optimisation RegiStrationgraph a4 x Frame f4 Quality 1350628 00000 Quality Difference Page 29 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 ALIGNPAGE Toolwindows Framelist toolwindow When the user has checkmarked show framelist the framelist toolwindow will pop up Depending on the type of images used only part of the buttons shown below will be visible When a user uses single frame files BMP JPEG PNG TIF DSLR RAW FIT a set of 7 buttons will show up The SORT SAVE LOAD and ADD buttons are only available for single frame files When using AVI SER or RFL saved list of imagefilenames only the leftmost buttons will be shown Check all Check none Sets all checkboxes for all frames to active inactive Empty list Removes all the frames only for single format from the framelist Sort Sorts the frames on the filenames Save Saves the list of fil
39. elow sigma low Cut pixels above sigma high Reject highest value per pikel Sigma 400 search Events During multi point alignment sometimes sections are drifting apart 2 adjacent alignpoints move in opposite directions without using feather this can create gaps in the final image Feather creates zones around each alignmentsection which will be stacked also these zones will be overlapping normally Its wise to keep the feather setting as small as possible Show alignmentsections This will show the way the alignment sections are arranged based on the alignpoints Optimal derotate NEW Checkmarking this will for images with 2 or more alignpoints use the results of the optimizer to estimate rotation If this is NOT checkmarked the de rotation will be done using the alignment data as it was stored after alignment for 1 and 2 alignpoint Morphing NEW Experimental Morphing allows the user to stack multipointimages in a different way normally registax cuts from each image a section around the alignpoint s and stacks that With morphing a new image is created that will morph the original image in such way that the image can be stacked fully This is experimental and has thusfar NOT proven to be better than the default method Page 32 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Sigma Stacking Sigma Stacking is used to create a stacked image with less noise and no effects from hot pixels dead pixels cosm
40. enames in a registax framelist RFL file Load Loads a list of filenames from a RFL file Add Allows the user to add more files The image on the left shows a framelist before alignment and on the right after alignment The images are now ordered on quality In both cases the user can inspect images by simply moving the cursors through the filenames New V5 feature Before alignment you can assign not for AVI SER filenames in the framelist to a colour channel To do this you select the frame and then press R G B or L to assign the file to the Red Green Blue or Luminance channel The effects of this are not visible before stacking has finished The filenames in the Stacklist will show if files are assigned to the channels Restoring the original state of the filename no assignment can be done by pressing the X on the keyboard on a selected frame Check all Check all Check none Check none Empty List 2 0002 bm 12 0003 bm 2 0004 bm 2 0005 bm 2 D005 bm 2 000 7 bm 12 0008_bm 2 0009_bm 12 0010 bm 12 001 1 bm 2 0012 bm 12 0013 bm 2 0014 bm 12 0015 bm 12 0016 bm 22 001 r bm 2 0018 bm 2 0019 bm 2 0020 bm 12 0021 bm 2 0022 bm 12 0023 bm 2 0024 bm 2 0025_ bm 2 0025_bm 2 002 7 bm Empty List BMP 12 1105 bmi BMP 12 1126 _bn BMP 12 0745 br BMP 1
41. ent this will lead to substantial more frames than Flat b the specified number However during stacking only those sections of the frames that correspond to the best X frames for an alignpoint 1 1 al n will be used JE i JE 3 Resample Drizzle 1 1 h Resampling and Drizzling are 2 techniques to enlarge the final image result Using them will limit certain options Resampling has 4 methods Bell Bspline Lanczos Mitchell The factor setting is valid for both techniques 4 Filtering A set of 8 pre defined filters are availble to be used during optimisation Each filter will change the image just before it enters the optimiser using the filtersettings The set of 9 controls allow the user to also create different filters Pre filtering can be helpful for images that lack contrast or have too much noise Page 31 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 STACKPAGE Stacking options Expand to maximum imagesize Setting this will expand the final stacked image to the maximumsize based on all the image shifts Stretch histogram after stacking Using this will make sure that the stacked image uses the maximum span of image intensities 0 65535 This can be usefull for images that are very dark Normalize intensity over frames When images have very different average intensities due to clouds for instance setting this control will limit the effects of this on the final stack Show stacklist This will open a toolwind
42. er dim images 10bits has a maximum image intensity of 4095 and 16 bits has a Luminance aR bG64cB maximum of 65535 Setting this conttrol to YES will 3 C b automatically stretch FITS TIFF setting NO will use the malt n E alt Original intensities even if the result looks dark At the 0 29 4 0 56 td 0 11 WA wavelet stage this can be easily changed by changing the histogram Using the Always ask option will let RegiStax So a4 ask everytime you are using TIFF FIT images if you want them stretched or not Autocheck for RegiStax updates 3 Luminance 2 At several stages during processing RegiStax uses this is Q Maximize during messages only the case for colour images the luminance channel Luminance is calculated using the settings from this group Autodetect Colour B W The default values can be called back using the reset button _ Messages During Optimizing 4 Additional settings Autocheck Messaoes Durina Create reference This will check if a new version of RegiStax is available on s the internet every time maximum once a day the program 3 ia is started Maximize during messages ees ne Some users minimize RegiStax during processing when Detayer RAW ULSR RegiStax asks the user for information this setting will maximize the program Use Debayer Autodetect Colour BW Method If this is on RegiStax will check for each image loaded if CR w BG there are 3 channels and if the data in these channe
43. ethod Low ligh Masi actively change the way the mask is displayed used By using the Use Mask Toggle and the show controls either the mask the image with wavelets and no masking or the image with wavelets and masking is shown When you remove the mask tool from the screen its function is also cleared Page 46 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Denoise Dering window Another new toolwindow the functionality is rather simple You can either control the noise that is visible when using wavelet layer 1 or you can limit the effects of deringing in general Denoising Although a numerical value is shown there is no standardisation possible Denoising works on the waveletvalues that are associated to wavelet layer 1 If you see noise in wavelet layer 1 and you plan to use that layer to enhance sharpen the image this control can be usefull The effects are directly visible on screen if the denoising checkbox is checkmarked and the slider is moved to the right How much denoising you prefer is a personal choice Deringing The deringing control works for all waveletlayers We have created a 2 sided approach deringing that happens on the dark side of a brightened area and deringing that happens on the brightside of a darkened area The wavelets can enhance certain parts of the image a lot but also create de ringing at locations where very sharp changes in luminance in the image appears This is the case around stars or moons near pl
44. ettings amp x The filters are Blur Blur uses a gaussian blur with a radius Pixels z I set by the user to blur the image This is a often usefull for images that have static Gamma 1 00 noise This type of noise is less random than normal noisy and can lock the Predict track Hold alignment onto a pattern When static noise is present after stacking and using wavelets Stretch the user often see diagonal lines hi Z Aligning optimizing with the blur filter can 255 prevent this from happening g Gamma sometimes the features a user ad frames Negative wants to align on are very dim Setting the gamma value of the image different can help in improving the contrast Stretch this allows the user to clip stretch the intensity values of the image Everything below the low value will be O black and everything above the high value will be 255 white Especially raising the low value can be helpfull to erase background noise Negative this simple creates a negative image some users use this to make dim dark areas better visible to position alignpoints Again alignment is started by pressing the ALIGN button Page 10 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 When alignment has finished After alignment is finished the user has to choose how many frames will be used This choice will limit all processing during optimizing stacking and wavelet enhancement If you find out you chose too little frames at the sta
45. fice 2007 Silver Office XP Alto _ Manual Page 2 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 General changes en to RegiStax4 the following parts of RegiStax have changed new support for RAW DSLR Nikon Canon Minolta DNG images better support for TIFF and FITS images supports AVI s larger than 1Gb can process up to 50 000 frames can process up to 500 alignpoints allows variable alignboxes user defined aligns optimizes alignpoints simultaneous in V4 sequential allows filtering of images before alignment allows masking of wavelets to prevent noise allows denoising deringing allows full preview of large images at all stages allows projectsaveing loading allows image derotation allows processing of region of interest prevents alignboxes alignpoints of drifting away allows the user to move large images when viewing them using the rightmousebutton down and dragging Page 3 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 How to Process images in RegiStax 5 In the explaination below you can see how processing images in RegiStax 5 works Several of the more advanced and sometimes complex controls are used in this manual but this is not a definitive guide to all controls The second part of this manual will list all available controls with the associated functionality explained The general workflow during the usage of registax can be divided in the following steps 1 Loa
46. for a very small circle of red pixels FFT spectrum 1278 y e Manual FFTfiter 12 Recac FFT Page 26 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 ALIGNPAGE Toolwindows When the user selects MULTI in the Alignment method box the MultiAlignpanel will pop up This toolwindow allows the user to load alignpoints save alignpoints create alignpoints It has 2 tabs inside the toolwindow Tab Alignpoints This is the default view after selecting Multi If a set of MultiAlign Panel Clear X saved alignpoints exists with a name equal to the file Alignpoints Estimate being processed that file Registax AlignPointfile RAP ane will be loaded autmatically Multi A method Multi A method Multi alignmethod Simple The default mode during alignment is Multi Quantity this A eee will ensure that each alignpoint will get the best in terms Multi Quantity of imagequality frames When Single is selected all ie 2 ial 5 A alignpoints will be using the same frames Maximum drift pix Maximum drift NEW ee ee The maximum drift setting is a new control During alignment the shift found for each alignpoint will be Save Points Load Points compared to the shift of alignpoint 1 If any of the alignpoints drifts more than the user set amount away from alignpoint 1 it will be corrected This ensures that no alignpoints can start drifting away It is adviced to keep this value relatively small Setting it to zero will mean that Regi
47. frames button NEW After specification of at least one alignpoint the user can use SCANFRAMES to analyse the drift and quality of the images After the SCANFRAMES procedure has finished the user will be able to see at every choosen frame which area is common to all images When setting the alignpoints it is wise to limit then to the scanarea SCANFRAMES also estimates image quality and orders the images in that order The 1st image is estimated the best in quality at the specified align point and can probably be used as a referenceframe Page 22 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 2 Quality settings group The quality settings group allows the user to select a quality estimator Current available are Classic Human Compress Local contrast Gradient V4 Default Gradient 2 V5 Default Blurdif In V5 we have choosen to make Gradient2 the new default estimator Use pre blurring NEW Using this control will blur each image slightly before estimating quality blurring images has advantages when noise is clearly visible Visible noise can trick the quality estimators into estimating high quality for noisy images Lowest quality When people use automatic processing this setting will be used to decide how many frames will be used for further processing The value is relative to the highest estimated quality in the image sequence If the user sets 65 this means images with a quality equal or hi
48. ft Optimizer Limits Optimizer Style NEW Eas Optimize until 1 4 In V4 we optimized every alignpoint in a separate sequence this bo ace improvement control is just available for those people that still prefer that option eos alz The new V5 optimizer style will process all alignpoints Tekin i simultaneouslywhich reduces processing time dramatically As a Graphs feedback the user will be shown for up to 3 alignpoints how the reference and current alignbox area in the images look Difference Movements Optimizer Difference NEW m In all previous RegiStax version the difference between the pixels in nS the reference frame and the frame that is getting aligned optimized was recorde as a squared difference RegiStax 5 allows you also to Fata use the absolute difference between the pixels Currently there is no A clear default advantage of either method Graphs Resample Drizzle Active x The difference graph is most often used during optimisation as it shows the progress during optimizing The movements graphs Style Method shows how much the images shift during the sequence None y Resampling Factor Drizzling 2 0 2 Create a reference updated This procedure is used to create a referenceframe before the user Filtering Set Reset Active x starts optimizing A reference frame will be created using the number of frames specified for each alignpoint this means that for Pre defined filters multi point alignm
49. ge all settings Additionally the lower slider allows you to check the frame at the slider position in the graph You can inspect this frame by pressing space when the slider is actively used You will see the frame the alignpoints and the specific alignpoint you are working on Page 37 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 WAVELETPAGE These are the common controls available at the waveletpage Automatic Automatic ae When this is set every change in the settings of for instance the Hold Wavelet setting wavelet schemes will be directly visible Normally this setting does Show Processing Area OL ave Pe Deol Show Alignment Points Hold wavelet setting This setting keeps your wavelet settings between sessions if you load 210 Full Image a new set of frames the settings will not be reset Wavelet filer Show processing area Gaussia The corners of the processing area are show when this is on Default eiii Show alignment points Waveletscheme When this setting is active all alignpoints will be shown and their Dyadic 2 n Linear number and number of stacked frames will be written in the alignbox Show full image Initial step Setting this active will either enlarge or shrink the image so it fits fully LEY Increment on the screen This has no effect on the image Layer Preview Waveletfilter RegiStax uses two wavelet types default and Gaussian Default refers 1 1 0 10 1 0 to the first RegiStax versions Gaussian was develop
50. ge on either the wavelet page or the final page The user can flip the image on the X Y axis and resize at some standard rations using the predefined settings Alternatively the user can enter the X and Y dimensions of the final image this will allow resizing in different ratio s for X and Y After setting the values in the numerical control the user should press Use settings to see the image change dimensions There are 4 filtertypes available to resample the image bell b spline lanczos and mitchell RegiStax will record the filter you have choosen Page 45 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Save Load Wee loaded Reset H ow sigh Meal Heather 5 i i Log based graph Masking This is a very new functionality for RegiStax Users would like to have the wavelets sharpen only certain areas In a lunar image users for instance like to sharpen the craters and craterlets but would like to keep the craterfloor rather smooth After starting the tool you will be shown a histogram see above This histogram shows the luminance values of the stacked image All luminances are rescaled to fit into a 0 255 range even if you are using 16bit files the histogram lo hi values will rescaled be O and 255 But this has no effects on the final image The slider below the histogram can be used to set the low and high values wavelets will only be active for pixels with a luminance between the 2 slider settings Only areas that are shown
51. gher than 65 of the highest quality image will be part of the selection In V5 we have added some functionality After alignment you can use the value to step through the images in steps of 5 of quality or jump to a user set value 3 Tracking settings group Track object This is by default on if off the program will restrict its alignment to the window of the 1 alignbox When this is on the program will remember the shift of the previous image when estimating the shift of the current image In most cases this is good enough to estimate alignment Predict track Sometimes the object on a set of frames moves in a predictable manner and faster than track object is able to trace Setting predict track can be usefull in those cases However if the object does NOT move in a preditable linear way do not set this control Misalign detectlevel NEW Region of interest Scan Frames Alignment Method Default None Multi Alignbox size 32 128 64 256 User set Alignbox 512 Alignment optig Align manually Align using Centre of gravity Fo I F m amm mi m t l Ca hd l E cm foal anil Lii gi Pai T om Be lm Use pre blurring Lowest quality Track object Predict track Misalign ee OO Misalign warning Ignore misaligned frames Processing area 512 bi Pixels Size This value is used to trigger if the other controls are used misalignment warnings Lowering this control
52. guess that the pixels will be influencd a lot by the surrounding pixels in the 5x5 matrix Using higher central values will make the effects of wavelets less aggressive and better controllable The gaussian fiilters are by default 0 10 this control allows you to set all of the filters directly and in an organised manner The initial value will be used for the 1 layer the 2 layer will be given a filtersize that is the same as the initial value but with a step fraction added So intial 0 1 with step O will set all 6 layers to 0 1 Initial 0 1 with step 0 1 will set layer 1 to 0 1 layer 2 to 0 11 layer 3 to 0 12 etc Each layer gets layer1 0O 1 added in this case Page 50 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Linegraphpanel Update Clear Zell f Use col and Left mousebutton to set Hace of the ine E 4 2 H mjm ot Rar Bay eel Sane he es F 4 F 4 Line graph tool Another new tool to inspect our data This tool allows you to inspect luminance values in the wavelet image on a lineseqment The linesegment is set by pressing the CTRL button and then setting a first green point by clicking with the leftmouse button and a 2 point by clicking still CTRL pressed with the mouse After clicking a graph will show the luminance intensities When you change the wavelet or other settings and press update you will get a new graph added You can have up to 3 graphs visible in the image after 3 times the 1 graph
53. he area and them move checkmark move area or and this is adviced you can simply set define area and then draw with the mouse a box around the area you want to use to estimate the shifts between the colour channels After drawing the area you will see a green box and a yellow box The green box is the area you have been drawing and the yellow box is the area that will be used to find the best shift for each colour channel After defining the area press estimate After some time watch the progressbar in the statusbar the image will be updated and the estimated shifts for each channel will become active If the estimates are not good you can always try and improve using the up down left right buttons for both the red and blue channel RGB Alignment Reset X RGB Align Area V Show Area Move Area Define Area X position Y position Blue 0 A 2 A Up Manual up Lt Rt Lt Rt Din Din Red channel Blue Channel Page 48 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 RGB Balance HistoRGB_Panel Auto balance Colourweight 1 00 5 iw Green 1 00 re This tool allows the users to change the way intensity of the colours is mixed to form an RGB colour image The graph shows a histogram for each of the colours Red Green and Blue Pressing the Auto balance function will start a procedure that estimates the best colour mix to get a good white balance This is however not always a good way to
54. ic ray effects The name sigma comes from statistical theory where it is used to describe a histogram For instance sigma 3 corresponds to selecting 99 of all available frames for a given pixel RegiStax will stack the images twice in the first run it estimates for every pixel the average pixel intensity and the variance Based on these 2 variables and using the sigma cut off values are calculated for each pixel If a pixel in a frame is higher or lower than the cutoff the user can prevent it from being Stacked Cut pixels below sigma low Makes the low sigma active when you have dead pixels this is a good way to remove the effects of them Cut pixels above sigma high Makes high sigma active when you have hot pixels or cosmic rays in the images this will remove the effects of them Reject highest value per pixel If only a few frames have hotpixels cosmic rays this might be enough to remove them from the stack Sigma This controls the amount of frames selected for the final stack a lower sigma will remove more frames from the stack Sigma s above 3 will nearly always have all frames in the stack and are therefore not usefull Search Events This opens a specialistic toolwindow text to be written Page 33 of 51 Create AVI File Sometimes RegiStax users want to save a registered set of images into an AVI file The Create AVI file group has all controls to do this Creating a registered AVI Codec NEW In previous versions R
55. in red the mask will be affected by wavelets The low and high numerical control have the same function as the 2 slidercontrols They will react to changes of the slider the Slider will NOT react on a change of the numerical controls Another important control is the Feather The feather is used to create a transition from pixels that have NO effects from the wavelets and pixels that have the FULL effects from the wavelets Any value lower than the low value and higher than the high value but within the feather range will be showing partial effects from wavelets linear function The mask for these values is not shown in bright red but a shaded red There are 2 methods available Clipping and Gradient Clipping limits the pixels that are affected by wavelets by luminance thresholds Gradient is more sensitive and lets the user select areas with high and low gradients in luminance The idea behind this is that an area with low gradient is probably less interesting to enhance with wavelets Think of the 1 method clipping when we have 2 crater floors with very different average luminance The 1 method will not be able to mask both of the floors without also masking part of the craterwalls of the darker crater The gradient method doesnt look at average intensity but looks at the changes in intensity around a pixel Often the gradient method is therefore the most powerfull The user can Create_Mask_ Panel Save Load Use loaced Reset x zm M
56. ix B4 2 41 2 41 as the best method Variable sized alignbox When this is on during alignpoint estimation RegiStax will ensure that no alignbox has a lot of overlap with adjacent alignpoints This can be very effective in creating small alignboxes for areas with fine details and creating larger alignboxes for the other areas Estimate Alignpoints Pressing this button will start the estimator depending on the setting it will detect up to 500 alignpoints The points will be shown on the screen If you have too many too little points you simply change the settings and press estimate alignpoints again If a master alignpoint was created this will not be overwritten Threshold Detectionlimit Radius These controls are used to limit the number of alignpoints used The alignpoint estimator first checks for each pixel in the image the differences in intensity with 15 surrounding pixels Raising threshold and or detectionlimit will decrease the number of alignmentpoints You should for your type of images find a setting that you feel works good Based on these settings up to 50 000 pixels in each image can be selected to estimate alignpoints If you set the threshold and or detectionlimit too low you might get a warning The radius setting comes into play after the pixels have been selected radius groups selected pixels together before the alignpoints are estimated Assigning a larger radius will limit the amount of alignpoints but they will mo
57. le click using the RIGHT MOUSE button Page 8 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 Step 3 ALIGNING The alignment stage will be used to do an initial registration of the alignpoint s This registration will be refined during the optimizer stage A good initial alignment will make the workload for the optimizer smaller best solution found more easily faster so this is an important stage for any subsequent processing In RegiStax V4 the user already had several ways to set Alignpoints In RegiStax V5 we have extended the options for the user There are 3 ways of setting alignpoints by hand let RegiStax estimate them or a mix of both In the text below you can see more about this we explain three ways of aligning images a Simple Aligning b Aligning using Gravity Centre c Aligning using filters a Simple Aligning This is more or less the same as the previous RegiStax versions The main difference is that multi point alignment will be done in one single processing run In V4 every alignpoint would be processed in seperate runs during alignment so for 50 alignpoints that would mean all images had to be loaded 50 times Loading images is time consuming and slows down processing In V5 we have therefore changed this to a simultaneous alignment of all alignpoints That speeds up alignment of multi points considerably using the new maximum amount of alignpoints 500 is however still timeconsuming During alignment you will see the a
58. lignpoints at every image in the sequence when an alignpoint drifts off compared to the master alignpoint 1 it will blink in red during alignment RegiStax will limit the drift to the value set by the user see Setting Alignpoints During alignment you will see in the statusbar on the lower right how much time RegiStax estimates that will be needed to finish alignment E j Align Li mit To start alignment just press the ALIGN button in the TABPAGE CONTROLS b Aligning using Gravity Centre Sometimes we are dealing with images that are difficult to align think off a solar image that nearly fills the whole image but hardly has any features eg solar Nea EEE spots In Registax V4 aligning these 32 128 512 images is hardly possible In V5 we have developed gravity centre alignment this type of alignment calculates the centre of gravity in each image based You can use this form of alignment as a Single option the gravity centre will then Region of interest Scan Frames Alignment Method Default Nore Multi User set Alignbox also be used as the alignpoint but you can also use and its adviced this form of alignment with multiple alignpoints The alignpoints can be set as we normally do but the gravity centre will serve as the master alignpoint Again alignpoints will be limited in drifting away from the position of the gravity centre point during alignment During optimizing the gravity centre will NOT
59. ls is different If so it will set colour or B W processing RG GB automatically Messages during optimizing create reference This allows the users to prevent certain messages to pop up 5 Debayer group Debayer RAW DSLR NEW This is still experimental but will allow the user to debayer images from DSLR camera s internally Only for Nikon and Canon this has been tested to some extent debayering internally improves often the amount of details available Use Debayer and Method This controls if and how images are debayered there are 4 debayer methods The letter combination stands for the colours used in the debayer matrix for the 2 topmost pixels This is a camera dependent setting so once a user knows which setting suits his camera will be shown on screen this should be used at all times Page 25 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 ALIGNPAGE Toolwindows Active options NEW This toolwindow only displays which special settings are Active Options X used the window is visible on all registax stages unless Darkframe Fit TIF stretch the user uses the X button to close the window Fleatield Filtering FFT GRAPH Toolwindow The FFT graph can be used to inspect if a choosen alignpoint is good enough for alignment When an alignpoint is good to be used for alignment a clear red circle should be visible in the middle of the FFT graph When this red circle is very large the FFT filter should be changed the same is valid
60. n see during optimizing Usage When the user has set the optimizer choices or left the defaults on you can either press the optimize amp stack button or the optimize button Using the last choice will keep you on the optimizer page you can change settings and try again or go whenever you want manually to the Stacking page by clicking on the green stack tab The optimize and stack option will start the optimizer and after the optimizer Optimize amp eee is finished it will also proceed to the stackingpage then it will Stack Page 13 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 stack all the frames and you will be ending up at the wavelets Create Reference all above settings of optimizer controls also apply to create reference Sometimes the user wants to optimize using a much improved reference frame especially when the individual images show loads of noise or distortion this can a be wise way to operate The Create Reference procedure can make a good referenceframe often using only a few frames 10s The user simply sets the number of frames that need to be stacked for each alignpoint This is different compared to V4 in V4 the user would set the number of frames to used for the referenceframe If the user would select 50 frames in V4 that would select the best 50 frames for alignpoint 1 and all other points would get the same 50 frames In V5 setting 50 frames alignpoint will make Registax select the 50 best frames for
61. of the original image NEW view compare this is a new control that allows the user to inspect what happens when changing settings in wavelets or other controls After the button is pressed the toolwindow will popup It shows a set of controls on top of the toolwindow The leftmost control allows the user to show the active image into either the TOP or BOTTOM image of the toolwindow There are 3 sections in the toolwindow a TOP image a BOTTOM image and completely below the DIFFERENCE image The 2 and 3 control allows the user to use the compare function using either 1x or 2x magnification Every time you change one of the controls the difference image on the bottom will show the difference Positioning the area you want to compare is done in the same fashion as for the zoom toolwindow Press CTRL and move the mouse to position the area to be inspected After that set your wavelets or any other control to a value you want to use as a default Then change the TOP to BOTTOM or vice versa and change the wavelets controls again You will see the effects of your each of your actions directly view stacksize when used this will show in red how many frames were used for every pixel in the image This can be helpful when inspecting images that show odd effects edges smearing Resize image this function can be used to save your images in a different size than the original smaller bigger RGB align sometimes the colour channels in an im
62. ompare Stacksize Resize RGB RGB Contrast Brightness Image Align Balance These are controls you will find in many image processing programs The settings for contrast brightness can be controlled Masking Denoise Wavelet using the slider and or using the numerical values Rightclicking Dering Filter on the slider resets it Clicking on the reset button resets all aa settings also the numerical values The hold button will not Show Create change the settings when the user starts a new processing run Linegraph stackslice loading images etc To Clipboard Sometimes we want to inspect how our images change when using different settings this is one of the tools that can help you do this When you have set the wavelet settings and anything else for a first trial press the to clipboard button This will copy the present image onto the clipboard Now change anything you wish in the wavelet or other settings pressing difference will show you where this image is different from the stored clipboard image You can also switch toggle between the current and clipboard image by clicking on the toggle control Contrast Brightness To Clipboard Difference Toggle E ee I iia pon mu u m gg a ia 4 Lf urreni mage Lo L m L D ae al r F J I hir Perm m pr p m m m l 14 Bi A f _ e oa arp Er LLI G L E om Clipboard front Page 39 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 WAVELETPAGE Toolwindows His
63. on differences compared to the reference frame Framelist When this is checkmarked the user will see a toolwindow with additional controls the controls let the users only for single frame image formats load save groups of images in one time All the frames are presented in a normal order the user can sort this before alignment or after alignment in a quality sorted order Selecting a frame in the framelist will display the frame on screen EXTENDED MODE To process LARGE AVI s RegiStax uses a so called extended mode Unfortunately different operating systems and AVIs seem to react different so we have had to create a rather complex control The extended mode control has 2 settings default and vista Vista users are adviced to use the vista setting Use Extended Mode For This is the complex part of the extended mode function The default setting is gt 2Gb On most PCs this will mean that any AVI smaller then 2Gb will be processed normal and any larger than 2GB will be in extended mode Other settings are gt 1Gb extended processing for any AVI larger than 1Gb never extended mode is not used and always We will try to add a page to the RegiStax webpage with settings that are used for several AVI types codecs on different operating systems Page 21 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 ALIGNPAGE Alignment options TAB Region of interest Scan Frames 1 Alignmen
64. or graphs The toolwindows can be placed at any location the user finds usefull The locations and size of the toolwindows are recorded and stored when you start RegiStax again it will be using the settings of the last time you used the program Page 1 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 INTERFACE SKINNING A new feature of RegiStax is that I I Y j A A a is supports skinning Skinning aeuts LastLayout_ Save Reset AVI Mode Normal means that a user can change I About File Version 5 0 0 103 25 11 Default the colours of all controls by choosing another skin In the ex Processing FFT Graph Show Frar then amples on this page you can see Tage Registration Graph show Zoo Dream the difference between two pre EE s defined skins Eos Human Leopard Office 2005 Office 2007 Black Office 2007 Blue Office 2007 Silver Office AP Alto Users can design skins and share them with others using freeware from http www mytreedb com view_downloads m soft i 75 html User created skins need to be ayouts LastLayout Save Reset __ AVI Mode Normal located in the RegiStax directory a to be detectable About File Version 5 0 0 103 25 11 Default 12MB HL FFT Graph Show Fra Athen processing s Registration Graph C Show 00 Dream kSlice mage Eos a Human Leopard Office 2003 Office 2007 Black Office 2007 Blue Of
65. ow that shows all available frames The user can select unselect frames and also inspect the estimated position s of the alignpoint s Show Stackgraph This opens a special toolwindow for both single and multipoint alignment this toolwindow allows the user to limit the number of frames in the final stack for each alignpoint by setting either quality or difference limitations Do not Stack Sometimes the images that are stacked have visible edges around them sometimes due to pre processing this control will not stack a user specified border of pixels from each frame Calculate Stackslice NEW EXPERIMENTAL This control will calculate a special dataset that can be used at the wavelet stage to see the effects of wavelets on different amounts of frames stacked Multipoint stacking options Fast method This method will use a default way to assign pixels to the nearest alignpoint not using this method will make RegiStax calculate for each image how the pixels should be assigned to alignpoints Use feather of X pixels Stacking Options Options Expand to maximum imagesize stretch histogram after stacking Normalize intensity over frames Show Stacklist show Stackgraph Do not stack g pixels at the frameedge Calculate StackSlice Multi point stacking options Y Fast method Use feather of alt pixels Show alignment sections Optimal Derotate Morphing Sigma Stacking Active Pel operations during stacking Cut peels b
66. r that initial run every frame will be stacked again but the extreme values will NOT be stacked The sigma setting sets the level of the Page 14 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 extreme value cutoffs a sigma higher than 3 will only detect few or even no frames above below the cut offs Step 6 WAVELETS Many things have been changed and added to the WAVELETS section The default functionality however using the wavelet sliders etc has more or less stayed the same We explain some of the functions available If any of the functions becomes used its button will remain in a highlight state until the function is closed or the button is pressed again The buttons toggle the state of the toolwindows Most of the functions are located on the rightside FUNCTIONTAB group called functions Histogram This opens the histogram window and allows the user to stretch the histogram Gamma This opens the gamma window functionality as in V4 NEW Colour Mixing this opens a special window which allows the user to create a B W image from a colour image Additionally when LRGB stacking was used the user can also mix the colours This replaces the old LRGB controls view zoomed This opens the zoom panel The user can set the area to inspect with the zoom panel by pressing the CTRL key and moving the mouse Once the CTRL key is released the zoom area will stay locked at that location The zoompanel shows a 2x zoomed version
67. rea gave Registered as BMP Sort On Quality Create integrated AVI file Method 0 Moving average mpressed Average of 2 A Frames Filtering Reset Active Fre defined fiters Flat 7 n ei ah a Interlace Active Save Integrated ie none odd amp even lines odd lines even lines frame the set of frames to build it changes so frame 1 in the new AVI will be when using 5 frames build using a stack of frame 1 5 frame 2 will be a stack of frame 2 6 etc Compressed Will create an AVI with far less frames compressing with 5 frames means that frame 1 of the new AVI is a stack of 1 5 frame 2 is a stack of 6 10 etc SAVE INTEGRATED Pressing this will start the saving procedure Page 34 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 STACKPAGE Toolwindows Stack Frames Allow multiple selected v F Frame 98 0 MF Frame 1340 i Frame 138 0 EF Frame 133 Frame 40 bf Frame 237 0 EF Frame 1040 EF Frame 2 0 EF Frame 200 0 iF Frame 1930 if Frame 1990 Frame PSS i Frame 167 0 EF Frame 910 EF Frame 90 0 bf Frame 117 if Frame 2130 ie Frame 49 0 MF Frame 2320 i Frame 10 ie Frame 225 BF Frame 1740 i Frame 1470 EF Frame 1020 i Frame 269 0 MF Frame 1950 EF Frame 1060 if Frame 1090 Ca Mu A Stacklist The stacklist allows the user to inspect the frames that have been aligned optimized The user can select a file in the stacklist to check if the image quality is as expecte
68. rs will create layers with more blurred imagedata Users should experiment with settings they feel are working best for their images Each set of images depending on many factors might need different but sometimes alike settings Load save schemes This allows the user to save all wavelet settings into a file for later usage Loading a scheme will directly change the settings Available schemes At startup registax checks the registax directory for the availability of schemes the user can open the control below the available schemes text and select a scheme Selecting a scheme will directly show the effects of that scheme on the image This control allows the user to step through a few previously recorded schemes to find a good startingpoint for the image enhancement using wavelets 0 10 1 0 Page 38 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 WAVELETPAGE These are the main controls that are visible on the rightside on the waveletpage These controls can be hidden by pressing the gt gt button that is visible not on this screenprint to the right of the functionsgroup Functionsgroup Most of the commonly used additional functions of RegiStax are Functions available from this group Most of these buttons will call a toolwindow that will show up on screen These toolwindows are described in more detail in the toolwindow part of the Histogram Gamma Colour waveletpage controls Mixing View View View foomed C
69. s the CTRL button and move the mouse When you want to keep a location in view simply release the CTRL button Stackview The stackview is used to check if multi point alignment has worked as expected it will show in red the differences in amount of stacked frames for each alignpoint In the above image the edges are clearly visible since feather was used during stacking All the sections between the feathered areas should be showing equal intensities of red unless the user specifically wanted different amounts of stacked frames for certain alignpoints The edges between alignpoint sections should be well defined when they look very wide for a given alignpoint section this can point to misalignment Page 43 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 WAVELETPAGE Toolwindows Compare Panel Tap e ix Bell gt Clip lt Clip x Comparepanel NEW This is a new toolwindow that allows the user to inspect the effects of using wavelets and other controls on the image After startup of the tool you will see an image as shown to the right The tool shows a 3 panel image the top and middle part of the image are user controlled You can decide what will be shown in those panels the lower panel shows the difference between the lower panel and the upperpanel compare the effects of different wavelet settings on the image is done by using the controls on the top The leftmost control tells top bottom where the active image on
70. s the nearest default alignboxsize thats the area that will be used for image quality estimation and the inner alignbox is the area that will be used for alignment This allows the user to use small alignboxes that align properly but also will estimate image quality based on a good amount of pixels Most other features are merely usefull in multi point alignment The examples below are therefore aimed at explaining the ways to set multipoints Additionally in V5 the user can load a separate reference frame bmp png This frame will serve the Same purpose as a chosen reference frame but can be loaded directly into the software and will NOT be a part of the final stacked image The advantage of such a reference frame is that it can be true in terms of topology location of features and space between them and also have a good image quality The reference frame needs to have exactly the same size pixels as the images that are being processed A good way to construct a separate reference frame is to do an initial processing with only a few widely scattered align points and then to create and save an unsharpened image containing only a handfull of frames a Setting Alignpoints by hand This is the method we allready had at hand in previous versions The user selects Multi in the alignmentmethod box and a multi alignpanel pops up This panel will show the alignpoints and also allows the user to load alignpoints and save them also for later usage A new
71. set alignbox This point will alignpoint 1 and when you estimate the other points they will not A 2 al TA overwrite this point and also keep their distance Next control is the E M dist Method we have method1 method2 and matrix The matrix will setup pem aa porte 5 s between points ptt a set of alignboxes arranged as a matrix the user can set both the 10 Free space to ed number X Y and the size of the alignboxes The default X Y of 2 will S setup a scheme of 2 x 2 4 alignboxes all 64x64 pixels large This FFTsize x y can sometimes be usefull But most of the time we will be using method 1 or 2 they work slightly different and the user has to find out atrix 54 2 2 2 what works best for the user s images The method uses the threshold detectionlimit radius to calculate possible alignpoints Increasing the threshold range 2 15 or detectionlimit will lower the number of alignpoints The detectionlimit will block setting alignpoints on pixels with an intensity lower than the detectionlimit The radius calculates the alignpoint strength based on an area around the pixel A larger area will create less alignpoints The minimum distance and free space to edge control how close alignpoints are allowed to be near to each other When calculating the best alignpoints RegiStax orders the points on strenght and then works from the strongest to the weakes found alignpoint If the next alignpoint candid
72. sing SELECT Pressing this button will open the file selection dialog you can choose depending on the filetypes single of multiple files to be processed MRU Most Recently Used BUTTON When pressed this shows the last 10 filenames that were used and allows you to load that file again When you use groups of BMP s these will not be loaded through this control unless you save the list of BMP filenames as a RegiStax Frame List option in the frame list window PROJECT BUTTON This button will light up when a project is available for the current SER AVI RFL RegiStax Framelist file that is getting processed Projectfiles carry the same names as the original files that were used for processing Currently the user cannot save projectfiles using other names Loading Projectfiles also will only work if the projectfile has the same name as the file that is getting processed When the Project Button is pressed a menu opens with these options LOAD If enabled this indicates that a default PROJECTFILE was previously and is available to be loaded LOAD as Will open a dialog for the user to select a previously saved projectfile NO checks are made if the projectfile was saved using the same set of images SAVE Allows the user to SAVE the alignment optimizer data for later re usage or for seeing analysis Saving can be done after ALIGNMENT and or after OPTIMIZING Saving can also be done after running CREATE REFERENCE and or optimizing
73. sing When the batch file is opened the user can see which commands are used during normal processing These commands will be written in the left window of the batch tool The user can copy these to the right window Commands in the right window will be processed when pressing the RUN button Users can also save load batchfiles You can even start RegiStax with a batchfilename in the commandline and it will load and process that file The command list see below is also available as buttons in between the left and right window When a command button is pressed the text belonging to the command will be written in the right window The current command list is Page 19 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 SELECT xxxxx When xxxxx is specified the file will be loaded and the specified directory will be used for most other commands for instance saving When xxxxx is not specified the user will be asked to select a userfile LOADRAP xxxxx When xxxxx is specified a RegiStaxAlignPoints file is loaded A directory name should NOT be specified When xxxxx is not specified the user will be asked to select a file ALIGN Starts the alignmentprocess LIMIT xxxxx Limits the number of frames selected for optimizing stacking xxxxx sets the number of frames CREATEREF xxxxx Starts the CREATE REFERENCE procedure and uses xxxxx frames per alignpoints OPTIMIZE Starts the optimizer OPTIMIZE_STACK Optimizes and Stacks STACK Starts
74. st likely be better in terms of interesting features Minimum distance between points We do not want alignpoints to overlap too much using minimum distance will ensure that each alignpoint is at least X pixels away from the next RegiStax starts by setting the strongest in terms of interesting features alignpoints first working down the list of possible alignpoints and checking if they are not to close to a better alignpoint Free space to edge Often we do not want alignpoints to be too close to the edge this setting ensures the outer edge of the alignboxes is X pixels away from the edges of your image Matrix The controls here are simply how the matrix will be created the free space to edge control also works for matrix The X and Y specify how many alignpoints will be created and FFT size states the size of the alignbox Free space to edge Page 28 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 ALIGNPAGE Toolwindows Power spectrum Registrationgraph toolwindow The image above shows the registrationgraph before and during alignment The red line in the graph is the so called powerspectrum The powerspectrum was used as the basic tool for image quality estimation in the first versions of RegiStax Currently most users do not use the qualitymethods classic human associated with this graph anymore The graph shows a relative histogram of image features When the histogram has a large tail to the right this
75. t group Alignment Method Alignment Method a o Default None Default is alignment using 1 alignpoint Multi uses up to 500 Multi alignpoints and None will NOT align the images a Alignbox size E _ Alignbox size These are the default sizes alignboxes can have alignboxes are D 32 126 512 used to estimate the quality of the image around an alignpoint ands g 64 256 also to estimate the shifts between frames i User set Alignbox NEW _ User set Alignbox New in V5 is the option for users to use Alignboxes of any given size When this is set the user will see when setting the Align manually alignpoint 2 boxes the outerbox corresponds to the next higher Align using Centre of gravity default Alignbox size and the inner box is the user defined vot alignbox During alignment the outerbox will be used to estimate image quality and the inner box will be used to estimate image De Rotate movement eee eee IDEC Aan aai cave derotated JPEGs Setting this will ask the user to click on the alignpoint s for every image in the sequence Only usefull for images with unpredictable movements sradient2 hi Align using Centre of Gravity NEW Setting this will introduce alignment by Centre of Gravity Centre of Gravity will be shown for the image currently on screen Especially for aligning planetary or other images that are objects in a dark space eg ISS this is a very powerfull addition It will Tracking Settings follow th
76. togram Log based graph Stretch Smoothing value This histogramtool can be used to inspect the luminance and for colour images also the RGB values in the image If the user wants to change the part of the histogram that is visible in the image you can change the settings of the sliders left and right or change the numerical values in the left right controls low and high hivalue After pressing Stretch the image will make adapt to the user set values You can reset back to the original values by pressing the reset button on top Other controls Log based graph sometimes the histogram has values in a large part of the range but only for a few pixels The histogram graph then hardly shows them Using log based graphs you can easier see where the intensities range from smoothing value The histogram graph will be smoothed to show an nice and easy to understand graph you can set smoothing to 1 to get a non smoothed histogram Page 40 of 51 RegiStax 5 Manual 21 mar 2009 V1 1 WAVELETPAGE Toolwindows Gamma Gamma _Panel Load Save Reset X right click insert a point ctrifeft click delete a point double dick reset Linear Gamma overrules graph 1 00 ts The gamma toolwindow allows the user to change the intensities of the stacked and enhanced image Normally the gamma is a straight line This means that every pixel intensity X axis will be translated to the sam
77. ts the optimizer will run 50 rounds and every frame will be loaded 50 times In V5style the new default all alignpoints are optimized at the same moment You will be able to see the aligned area for up to 3 alignpoints during optimizing Optimizer difference The optimizer tries to find the best shift by minimizing the difference between the aligned area on the frame that is getting processed and the referenceframe The actual difference can be calculated in 2 ways squared or absolute When using squared the intensity difference between 2 pixels is squared and summed for the alignmentarea When using absolute the difference between 2 pixels is calculated but if the difference is negative it will be treated as a positive difference again all the differences are summed for the alignmentarea In V4 we only had squared available in V5 absolute can also be used Theoretically there is no clear sign of either method being the absolute best If large scale user testing will point in a certain direction this website will be mentioning it Optimizer limits These are mainly valid when not using the fast optimizer the optimize until setting is a threshold If at the end of the optimizer run the total sum of differences all frames has descreased more than the set value in another run of the optimizer will try to optimize even further The other control was allready explained under fast optimizer Graphs These are the optional graphs the user ca
78. using freeware from http www mytreedb com view_downloads m soft i 75 html Skins need to be located in the RegiStax directory to be useable AVI NORMAL EXTENDED DISPLAY ONLY This will display NORMAL for AVI s lt 1Gb and EXTENDED for larger AVI s Larger AVI s are processed with a different routine and this display shows the user if the AVI is larger than 1Gb When users process a larger AVI in windows Vista it might be necessary to set the Vista LargeAVI checkbox the circumstances under which this is needed have not been totally determined at this time If when loading a Large AVI in windows Vista does not work properly first try to set this field CANCEL amp Restart Pressing this button will stop any action as soon as possible Be aware that some actions will need to be finished first in order to not crash the application You can also restart RegiStax automatically when you press Cancel In general restarting RegiStax after using CANCEL is strongly advised After cancelling RegiStax the application has been found to be less stable BATCH RegiStax allows the users to control RegiStax with commands The commands can be saved loaded for later usage The setup is mainly usefull currently for AVI SER image and RegiStaxFramelist RFL processing The batch processor does NOT check if the sequence of actions planned by the user in the batchfile is logical It simply reads every batchcommand and starts the associated proces
79. velets on the dark or bright side of the gradient The dark side of the gradient is the area between the topic and the surrounding darker area for instance for Stars this tool is very effective for that if you only use the dark side and limit the functionality of the wavelets the outside surrounding of the star will not be affected by the wavelets The bright side controls in the same fashion but on the inside pixels of the star For stars often limiting the dark side is enough but for instance for lunar craters that have been overlit during recording you might need to use both controls to limit deringing For both controls its adviced to use them together with the view compare toolbox that will allow you to inspect the changes in more detail Waveletfilter this function is already available in RegiStax for several versions Allows the user to manually control the filters used to enhance the images NEW Show Linegraph sometimes users want to know how things change on the images in a more graphical way Linegraph allows you to inspect the image intensities on a line between 2 points The user can set these points by pressing the CTRL and clicking the left mouse button After 2 points have been set the line of intensities between them will be displayed The user can then changes wavelets or other controls pressing UPDATE in the toolwindow will update the graph It will show up to 4 different lines at a time You

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