Free Lighthouse script for PixInsight Version 1.4 Update

[00:00:00]Hello beautiful people and welcome to my channel. Today I'm presenting a version 1.4 of Lighthouse Script. [music] Lighthouse is a completely free script for Pix Insight and I do plan to keep it that way. If you'd like to help support its development, you can buy me a coffee or join my Patreon page. The funds will support new features, testing, and it will allow more time for me to create even more tools for this Pixight community. So, thank you. Very excited to show you what's new in the version 1.4. [music] Let's start. Velet sharpening. It's an advanced type of sharpening per channel white balance. I fixed the picker to be more accurate while while white balancing the image. I've also added auto white balance so it's even easier to make the white balance if you need one. I've added multiple mask regions. Very excited to show you that.

[00:01:17]Some of you asked for invert selection.

[00:01:20]So, I've added that. [music] Of course, apply progress now has a percentage and what's going on the behind the scenes when you apply on a larger image. So, you have to wait a bit. Faster apply is an optimization for a speed up. And that's the last of the updates.

[00:01:43]Let's start from top to bottom. The first thing is auto white balance and fixed picker.

[00:01:51]If you have color calibrated your image, you don't have to color calibrate it again. But let's say you did some screw-ups and you didn't calibrate it right. You can see the histogram is not well aligned here.

[00:02:07]So you can just click auto white balance and it will align the histogram. So you can have before after.

[00:02:18]This is before and this is after.

[00:02:25]So it's a little better image. Color fixed.

[00:02:30]Also the picker is now more accurate. Let me pull out the moon image.

[00:02:37]It's yellow. And the moon is not yellow.

[00:02:41]We can pick. Let me just reset this.

[00:02:46]If we go to auto white balance, it will try to improve, but it's still a bit yellow. It's okayish, but if we boost up the saturation, we see the yellowess coming out still. So, we can use now the picker to be more accurate. Let me find a good spot on the moon. We are aiming for a natural gray.

[00:03:09]Okay, let's see.

[00:03:12]This is great. Now it's much better color calibration of the moon.

[00:03:20]And now the colors are better and accurate.

[00:03:29]Cool. Big update is multiple mask region. [music] This is a must-h have option. You go to the luminosity masks, enable luminosity masks, and now you have some additional options here.

[00:03:45]It's not [music] select region anymore.

[00:03:48]It's add region. So you click on that and it's like in the last version. Just mark the part of the image that you want to select.

[00:04:03]And you can now add another region. I want to mask this dis disc this in a sort of disk.

[00:04:15]Okay, we have now two masks. Let me show you the masks.

[00:04:22]Uh it's lights depth one and target.

[00:04:27]Of course, we can hide ants and see. And we can also invert the masks.

[00:04:37]The marching ants will change color to blue when it's inverted. So you know if you have blue ants the mask is inverted and you when you have yellow ants their mask is [music] normal. Of course you will also have a click on the invert. So you you'll know [music] when it's inverted by this also.

[00:05:01]Okay. Now we can manipulate. [music] Let me hide the ants. We can manipulate the chosen mask. You can select the mask on the image for which you want to improve.

[00:05:17]We are selecting this. And these two options are now for this disc this mask only.

[00:05:28]You can lower the strength if it's too high.

[00:05:32]We can manage the [clears throat] select feather and so on.

[00:05:38]When we switch just click on this mask and we can now adjust a strength for this mask and feather for this mask.

[00:05:54]Let's hide the masks. So you can manipulate what strength and feather you want for particular mask that you have on the image.

[00:06:07]So that's cool. Let me remove this and we can I don't know we can tone down the exposure. Maybe this image is already processed, but you can see the before after. If I want to turn down these galaxies because they are too bright maybe.

[00:06:34]Clickity clack.

[00:06:42]Let me show the mask.

[00:06:46]The strength for this I would like it more of strength for this because it's a brighter the strength for this is okay.

[00:06:58]So we want to apply because it's brighter in the mask the slider the adjustments will be harder on the white masks.

[00:07:10]Hide the ends. We can now remove show mask.

[00:07:16]And now we'll have a harder exposure than before. So that's way that's how you can manipulate the mask regions when you have a couple of things that you want to change, but there are different brightness levels. So you can manage [music] it with the masks and the strength of the masks. Of course, you can go with the white white mask and click there. Here we can we can also change the white mask per selection.

[00:08:00]We turn this into white mask. The strength also applies to the white mask.

[00:08:05]So, if you have a brighter object that you want to tone down, you can have a stronger mask. And if you have a lower brightness object that you also want to tone down, but not exactly the same as this one, you can lower the strength and the effect will be smaller.

[00:08:29]Okay, let me remove show mask hide ends.

[00:08:38]Because it's a white mask, we have to create a bigger feather.

[00:08:49]So, it hides the edges.

[00:08:54]Before, after. It still has some edging, but it's not important right now.

[00:09:06]Great, isn't it?

[00:09:10]You can remove the mask. The one that is selected will be removed.

[00:09:18]And now you can we can remove this mask.

[00:09:21]And that's how you can remove all the masks one by one. Of course, if you want the effect to be applied on the background, uh let's add a region here.

[00:09:47]Let's invert the mask. Now it's blue. We can show the mask feather is already on and let me strength will be. So this applies now on the inverted mask. These options are applying on the inverted mask because this is not masked. Everything outside is masked and that counts as a mask.

[00:10:15]Right? So we are applying this options only on the background now.

[00:10:23]So we want to protect this galaxy from some adjustments.

[00:10:29]And when we uncclick the show mask, hide the ants.

[00:10:36]You can now see if you turn down the background, this galaxy will stay bright as before.

[00:10:46]show you before after of course I didn't mask it well but that's not the point now everything is tone toning down except the selected mask but it's not selected it's inverted you know what I mean you'll get it it's blue okay I know it's inverted it.

[00:11:16]Click it. Click remove it and reset it all.

[00:11:25]And we are back to beginning. So that's select multiple regions update. And now moving on to the last update. The most important one for me is wavelet sharpening.

[00:11:41]You can click here. It has its own box and this is how it looks. So what is a wavelet sharpening? It's it's based on atro vlet transform that you have in pixight as a processing module and it slices the image uh into six wavelets and [snorts] they are based on the pixel size. So you can sharpen a first slice that is based on one pixel and you can sharpen the finest detail uh on a one pixel size.

[00:12:17]So let me show you. It's very visible on the planets and the moon.

[00:12:24]Before after. Okay, let me squeeze it some more.

[00:12:29]And you can see the fine details of the moon are now sharpening.

[00:12:35]But if you don't have fine details uh in the image and it's [music] a bit blurry, you don't have a good seeing that night, you can go to the rest of the wavelets and find the right spot for the sharpening of that particular region or planet or nebula etc. So we are now applying the sharpening on a two pixel size.

[00:13:07]Let me show you how it looks on a four pixel size. It's getting bigger now.

[00:13:13]It's similar to the clarity.

[00:13:17]When you choose the clarity radius, you'll also choosing the pixel size that you want the clarity to be based on. But you can only pick one size for the one adjustment. And here you can pick six sizes and apply dnoising also to that particular wavellet layer.

[00:13:43]We can go to four.

[00:13:46]And now we having some artifacts that we don't want because this is a good image of the moon. And it's very sharp in the beginning. I can use the first two wavelets for it to get a sharper craters and details out. We can also use now auto white balance to have an accurate color of the moon.

[00:14:22]bit of contrast.

[00:14:25]Let me lighten up.

[00:14:28]We can go to the whites. We can also use now because the background is black.

[00:14:36]Press alt and move the blacks to the left.

[00:14:44]So you see now the blacks will be black. That's how you can clean your backgrounds from planets and moon images.

[00:14:55]So now we know that this part of the image is blacky black.

[00:15:05]Bit of saturation.

[00:15:11]It's still a bit greenish.

[00:15:15]Let me choose a picker to have some better color balancing.

[00:15:23]Okay, good enough. [music] And that's how you can sharpen the moon.

[00:15:34]And this is particularly good on the planet images.

[00:15:42]Let me show you. This is a recording of Jupiter.

[00:15:47]As you can see, it's quite blurry. And we can use, by the way, the filter has two filters, the default and gaussian.

[00:16:00]The differences are the default version is crispier. It uses a small smaller kernel shape uh three t three tap shape.

[00:16:11]And the goian uses a five tap shape kernel and it's a a smoother effect of sharpening.

[00:16:20]So when you see some artifacts on the default filter like oversharpening or maybe some halos, you can switch to the gaus gausian and it's likely that they will disappear or or turn down. So let's now sharp. If we go to the pixel one, we don't have any details in the pixel one wavelength because it's too blurry. It's not on that layer. This image of Jupiter is not on a one pixel scale level. So, we cannot sharpen it.

[00:16:58]We will just sharpen the noise on that level.

[00:17:03]The details are in other wavel uh layers.

[00:17:09]They are also not in the second two pixel.

[00:17:14]So let's write third third. So now we can see some details popping up. I have some artifact artifact here but it's not important now. So now we can see on the third wavelet we have sharpening of the Jupiter.

[00:17:38]Now let's go to fourth.

[00:17:44]Let's click on auto white balance so we can balance out the colors. We can even go this far to make it pop.

[00:17:58]Let's go with the whites to make it even shinier.

[00:18:05]And let's try now the fifth wavelet.

[00:18:09]Okay, now it's maybe going overboard.

[00:18:12]So now you can see that this image of Jupiter is on the third and fourth wavelet. The first two are not exactly doing anything.

[00:18:23]We are I switched to go gausian accidentally, but now you can see the difference how the linear default version is crispier and gausian is more softer.

[00:18:44]You'll get the hang of it. And now you can move on the strength.

[00:18:49]If you oversharpen, you can play with the strength and [music] not go that far.

[00:18:57]It's always good to not zoom in, but zoom out. But I can zoom out because it's a smaller image.

[00:19:10]Now we can play with it. Even more sharpening. I will add on a third.

[00:19:16]So the textures are popping out on the north and the south side. And this is the before after it's amazing amazingly better.

[00:19:31]So you now you can see the power of the wavelet sharpening and how [music] how can you manipulate it uh via these wavelength layers of sharpening.

[00:19:44]Also we can do is remove some noise immediately on that wavelet layer. So that's another thing you can do to make this image even better. Not this image but every image.

[00:20:06]Is this okay?

[00:20:08]It's much much better. Let me try.

[00:20:15]to see if there is any. Now I'm introducing the noise. You can see by moving this slider too far, it's not needed because I don't sharpen any textures because there are none on that layer, only noise.

[00:20:36]I hope you get the hang of this tool because I think it will be great for planets and the moon and for the nebulas also.

[00:20:48]Let's try some nebula. Hello, Mr. Pacman.

[00:20:52]Let me zoom in. Now you see in the Pac-Man we have some interesting stuff going on and we want to sharpen it.

[00:21:05]And let's use a gausian.

[00:21:10]Let's see on what layer are these details.

[00:21:16]They are on level one some of it. But this is way too strong.

[00:21:23]Before after before, after remember we are introducing noise when we are sharpening also. So we can do some D noise as well while sharpening.

[00:21:37]Is this okay? I don't know if you can see it but let me move it some more.

[00:21:45]So the first layer of sharpening is done. We are sharpening this black nebulas in the Pacman. Let me try the level two.

[00:21:57]So we are now sharpening these parts of the nebula that didn't sharpen with the layer one.

[00:22:06]Also maybe too hard.

[00:22:09]Some noise reduction as well.

[00:22:13]Before. After. Before. After let's now try level three. We have some large objects that we can sharpen. Of course, this has effect on also on this brighter stuff in the nebula.

[00:22:33]Let me see some more.

[00:22:37]We can go overboard so we can see what's going on.

[00:22:44]We can now lower [music] it down. See the before after.

[00:22:49]So now you can see how are we able to sharpen it via wavelets.

[00:22:57]This this third wavelet layer is not affecting the first one. It will not affect this and this that we already sharpened with the first layer.

[00:23:11]So, we can always always go back to the first one and make some changes if you don't like the noise or the sharpening details.

[00:23:22]And now you can see how the contrast pops out and we can see more of this white bright nebula uh in the in the core.

[00:23:34]You can play with sliders here to see what effects will give you. Of course, the fourth one is already too large and it will sharpen stuff that we don't want to sharpen.

[00:23:51]So, we we will not use it. This part will be maybe you'll use it someday but usually you don't get to the fifth and sixth wavellet. If you have some very very blurry images then this uh wavellet uh layers will have an effect but usually you'll not use you did the adjustments and you're ready to apply. If you have a large image, this is a 25 megapixel image. Uh if you have mosaics, it will get even larger.

[00:24:29]And when you hit apply, you will see now the percentage and the behind the scenes what he's doing. This is a real time preview. Now he's applying and you know what is he's applying and you can see now what's going on and don't have to guess if he's done or if the pix has an error. Okay, it's done and you have a finished image. So that's new. So that will conclude the updates for the version 1.4.

[00:25:02]Hope you'll have some fun with it.

[00:25:05]Comment, like, subscribe, and see you in another one. Bye-bye.

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