StarXterminator and More with Russ Croman

Leave comments below to let Russ know what you think!
The latest version of StarXterminator is yet another leap forward in the clean identification and extraction of stars and their related artifacts. In this video meet Russ and learn more about the person behind the software and how it has improved!
Another way to let Russ know you saw this late breaking update, is to use the coupon code "abs10" for a 10% discount when buying one of Russ's innovative software tools. Discount good until the end of September 2022.
See Russ Croman's website at: www.rc-astro.com/
(Thumbnail is a portion of the Pleiades star cluster... without stars!)
#pixinsight #pixtv #croman #starxterminator
More at: AdamBlockStudio...
Those just starting out in PixInsight will enjoy FastTrack Training! www.adamblocks.... (see the video @www.youtube.co.... )
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[@timmyers3428]

Ok I am now a true believer, I have watching all the YT videos of StarXT and NoiseXT, and telling myself I am not spending the $$ to get these tools. Working a a frustratingly difficult integration of images, (light pollution, Moon light pollution) I just couldn't get these images to clean up. I broke down and tried the free trial of NoiseXT, and as Adam said, one click and my image was totally transformed. I immediately purchased the permanent license and followed up with a StarXT license. Absolutely wonderful tools

[@robertocoleschi4025]

The most innovative guys in the world of digital processing: I've been following you for years, you are a guarantee ..

[@alfogator]

Who needs Marvel when we can watch these superheroes!

[@dariosalerio2801]

What to say!?! A reference for astrophotography !!! Go on like this ... to benefit all lovers of this passion !!!

[@Brisbane_Astro]

Got both of them and they have vastly improved my processing flows.

[@PatJones82]

@Enteraname Agreed. EXCELLENT work by Russ! I stated the same but my comment was removed for some reason.

[@ruthlessrog1]

I got the Star/Gradient/Noise software recently. Now im playing around with old linear images, getting crazy results. These are game changing!

[@AdamBlock]

Excellent!

[@Xanthus723]

Thanks for sharing the background and insight into these tools. I happily use both on every image now.

[@craiglowery4427]

Wonderful interview with Russ

[@AdamBlock]

thanks for watching...

[@komr323]

Wonderful talk!! Would be interested to see the screening technique than adding the star back to the original photo.

[@PhilFXPhoenix]

Great video, nice to see Russ Croman in person. Actually knew about him before I got into astrophotography as too am an electrical engineer and Russ has done some amazing work in the area of switch capacitor analog design for CMOS devices. At least it was that area where I was doing some work and I read a lot of his papers and work. Looking forward to using his tools in my Astrophotography journey. Thanks Adam for hosting this. Looking forward to many more.

[@jeromeyesavage9628]

Outstanding set of tools...

[@Makrem]

Thank you to Adam Block and Russ Croman !

[@steveweintraub1113]

I too have purchased them both, amazing tools. Thank you, Adam for featuring Russ and going into the details of each process. I love how Russ mentioned he’s a “Apple fan”; clearly both of those processes follow the streamlined Apple logic to achieve the desired results.

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks for watching!

[@marshawilcox]

I'll add my voice to the chorus of thanks for these excellent tools. They are indeed an integral part of my workflow now. It is wonderful for me to "meet" Russ - thanks for doing the interview, Adam.

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks Marsha!

[@markmayer9290]

NXT was a game changer for me - now I'm convinced to get StarXterminator. Thanks Adam for a great video explaining how SXT was developed and what its capable of.

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks for watching!

[@bnkohrn]

I will be purchasing both after my trip to the Black Forest Star Party next week. Thanks for interviewing Russ, Adam. It was really helpful to see the results of his hard work.

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks Nick!

[@rudibarani]

thanks for the very interesting interview!

[@trevorgreen2232]

Thank you both for a great informative presentation

[@AdamBlock]

thanks for watching!

[@billblanshan3021]

Great job guys! Both of you are pioneers in this wondeful hobby 🙂

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks Bill! You are making your own waves...

[@billblanshan3021]

@@AdamBlock Na, I am just riding them with the rest of y'all

[@dalep2842]

I have them both as well Adam, thanks for doing this video with Russ! I look forward to future updates as well as new tools that Russ comes up with!

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks!

[@martinsastrophotography]

Thanks for the great video Adam. I use GradientXTerminator, StarXTerminator and NoiseXTerminator on a regular basis as part of my workflow. They are just incredible, especially version 2 of StarXTerminator...I used to spend ages "tidying up" using a clone tool after using StarXTerminator but now I don't have to any more. I am an Electronics Engineer and Engineering Manager just like Russ was, and have started writing my own astrophotography related software tools as well (I wish they were as good as Russ's!) so I can relate to the emotions and passion that Russ described in your interview. Thanks again. I enjoyed watching this.

[@slmdaddy1]

purchased these from Russ website and both work very well. Excited to see what Russ comes up with next. Thanks for the chat Adam nice to see learn about Russ

[@AdamBlock]

I did want this to be more of an interview...rather than just an announcement. Glad you liked it!

[@bengterlandsson7921]

These tools are really helpful! Great presentation, nice to get to know some of the background of how these came to life. Happy user of star exterminator. Clear skies.

[@AdamBlock]

Excellent!

[@MarkManner]

Hi, great interview, and great tools!

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks Mark!!

[@Aerostar509]

Just downloaded the new version and can't wait to try it out. Thanks

[@DieterWiedenhofer]

Many thanks to both of you! You make our passion more enjoying and life easier. Highly appreciated! Best regards from Bavaria!

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks for checking it out.

[@gomanastro]

Great video! I was fortunate to meet both of you at AIC....great conference too. thanks for all your advancements of our "hobby".

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks Greg!

[@RigoFromSpain]

Super tools 👌

[@mrrockenrock]

Great tool, and creative application for AI machine learning. Thanks to you and Adam working together and presenting a great video! I don't quite understand the discussion (start 29:40) where Adam asked... Would you like to discuss the subtraction and the unscreening of stars. What does this mean, and which is StarXterminator doing, and is there another tool you both are referencing? Is the stars image resulting from StarXterminator the one with the weaked brightness and with color inverted? I did not notice any inversion when I look at the starless image resulting from my running StarXterminator on Flaming Star nebula. A little context would help.

[@davidecattani8282]

Maybe I'm saying something wrong, but NoiseX and that class of tools are inducing a significant step forward in the astrophotography world progress in that is allowing to reach SNR levels unobtainable by optical/electronical means, probably both in amateur and, I guess, professional areas. In the end it's all about SNR enormous increase. Thanks so much for the work, for this very interesting interview and for the contribution to AI research!

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks for watching.

[@rickbohart6788]

both tools are outstanding . Thanks for all your work!

[@davidserquera3331]

Such a wonderful people made my day! ❤

[@davidleejenkins]

Such an inspiring interview! Thank you both!

[@AdamBlock]

Thanks for watching!

[@jean-marclemoine9636]

Hi. Really amazing! The next for stars halos removal??? Congratulations to you for this great job. I am using Gradient exterminator in Photoshop and both stars and noise exterminator in Pixinsight. They work extremely well. JM

[@rrcroman]

AI12 is currently in training. The focus is indeed larger star halos and filter reflections. :)

[@tomhoskins4913]

Brilliant Man but practical, Love his software suite, I have every product.

[@niccoc1603]

Great plugins, especially the constant improvement

[@kmh032008]

Just downloaded AI 11….keeping much more galaxy detail. Nice work!

[@AdamBlock]

EXcellEnt!

[@thewarhenk]

Great video, and great seeing the both of you!

[@danjensen9425]

Yes awesome stuff I have both. Making parts of pixinsight and the work flow less daunting for us is huge. I would have thought software engineer.

[@christianvulpescu1398]

I saw Russ the forst time and was verry positively surprised what a friendly and competent guy he is! Just one question: Do I have to load the new IA versions by hand or does the Repository the job for me automatically?

[@AdamBlock]

Repository does the job automatically for you. If you happen to have older versions due to updates, I suspect you can revert back.

[@johnadastra1754]

Love StarX and NoiseX! How about an AI based Star ResurreXionator to add the best stars back 😀.

[@redabdab]

Love both these and the new AI 11 is a BIG improvement. Thanks Russ! I can recommend setting it up to use your GPU's CUDA cores if you can. It speeds both of them up massively.

[@Hebert6615]

I have both NXT and SXT, some of the best $$ that I have spent on AP.

[@galaxyhunter1978]

Russ, is there any plans to develop a GradientXTerminator for P.I.?

[@rrcroman]

Not at the moment, but I'm thinking about it in the background (pun intended). The biggest challenge is the lack of selection tools to inform the plugin which parts of the image are truly background.

[@galaxyhunter1978]

@@rrcroman I hope you can. I used it years ago in P.S. and it worked good on my images. That's the one tool I really could use for P.I.. Thank You.

[@billblanshan3021]

Great job btw Russ! I agree with this, having a gradient remove AI based plugin would be awesome! The creator of Startools has attempted to do this without selection points so maybe you can get an idea from that to help yours. If you ready have the ability to remove stars, you might be able to detect structure, and if that is removed then you are left with a gradient. Plus, gradients should be a low order spline interpolation (but not all cases i.e. bad flats) so it could be your tool can do that much better. I prefer the light pollution removal tool in APP software over pixinsight ABE and DBE but that requires manual selection, if you had the ability to do what they are doing in APP without selection, similar to Startools method, that would be awesome. Again, great job Russ! I look forward to seeing more ugins from you!

[@kekkoukedarake110]

Thank you for such interesting topics. I got so interested in StarXTerminator. So downloaded the plug-in. Result was unfortunately much worse than what StarNet2 delivered. I know my photo quality is not so great at first place but StarXTerminaror only removed about 60% of stars while StarNet eliminated about 97% of stars. Is there any way to improve its performance?

[@AdamBlock]

I have seen some reports on this. I think the idea behind SXT is that it is trained to remove a uniform star quality (as the AI "understands" it). If do not train in this way- and you train it on data like yours- you will get variable results with the people that *have* similar star quality across the field. So, it seems to me (without looking at your data of course)- this is a reasonable place to make a stand.

[@AdamBlock]

If I am wrong about your image... one thing that would help SXT is to train data like it. So I think that is what you need to argue.

[@federicoboninsegna7802]

I noticed that StarXterminator also eliminates the hydrogen particles on the galaxies taken with the L-eXtreme filter, leaving them on the image of the stars only. Any particular setting to avoid this problem and thus be able to use all the hydrogen signal on the starless? Thank you

[@AdamBlock]

Well.. for a galaxies in general they are actually stellar in profile in most cases (since most galaxies are so far away). There are perhaps two tricks (depends on the data) that can help that I demonstrate on my site.

[@paololazzarini6411]

worderful

[@wallbke]

Well, I bougt them both and StarX works super nice! I had severe artefacts with NoiceX and sent files to Russ but got no help from him other than "I'll get back to you" on Oct 12. Obviously I am not important enough so nja, I am not amazed or impressed😠 / Kurt Wallberg

[@AdamBlock]

I believe Russ is travelling right now. I also recently sent him a note- and he explained.

[@wallbke]

@@AdamBlock oh, good for you that he explained to you but not to me. I wonder what I'm doing wrong?