Images Plus, by Mike Unsold, is a powerful commercial image-processing program for astronomical images. It will process both planetary and deep-sky images.

Images Plus Camera Control (IPCC) is a separate program that can be used to capture the Live View video feed as uncompressed still images from most Canon and some Nikon DSLR cameras with Live View. IPCC stores these images in a file with a Sequential Image Data (SID) format that requires Images Plus image processing program to open.

Images Plus image processing then is used for grading, aligning, stacking, sharpening and image processing the SID files.

Figure 1 - Images Plus Video Processing Dialog

Converting Video Formats

Images Plus Image Processing v5.0 will perform these video conversion functions:

• Directly open MOV video files shot in-camera and convert them to SID files.

• Open SID files recorded from Live View by Images Plus Camera Control and convert them a series of 16-bit FITs, 16-bit TIFFs, 8-bit BMPs, or 8-bit JPEGs individual still images.

• Open AVI video files and convert them a series of 16-bit FITs, 16-bit TIFFs, 8-bit BMPs, or 8-bit JPEGs individual still images.

Note that you must install Images Plus v5.0 on Microsoft Windows 7 or later operating systems to use the video conversion tool.

You can use Images Plus for grading, aligning, stacking, sharpening and image processing directly from an SID file, or you can convert the SID file to individual still images and drop them into a program like AutoStakkert!, AviStack or RegiStax to do multi-point alignment and stacking.

The Convert MOV and AVI tool can also be used to open problem AVI files that the Video Process tool in IP will not read.

Step-By-Step Conversion

• Under the Image Set Operations pull-down menu, select Convert MOV and AVI to SID (Figure 2, Number 1).

  Figure 2 - Convert a MOV or AVI file to SID file format.

  
  

• Select the file you want to convert from the file open dialog box (Figure 3, Number 1) Click the Open Button (Figure 3, Number 2). The Convert MOV and AVI to SID dialog box will open.

  Figure 3 - File Open Dialog Box

  
  

• Click the Convert Button (Figure 4, Number 1)

  Figure 4 - Convert a MOV or AVI file to SID dialog box.

  
  

• After the conversion is complete a file will be produced with a "CVT" prefix to identify it. Click the File List button (Figure 4, Number 2). The input and output files dialog will open (Figure 5).

  Figure 5 - Input and output dialog box.

  
  

• Click on the output SID file with the CVT prefix (Figure 5, Number 1). The SID file will open along with the Video Processing dialog box. Click the "X" in the upper right corner to close the dialog box (Figure 5, Number 2). Do the same to close the Convert MOV and AVI to SID dialog box.

• The SID file and Video Processing dialog box will now be open (Figure 6).

Figure 6 - Images Plus SID file and Video Processing Dialog

Grade, Calibrate, Align and Combine the SID File

The converted SID file and the Video Processing dialog box should be open.

Figure 7 - Video Processing - Grade, Calibrate, Align, Combine Tab

• Click the Grade, Calibrate, Align, Combine (Figure 7) Tab.

• Grade section

  • Uncheck B, C, D and F. Only A should be checked (Figure 7, Number 1).

  • Click the Edit Grades button (Figure 7, Number 2).

    Figure 8 - Edit Grades dialog box

    
    

    Input a grade for each letter (Figure 8). If you only have "A" checked, you only need to input a grade for "A". Each frame will be graded based on edge sharpness, ranked from 0.0 for the lowest and 1.0 for the highest.

    Note that these are not a percentage of the total frames to be used. All of the frames in your video could have terrible seeing, and they could all be rated poorly with something like a 0.3 rating.

    You may have to experiment several times to determine which grade works the best for your image. In this example, I used a grade of 75, so all frames with a grade between 0.75 and 1.0 will be used.

    If you check the B, C and/or D grade intervals (Figure 7), frames with those grades will be included in the final stacked image.

• Align section

  • Select Lunar - Solar Region for close up regions of the Sun or Moon such as sunspots or lunar craters (Figure 7, Number 3).

  • Select Planet - Lunar - Solar Disk for planetary full-disk images (Figure 7, Number 3).

  • Click the Display Reference Frame button (Figure 7, Number 4). Ok the message box.

  • Left Click in the image on the spot that you want aligned. Here I have selected the peak of the mountain inside the lunar crater Moretus. A red box is displayed around the alignment point (Figure 9).

    Figure 9 - The Alignment Point box

    
    

  • Click on the Correlation Parameter Setup button to change the correlation neighborhood pixel radius and the correlation parameter if necessary.

• Combine section

  • Click on Average as the combine method (Figure 7, Number 5)

• Process section

  • Check Grade, Align and Combine (Figure 7, Number 6, 7, 8).

  • Check Calibrate if you have dark, bias of flat field calibration frames (we usually don't for planetary work).

  • Click the Apply button (Figure 7, Number 9).

Images Plus will then grade each frame, align those that meet the grading specification, stack them and display the stacked image. At this point you should save the stack. Use File > Save Copy As and under the pull-down menu for Save As Type select Uncompressed TIFF, and when the Tiff format options box comes up, select 16-bits for the bits per channel.

The stacked image is now ready for sharpening and further processing.

Basic Processing

For this particular image of the Moon, which was shot at a low elevation with plenty of atmospheric reddening, we will just simply unsaturate the image and make it a gray scale image.

• Under the pull-down menus at the top of Image Plus, go to Color > Hue, Saturation, Luminance and drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left (Figure 10).

  Figure 10 - Hue, Saturation, Luminance dialog box

  
  

• Click Apply and then click Done.

Next we will use a bit of multi-resolution sharpening, the equivalent of wavelets in other planetary image-processing programs.

• Under the pull-down menus at the top of Image Plus, go to Smooth Sharpen > Multiresolution Smooth/Sharpen (Figure 11).

  Figure 11 - Multiresolution Smooth/Sharpen dialog box

  
  

• Start with the finest detail slider. Drag it to the right to sharpen the image. If your image does not have any really fine detail in it, this may only sharpen and exaggerate the noise.

  The particular sliders to choose and the amount of sharpening will depend in the content of the image and the quality of the seeing it was taken under. There is no specific formula to follow here. The best sharpening will be accomplished by trial and error based on the individual image.

• Click Apply and then click Done.

Hold your mouse cursor over the image of the lunar crater Moretus to see a comparison between the original raw stacked image and the sharpened version.

Converting the SID File Into Individual Frames

If you want to work on the images that come out of a MOV or AVI video recording in another program such as AutoStakkert!, AviStack or RegiStax, you can convert them to individual still images with Images Plus.

The first couple of steps here are the same for converting a MOV or AVI file to an SID file. Then the individual frames from the SID file are saved.

Convert

• Under the Image Set Operations pull-down menu, select Convert MOV and AVI to SID (Figure 2, Number 1).

• Select the file you want to convert from the file open dialog box (Figure 3, Number 1) Click the Open Button (Figure 3, Number 2). The Convert MOV and AVI to SID dialog box will open.

• Click the Convert Button (Figure 4, Number 1).

• After the conversion is complete, click the File List button (Figure 4, Number 2). The input and output files dialog will open (Figure 5).

• Click on the output SID file (Figure 5, Number 1). The SID file will open along with the Video Processing dialog box. Click the "X" in the upper right corner to close the dialog box (Figure 5, Number 2). Do the same to close the Convert MOV and AVI to SID dialog box.

• The SID file and Video Processing dialog box will now be open (Figure 6).

Save

• In the Video Processing dialog, go to the Display and Save Files tab.

  Figure 14 - Video Processing - Grade, Calibrate, Align, Combine Tab

  
  

• Select the Output Directory to where you want to save the file.

• Name the Combination Name - this will be the prefix for the individual files that are saved, each will also have a number attached.

• Save as BMPs, which are 8 bits, because you don't need 16-bit TIFFs or FITS since the original data in the Live View video is only 8 bits.

• Select "All Frames" to save all of the frames in the SID file.

• Click the Save button.

• If you have graded the frames with the Grade, Calibrate, Align, Combine tab, you can check "Display Graded Files Only" box to save just the graded files.

  In general, if you are using a multi-alignment point program like AutoStakkert! AviStack or RegiStax, you will not want to save just the graded frames, you will want to save all of the frames in the original video file. This is because part of one frame, that otherwise has a low grade, may be good for a multi-point alignment algorithm that uses different parts of different frames for each alignment point.

Note that 3 minutes of 640 x 480 Movie Crop Mode video recorded in the camera creates about 10,800 individual frames and takes up about 500 megabytes as a compressed MOV file. When this MOV file is converted to an SID file, the SID file will be about 10 gigabytes. The SID file converted to 10,800 individual still frames will be another 10 gigabytes.

This tutorial was done with Images Plus version 5.0 Beta 2a.