Night skies are beautiful, and the shining stars, moon, and astronomical events make the night sky look incredible. But light pollution is a thing that gives extra noise, gradients, and tint, which makes photos look blurry or of low quality.
If you are living in any city, you might face light pollution. And today, we have a solution to this problem – the PixInsight Background Extraction tool.
In this article, we will learn how to remove light pollution in Pixinsight.
Table of Contents
How Does Light Pollution Look Like?
Pic via Quora (Clicked by Todd Carlso)
On the left side, you can see an image without light pollution; on the right side, you can see an image affected by light pollution. The photos were clicked in 2003 during a power outage.
Of course, no software can reduce light pollution to make it look original. However, we can reduce its impact using Pixinsight.
In the photo with light pollution, you can see it has too much noise and uneven gradients, plus a vignette effect, which can occur due to lens imperfection.
How to Remove Light Pollution in Pixinsight: Automatic Background Extractor
Pixinsight has this cool feature called an Automatic background extractor. The good part is the tool is automatic; In a few clicks, your pic will get ready. Further, if you aren’t satisfied with automatic results, you can change it manually as well.
Steps to Remove Light Pollution using Pixinsight
- First of all, open Pixinsight
- Then, you can select and open the desired image you want to edit.
- Go to Process
- Then hover to Background Modelization
- Select Automatic Background Extractor
You will also see the second option of Dynamic Background Extractor. Both have the same utility; the first is automatic, and the other is manual. Automatic is easy; however, manual (Dynamic) can produce some good quality results.
By default, you will see these settings applied; you only need to change one thing here. See the Target Image Correction section; in front of Correction by default, it has selected none; change it to Subtraction.
- Tap on the run button (highlighted in the above image)
- Now, you will get two images; the first will be of extracted gradient, and you can close that window.
- After closing the first image window, you will see the second image, where light pollution will be removed.
Results –
It has automatically improved uneven gradients and noise from these photographs. To see the live tutorial, you can watch this video –
Related – How to sharpen an image in Photoshop
Frequently Asked Questions
#1. How to Sharpen Stars in PixInsight?
In astrophotography, regular starts can be easy to neglect when searching for nebulas. In PixInsight, there is a way to sharpen the stars; you can also sharpen the stars using the Automatic Background Extractor of PixInsight, although you need to register your star first.
Watch this YouTube video to know more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK_AKmILiIg.
#2. Star Removal Method in PixInsight?
Star removal is a process in PixInsight to shrink the size of stars or altogether remove them. For this, you need to create a star mask, use a Morphological Transformation, and select iteration to 1 to eliminate stars completely.
You can use the Multiscale Median Transform tool if that doesn’t completely eliminate stars.
#3. What is Gradient in Astrophotography?
Gradients are gradual changes in the brightness of Astraphoto; such gradients are uneven and are not part of an image; external factors are responsible, like the lens, light pollution, etc.
Hopefully, tools like PixInsight can identify such gradients and remove them.
Conclusion
PixInsight is an amazing tool for Astrophotography; it has various tools to enhance the quality of your images. One such tool is Automatic Background Extractor, the good thing about this tool is its ease of use.
It can automatically enhance the image by reducing uneven gradients because of light pollution.
To use this tool, you need to go to Background Modelization > Automatic Background Extractor, set Correction to Subtraction, and run the tool.
That’s it for this article; hopefully, you have found this one helpful…
See Also…
How to sharpen an image in Photoshop(Opens in a new browser tab)
How to Change background image on Zoom | Android PC(Opens in a new browser tab)
