Image processing in action

Folks - since there seems to be a lot of imaging activity recently, I thought I'd post this as an illustration.

I had an issue with some of my images and at first I really thought it was a tracking problem. So I asked around the DSI boards and got some comments. Seems the streaking and 'graininess' in my images is down to noise - so longer exposures are the order of the day to improve the S/N ratio.

Luckily enough, one of the responders to my question was a guy called Don Waid who is a very skilled image processor. He took my original image and according to him, 'tweaked' it. Well, as far as I can see, he's worked a miracle! Don has collaborated with a few of the folks on the DSI board and taken their images and carried out the processing for them. The images, for a 300 dollar CCD, are truly outstanding. But only in the hands of a skilled graphics processor. So my thanks to him for producing a silk purse out of a pig's ear.

If you increase the brightness and contrast of your monitor you'll see the background details in both these images better - and you'll see the difference.

Cheers

Dave McD

Original image



Same image with Don Waid's processing

Wow! It's hard to believe it's the same image. There's a huge amount of definition in that second image. The guy knows his stuff.
Doesn't cooling the CCD help improve the s/n ratio too? Just looked in Maplin and you can get a cpu water cooler for pretty cheap..
www.maplin.co.uk/search.aspx?MenuNo=535&...mMenu=y&doy=12m5
Wonder if anyone has tried it?

Hi Dave - I was impressed. Don works in collaboration with a couple of imagers. I don't he actually does any imaging himself. He takes the images off other folks and doeas all the processing. And he does it very well!

There was a thread a while back about cooling the DSI. As supplied, it relies on air cooling. Some of the folks tried to attach all kinds of gizmos to the unit will little or no success. Its a very small unit but it seems that whatever cooling was applied didn't get close enough to the chip to make much of a difference.

Of course, the more expensive CCD imagers come with integrated cooling - some of them can get to 60 degrees below ambient :shock:

Cheers

Dave McD

Hey, you're an engineer- I'm an industrial designer. Between the pair of us we could design something useful for this purpose I'm sure