New noise reduction

[Jockinireland]

Russel Croman, the guy behind GradientXterminator and StarXterminator has released a new module for Pixinsight (Photoshop and I think, affinity, coming later) which is an AI noise reduction process. Billed to give good noise reduction but without the artifacts of Topaz Denoise.

I downlodaed the free trial (its still at Beta I believe) and gave it a whirl. I rountinely use EZ Denoise and honestly have been happy with it. However, I am pretty impressed with NoiseXterminator.

Here are three direct comparisons from the same image (cropped, gradients removed, decon). In each, the left panel is no nose reduction, middle is EZ denoise and right is NoiseXterminator. These are from my ASI 2600mc (which is not noisy anyway) but at only 1hr 45 integration was noisier than I would like. These are very tight crops to show the noise clearly

My thoughts;

Boy its fast! about 1 tenth of the time of EZ denoise. In my view it is vastly superior to EZ denoise, doing a much better job. It could be argued, particularly in the horsehead, that its oversmoothed but it has an adjustment to allow you to reduce the effect. This was 82%. the default 90% was too smooth for me and 75% would probably have been enough - it was still way superior to EZ denoise but certainly not over smoothed. I showed the 82% as it shows the effect better. It also has an adjustment to recover detail, This was set at 32% in the above but could be tweaked up further - though I did not try it. But it is so quick it would be easy to trial settings to get what you want.

For me this is a definite leap forward.

What do you think?

[STEVE333]

Looks very interesting!!

I was able to find the download by going to the link below.

https://www.rc-astro.com/resources/Nois ... /index.php

I'll be giving it a try and report back. Thanks for sharing.

Steve

[Juno16]

Hi David,

Thanks for pointing this out. I am a big fan of StarXTerminator. I really like Starnet2, StarXTerminator does a great job and even better that Starnet2 on some images.

I downloaded the NoiseXTerminator trial and I must say that in just trying it out (with default settings), the results are pretty impressive! I did try it on just one linear image and didn't get very good results. I will give that another try later on.

Just working quickly with a few images, I really like the noise reduction (Denoise) with the default setting of 0.9. The "fuzz" is very smoothly removed. The Detail slider is very touchy and can produce some undesirable effects if overdone (as does any sharpening application).

I have been playing with last year's M101 data. Below is a super zoom in of the core of M101. This is starless and near the end of processing. Some NR has already been performed (EZ Denoise). NoiseXTerminator nicely further cleans up the residual noise without negatively affecting details (no artifacts).

I know, colorful!


So far, I really like it. Thanks again!

Looking forward to Steve's report.

[bobharmony]

Those results look really good. When the PhotoShop version becomes available I will give it a spin. I have used GradientXterminator for years with good success, so am looking forward to this new product from Mr. Croman.

Bob

[Jockinireland]

@Juno16 yes I'd say it is going to be very useful. But I do think that care will be needed to not oversmooth - for example my horsehead and I think your 101 are both losing a bit of resolution in some of the detail. I need to try the "detail" slider a bit more because I feel sure that it will be possible to adjust things to get the best NR but also good detail retention.

Looking at my post above again I suddenly realise that NX has also resulted in tightening the stars a bit. That must be the effect of the "detail" slider.

@bobharmony yes I used GradientXterminator for a long time with great results and I still sometimes go in and give it a try if I'm struggling with gradient removal. Have you tried his other offering Starxterminator, which is also available in photoshop. I've used it in PS and PI and it is really excellent. I wish I understood more about how these "AI" programs work. Its all a bit like black magic to me.

[Juno16]

@Jockinireland
Absolutely do need to be more careful in practice than I was in the earlier post.
I just slammed the default 0.9 nr on top of an already noise reduced image. Considering that though, I sometimes struggle with the nr settings in other PI nr processes and loose more details than I want to.
Have you tried to use a mask with NoiseXTerminator?

[Jockinireland]

@Juno16 Yes same here, I'm rather short of time just now so that was really just a quick trial. It will need a bit of trial and error to work out how best to use it.

No didn't try masks with it. I'm not great with masks in pixinsight so probably best for me to let someone else work out that part

I'm looking forward to seeing what @STEVE333 makes of it.

[Juno16]

Well, David, I will definitely look into NoiseXTerminator more now that you have filled me in about it. Thank you for that.

I went back into the same M101 starless image that I showed in the earlier post and dropped the Denoise level to 0.50 and see a slight increase in details (detail set at the default of 0.15) and still buttery smooth nebulosity. I like this application very much so far. Russsel Croman has done well here. I really do like this application better than Topz Denoise so far.

Also, I briefly tried using a Game mask with NoiseXTerminator and it works well!

[bobharmony]

@bobharmony yes I used GradientXterminator for a long time with great results and I still sometimes go in and give it a try if I'm struggling with gradient removal. Have you tried his other offering Starxterminator, which is also available in photoshop. I've used it in PS and PI and it is really excellent. I wish I understood more about how these "AI" programs work. Its all a bit like black magic to me.

David - I have not used StarXterminator at all. Most of my processing these days is with StarTools and it doesn't lend itself to other data manipulation. Also, I am the freak who likes stars, lots of stars in my images

Bob

[XCalRocketMan]

Very interesting indeed. I will be trying this very soon as I've always had some issues with the existing noise reduction tools. Thanks for the heads up!

[STEVE333]

I did some testing of NoiseXTerminator in PixInsight. Rather than bury the results at the end of this thread I decided to post the results as a new thread. It is located at

viewtopic.php?t=24830

Steve