K3's Software
"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, what is Man that You are mindful of him?" -- Psalm 8:3,4
K3CCDTools processing details
Capture process
  Standard Process (I.) K3CCDTools Process (II.) Note
Source 24bit CCD 24bit CCD  
Result 24bit AVI
or
3x 32bit FITs		 24bit AVI As 32bit FITs are derived from AVI, they don't contain more information than AVI
Stacking/summing process
Source 24bit AVI
or
3x 32bit FITs		 24bit AVI  
Result 3x 32bit FITs Project file (K3P)
+
3x 32bit FITs		  
  Advantage: you needn't AVI file further (you can delete it).
 Advantage: you can realign or reprocess source AVI file with several project files (K3P) K3P together with AVI contains the same information as 32bits FITs.
Post processing
Source 3x 32bit FITs or 3x16bit FITs 24bit AVI + K3P In (II.) all processing (from capture to final result) is done in one package. Dissadvantage is that (II.) has not Unsharp Mask, Deconvolution. These procedures can be done with 24bit BMP in other packages. The essential fact is, that the most critical non-linear procedures like logarithmic scale and gamma factor are done inside K3CCDTools with 3x32bit precission. Advantage of (II.) is, that all processing settings can be saved and are reproducable in future.
Software GIMP, MaximDL, IRIS, ... K3CCDTools
Processing
precission		 3x32bit or 3x16bit 3x32bit
Final result for sharing 24bit BMP, JPG 24bit BMP (JPG in future)

The final results of Processing (I.) and (II.) are very similar, as the most critical processing in (II.) is done with 3x32bit precission. The final results of (I.) and (II.) are almost always BMP or JPG (to be able to share them).
!New!: Now K3CCDTools allow export to 16-bit and 32-bit FIT files.

Conversion 32bit (16bit) per channel to 8-bit per channel

With this problem we meet during creating of final BMP or JPG image (e.g. conversion of internal K3CCDTools buffer into 24-bit BMP or conversion of 32-bit FIT to BMP). We can use various transformations between 32-bit and 8-bit values. K3CCDTools uses 3 types of transformations: Linear, Gamma and Logarithmic.

Here, there is an example of using Linear, Gamma and Logarithmic conversion of monochrome 16-bit FIT file into 8-bit grayscale BMP. The same principle is valid for color conversion - conversion is applied to each of R, G, B components. The image of Andromeda Galaxy was downloaded from Digitized Sky Survey server.

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Last Update: 31.10.2002