Photos from Chania and Elafonisi!

Chania is the second largest city of Crete and the capital of the Chania regional unit. It lies along the north coast of the island, about 70 km west of Rethymno and 145 km west of Heraklion.

Elafonisi (Ελαφονήσι) is an island located close to the southwestern corner of the Mediterranean island of Crete, in the regional unit of Chania. When the weather is fine it is possible to walk to the island through the shallow water. The island is a protected nature reserve.

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont...

RTL-SDR Blog V3 Arrived

I recently bought a new RTL dongle that supports Direct Sampling that allows frequencies less than 40Mhz. In particular, the model I ordered was the RTL-SDR BLOG V.3. DONGLE that was really cheap compared with other solution. It still can't reach the quality of the other more expensive receivers, but it still a step up. The Dongle comes with a long external antenna. The RTL dongle. So, the question now is how better is from my old SDR. I did a check with the RTL power tool to see what is the difference. My old SDR Dongle (Fitipower FC0013) has coverage from 22 to 1100 MHz. The new Dongle RTL Blog V3 a has Rafael Micro R820T has coverage from 24 - 1766 MHz, but it also contains Direct Sampling that allows for High Frequencies. A word of warning here, the reception using Direct Sampling is very bad, especially if you connect the antenna without a filter band or/and preamplifier. I did experiments using the rtl_power, and the results showed much more gain for the ne...

Processing high ISO night images with RawTherapee

Earlier this year i did some videos ( here and here ) regarding how to remove the noise from high ISO raw images. I decided to write down the work flow with text and pictures to avoid the seeking the video in different parts. The original file is available here: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/playraw-high-iso-challenge/2778 and the image is taken by PkmXDec using a Sony A6000 + Canon FD 85mm f/1.8 S.S.C. + Lens Turbo II wide open. Out of the box, the picture shows a lot of noise and the color is too warm if we press the "Auto Levels". This happens because he ISO is 12800 and the lighting available: sodium light. In addition, the color noise has a specific noise pattern, as shown in the uniform part of the picture on the left. Initial RAW image conversion using the default options. 1. Our first approach is to change the Demosaicing method from the "RAW" tab. The "RAW" tab contains all the options responsible from converting the image from the RAW fo...

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