While Picture Window was not designed expressly for use by astrophotographers, it turns out to be one of most powerful tools avaialable for this purpose. Picture Window Pro has been used by quite a few astrophotographers over the last year or so and many of their suggestions have been incorporated into the final product. Two of the features that make Picture Window Pro uniquely suited to astrophotography are:
Full support for 16-bit black and white and 48-bit color images
Picture Window can acquire, read, write, and manipulate 16-bit black and white and 48-bit color images. This extended dynamic range is very useful when combining several images of the same part of the sky to pull faint objects out of background noise. Unlike Photoshop which offers only limited 16-bit support, these new image types are supported by all of Picture Window's commands, transformations, and tools.
Precision registration
The Composite transformation in Picture Window Pro includes many unique and powerful features for precisely registering and combining multiple images. The new multi-point alignment feature is especially useful for registering images that contain slight distortions which otherwise would make combining the images impossible.
For More Information ...
An in-depth white paper describing how to use Picture Window or Picture Window Pro in astrophotography is available for download. This document describes how to use Picture Window's normal image editing features to improve astrophotographs as well as describing in detail how to use its advanced features for precision image registration, combining red, green, and blue images to make a color image, and much more.
The white paper (astro.pdf) is in Adobe Acrobat format. If you do not have Acrobat Reader 3.0 or later installed on your computer, you can click the yellow button below to download a free copy from the Adobe web site.