Color retention

Please note you should completely disregard the colouring in AutoDev (if coloring is even at all visible).

Non-linearly stretching an image's RGB components causes its hue and saturation to be similarly stretched and squashed. This is often observable as "washing out" of colouring in the highlights.

Traditionally, image processing software for astrophotography has struggled with this, resorting to kludges like "special" stretching functions (e.g. ArcSinH) that somewhat minimize the problem, or even procedures that make desaturated highlights adopt the colours of neighbouring, non-desaturated pixels.

While other software continues to struggle with colour retention, StarTools Tracking feature allows the Color module to go back in time and completely reconstruct the RGB ratios as recorded, regardless of how the image was stretched.

This is one of the major reasons why running the Color module is preferably run as one of the last steps in your processing flow; it is able to completely negate the effect of any stretching - whether global or local - may have had on the hue and saturation of the image.

Because of this, AutoDev's performance is not stymied like some other stretching solutions (e.g. ArcSinH) by a need to preserve colouring. The two aspects - colour and luminance - of your image are neatly separated thanks to StarTools' signal evolution Tracking engine.