Astroart Forum

Hello all,

My first post here. I'm a beginner taking my first steps into astrophotography. Went out and bought Astroart on recommendation from telescope dealer, and after reading some positive reviews.

Was originally going to ask a question about converting RAW to colour, as I get horribly looking images no matter what settings I apply, unless I do the demosaic in preprocessing (which the manual advices against).

However, discovered that if I saved my view, whether as jpeg or TIFF, I would get a much different looking image than what I see in Astroart - much more muted and less saturated. Got a nasty suspicion, which I have just confirmed. I use an Eizo Flexscan SX2762W monitor. This is a wide gamut screen, which requires a special monitor profile for colours to be shown correct. (I have a photo of an orange car, which is displayed glaringly red, if the program isn't using the correct profile). Windows (Win7 Pro) is set to use the correct profile, but some programs still need to be individually set to use it. My standard image viewer; ACDSee Pro 4 for example needs the profile set under 'Color Management', whereas my ancient version of Photoshop doesn't have an option for it, but still shows colours correctly - it must use the one set in Windows.

Unfortunately Astroart is one of the programs not displaying colours correct on my monitor. I have looked through settings for an option to set a monitor profile, but found none. If this isn't possible, the program is not useable for me, and I will have wasted £150 Please tell me there is a way to solve this.

Best regards,
Erling G-P

Hello, I confirm that Astroart always uses sRGB when displaying images, (mainly for speed, for the realtime visualization).
My only suggestion is to avoid saving the final image (save view) in jpg or tiff, which implies a color profile, instead use 16 bit dynamic formats (save view PNG 16 bit) or just save data (again PNG 16 bit) which are agnostic. Then when you'll open these image in photoshop for the final fixes and additions before publication, you will have all the dynamic there to set the colors as you wish.
In any case you could ask the dealer to change Astroart with another astro product, if refund is not possible.
Best regards,
Fabio.

Hello Fabio, thanks for your reply.

Armed with your info I have found a solution - set the monitor to sRGB mode when Astroart is the active window - it can do this automatically, so I don't forget. With this, colours are shown correctly

Best regards,
Erling G-P