Like everything ZWO does on the SeeStar app, new features take forever to arrive, are very compelling at first glance, and yet manage to disappoint by how unusable they really are.
I am really impressed by the image improvements the AI Denoise feature manages to achieve in just 15 seconds. Yes, the image looks artificial, still, it is still quite impressive. But as impressive as the actual results are, the way the feature is delivered is nothing but. Underwhelming is an understatement.
In the spirit on providing constructive criticisms, here are my 3 suggestions for improvement. I do not think they are difficult to implement, in fact, I think they are trivial and I see no reason why they couldn't make it into the next update if ZWO really cared about user experience.
- Like I said, the denoising and star sharpening is too aggressive - that's not a bad thing in itself if you had a dial to mix the original image with the cleaned up one. By adjusting between 0 and 1 you could control how much actual denoising is being done. There are already controls to tweak brightness, contrast and saturation before saving, just add another one for the amount of denoising. This fruit is so low hanging, it is almost on the ground, ready to pick.
- AI Denoise only operates on JPGs, which is a shame. JPGs are a gimmick, the FITs are what counts. If ZWO wants to keep processing JPGs for beginners to share on Instagram that's OK, but please give us AI Denoise with FIT support, FIT format in, FIT format out.
- In true ZWO SeeStar style, AI Denoise does not work unless you are physically present - you have to manually select the file, press the denoise button, wait for 15 seconds, then press the save button. If you only do this once, it's OK. If like me, you have hundreds of images accumulated over one year, stored on a back-up drive, and you would like to denoise them, then good luck. I would have to copy them back into the S50 in batches, because there is not enough room for all of them, and then one by one select them, denoise and save them. At an average rate of 2 images a minute, denoising my entire archive of over one thousand images would take about 10 hours. I do not know about you, but I am not going to do that.
I understand that ZWO wants to maintain control of this and not turn the SeeStar app into a free tool that denoises any kind of astro image. I am OK with that. I am even OK with having to move the images into the S50 to denoise them, so that the function is tied to S50 ownership. But please, add a "denoise all S50 produced FIT files placed in a folder" feature that does not require any user intervention other than pointing the app at the said folder.
