BackscatterXTerminator

[homodelphinius]

An interesting filter appears > https://www.goaskerin.com/backscatterxterminator/

 

Seems that in an automated way, inspired by astrophotography (see the history below), backscatter problems disappear in the postprocessing

 

HISTORY OF BSXT

Backscatter is a notorious problem for underwater photographers, and the idea for BSXT came about when Bruce Warner, a colleague of Erin Quigley, recognized an unexpected parallel between backscatter in underwater images and star fields in astrophotography. In both cases, tiny bright spots—whether particles in the water or stars in the sky—stand out against a darker background, and this shared visual issue sparked a great idea. Erin and Bruce approached the astrophotography AI software genius Russell Croman of RC Astro, and the rest is history! RC Astro was founded in Austin, Texas, by Russell Croman to create innovative solutions for astronomical image processing. Russell’s award-winning work has appeared in online and print publications including NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (16 photos) and National Geographic. He won the Advanced Imaging Conference’s Hubble Award in 2010 for significant and sustained contributions to the astrophotography community, and in 2024 he won the Photographic Society of America’s Progress Award, an honor he shares with Jacques Cousteau who won the award in 1977. Russell’s astrophotography tools have revolutionized the field of astrophotography, and are used world-wide by professionals and amateurs alike.

 

Has anybody use it yet?

 

I see that @Alex_Mustard in FB post has already test it.

[shokwaav]

[Luko]

I tried the trial version this morning. Very easy to download and use immediately after.

Of course I wanted to trick it on a photo mixing diver bubbles in the distance with some actual backscatter.

It eliminated the backscatter without touching to the bubbles : much better than a hand made selection.

VERY Impressive.

 

[Kamaros]

I was pretty impressed when I tested it yesterday. While I've tried other software that did a comparable job of getting rid of small specks of backscatter, I also tried it on a photo with large out-of-focus blobs of backscatter and it was able to identify those as backscatter and remove them as well. I also tested a photo with hotshots from strobes being too far forward (so the backscatter is on top of a light background instead of the usual dark background) and it was also able to handle that fairly well.

[humu9679]

Holy shit!

[Andrey Narchuk]

This is the first really working plugin for eliminating backlight. It collects most of the suspended matter both in water and on objects. It works with photos of different sizes and suspended matter of different sizes. And it practically does not spoil the image itself.

[Floris Bennema]

Although it says you need a NVIDIA Graphic card on your computer I tried a test version on my laptop with Intel Iris Xe Graphics. It works, not fast, about 3 minutes for an image.

 

But then I ran in the seemingly notorious 'Photoshop does not return the image to Lightroom' issue .