SGBNR stands for Selective Gaussian Blur Noise Reduction. The advanced implementation of the SGBNR technique makes this program a powerful tool to reduce noise in digital astrophotographic images, including film grain in scanned conventional astrophotos as well as background noise in CCD images. When adequately applied to a variety of astronomical imaging works, we have consistently achieved excellent results with this program.
The SGBNR application can read TIFF, JPEG and BMP images. It writes TIFF files exclusively in its current 1.0 beta version, but FITS support is planned as a priority task in the development of this program and will be implemented in incoming versions.
The program can read and write RGB or grayscale images, with either 8 or 16 bits per channel (24-bit and 48-bit RGB color images, 8-bit and 16-bit monochrome grayscale images). However, SGBNR works internally with 16 bits per channel exclusively, regardless of the original file format and color depth. This has an extra cost in terms of memory usage, but gives a superior level of accuracy, which was one of our main goals when conceiving SGBNR.
