Stellar Magic is a suite of 11 programs with each program grouping a set of similar operations. For instance, the Image Aligner program controls all of the procedures for rotating, registering and sizing of images as well as mosaic creation. Similarly, the Image Combiner program controls all of the batch processing operations such as debayering, dark frame subtraction and adding and averaging of images. Switching between programs requires only a click on a toolbar icon. This arrangement makes it much easier to use than continually sorting through cascading menu lists since there are over 100 processing techniques.

Color images may be created using the RGB or LRGB methods. For images acquired from color CCD imagers there are several automatic color balance options. For color frames acquired with the use of filters there is complete control over the coloring process from weighting for filter trasmissions to histogram stretching for each component. When color adjustments are complete, the images may be further sharpened using multiresolution techniques.

The appearance of Stellar Magic is a bit different than most image processing programs. Open images are not tiled, but are instead accessed by an image list. Only one image is displayed at a time, and images may be rapidly scrolled by use of the mouse wheel. The rapid scrolling capability is particularly useful when aligning images before stacking in order to ensure that each image was successfully aligned.

An assortment of image processing operations is shown in the following table. For some operations the image view is full size, while for others it is compressed to be able to simultaneously show other features such as histograms and magnified views. Click on any image to enlarge it.