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First launch

You have downloaded, checked and installed or unpacked Helia (see Download and verify and Installation). This page is what happens next.

Check the programs run

Helia is two programs, helia (the command line tool) and helia-gui (the app). After a Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora package they are in /usr/bin, so in any new terminal:

helia --version
helia-gui --version

From the Windows installer, helia is only on the PATH if you ticked Add the helia command to PATH (and opened a new terminal afterwards). Otherwise run it by its folder, by default %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Helia: & "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\Helia\helia.exe" --version. From the zip or a tarball, run .\helia.exe --version or ./helia --version in the folder you unpacked. From an AppImage, ./Helia-<version>-x86_64.AppImage --cli --version runs the command line tool and the plain file runs the app.

Each program prints its version, when and how it was built and the licence. Neither opens a window; this is the quick test that the program starts on your machine. On Windows helia-gui.exe is a window program with no console of its own, so in PowerShell its text can arrive after the next prompt has appeared; helia.exe is the better tool for this test. A line such as wgpu: 30.0.1 is the graphics library Helia was built with, not a requirement on you.

Start the desktop app

Choose Helia in the Start menu (Windows installer) or the applications menu (.deb and .rpm), double-click helia-gui.exe or the AppImage, or run helia-gui in a terminal. The first start after installing from Windows can show the SmartScreen warning described in Installation. A window opens with the nine steps down the left and a dark, empty viewer. The top bar offers About, Open capture and Export.

If Helia finds a graphics card it says so in the top bar, for example Vulkan and the adapter's name. If it finds none, it says CPU and works anyway; the answers are the same, only slower for sharpening previews. See GPU acceleration.

The first-run strip

The first time, a Quick start strip lists the three steps: open a capture, press Stack with recommended settings, pick a colour and export. Press Got it and it never returns. Helia remembers that, and the look you choose for each filter, in a small settings file (see Settings file). Nothing else is saved, and nothing is sent over the network.

Open your first capture

Press Ctrl+O, drop a file on the window, pick one under Recent in the top bar, or right-click a .ser, .avi or .fits file and choose Open with, Helia (or run helia-gui capture.ser). Helia remembers the size of its window and the last eight captures. If you have no capture to hand, any SER or AVI of the Sun will do, or a short phone MP4 if you have installed ffmpeg. From here, follow the step-by-step walkthrough: it goes from the Open step to a finished picture with a screenshot at every step.

If you prefer a terminal, the Quick start shows the same journey on the command line, and the recipes are short, complete jobs for the common captures.