Results of extracting stars from a 1000 stars arcsec⁻² cluster at a distance of 50 kpc. Top left: original 2″ × 2″ stellar field with a density of 10³ stars arcsec⁻². The stars in the field have masses between 0.01 M_⊙ and 300 M_⊙. The PSF used in this study was an instantaneous SCAO PSF, similar to what would be seen on a single MICADO detector 2.6 s exposure. Top right: same field after our detection and subtraction algorithm iteratively removed all the stars. 10³ stars arcsec⁻² are extracted reasonably easily by our algorithm. Bottom left: fraction of extracted stars in each mass bin that matched the original list of stars. The majority of stars more massive than 0.1 M_⊙ were detected. Bottom right: ratio of extracted mass to original mass. The vast majority (∼97%) of the almost 4000 stars in the image fell almost perfectly on the red one-to-one line. The minor scatter around the line arises because our detection algorithm is unable to distinguish between two very close stars and contamination from the PSF artifacts, e.g., the segmented diffraction spikes. The lower panel shows the standard deviation of masses around the one-to-one line in a certain mass bin. A mass bin was deemed reliable when the average ratio of recovered to original mass was in the range 1 ± 0.1 and the standard deviation was lower than 10%.