DSS and RAW files

[Stu Ward]

Hi

I was out fine tuning my AP skills last night and took a set of RAW images of Centaurus A.
When I got back in to process them, Deep Sky Stacker sees them as only 1336 x 3516 i.e a thin strip with very little data in it.

Now if i convert the RAWS into Jpegs they are fine and come out at the full 3456x5184 resulotion.

But DSS works better with RAWS right ?

Tell me i'm doing something stupid so i can learn from my mistakes and carry on

Thanks

Stu

[Lester]

Hi Stu, yes DSS works fine with RAW. Sorry I cannot put my finger on what is causing your problem though. Hope you get it fixed soon.

[adman]

Hi Stu - you are probably running DSS 3.3.2 or something like that? You need to download the beta 3.3.3 (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/DeepSkyStacker/) which can handle the 550D RAW files.

Adam

[Stu Ward]

Thanks Adam, i'll give that a try when i get home

Stu

[Stu Ward]

What do you guys open the TIF that is created with ?

I find TIFS a bugger to find anything decent to open em up.

[jjjnettie]

Adam put me onto DSS 3.3.3 too, it's great to finally be able to process my raw files.

Do you have Photoshop CS3?
I drag and drop the autosave file into photoshop, then convert to 16bit to work on it.
It's the only way it will work for me.

[Stu Ward]

Unfortunately I do not

Stu

[adman]

Stu - use Digital Photo Professional - it is on the Canon Solutions disk that came with you camera. You can do some basic manipulations with TIFFs using that.

Adam

[Stu Ward]

I cant get DPP to open a tif

[jjjnettie]

Stu, in DSS, when it's finished it's run, in the menu on the left hand side, under "Processing", click on "Save image to file".
It will save the image as 16bit, and you will be able to open it then. :D
Just make sure you put the file in it's correct location, or you'll spend half the night trying to track it down. LOL learned that one from experience.

[Stu Ward]

hmm
this is getting silly now
For some reason DSS makes my RAWS look so much darker than they really are.

I get better results converting the RAWS to Jpeg then stacking these

So confused

[jjjnettie]

Don't worry, the data will still be in your images.
You'll just have to work a little harder to tease it out is all.

[midnight]

Stu, I had the same problem. Turned out the Canon 40D in my case (and probably the 550D in your case) is a 14 bit file. DSS is working in 16 bit so the Canon image is only scaled 0 to 2^14 = 0 - 16384 whereas DSS is working in 16 bit ie 0 to 65536. That's why it appears darker. As jjj has indicated you then need to stretch the data because it is now ranged to 16bit.

Cheers,
Darrin...