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I am in two minds about posting this bit as a thread in the software section as part of it is about software, but a lot of it is as my own criticism of what I have done here so I will just post it here at least for now.
First my own critique of what I have done on the weekend, any more experienced folk please feel free to chime in with constructive criticism too.
Focus is maybe not quite right but it is a bit of a limitation of the camera I used (Canon 350D) which has no live view function, so getting it just right is tricky. It also can not be focused via the software so it means playing with the cam while the timelapse is underway, you can see things move about in a couple of frames when I decided to tweak it, without live view it is time consuming waiting 30 seconds between tweaks to see if you are going the right way. The alternative being to suspend the captures to do it and get a jump in the finished product.
Colour correction is very much so-so here, the astro modified cam (IR filter removed) gives a pronounced cast to the images and the impact varies depending on the content of the individual image, the lapse software I used provided a basic colour correction tool but that is overall on all frames, not frame by frame.
Dark frames have not been applied at all, which are needed as at 15 seconds the camera displays the expected amount of hot pixels. No flats have been applied either.
The output resolution is quite low so it is all a bit on the fuzzy side, but that is a limitation of the free version of the software I used to create the time lapse.
Does anyone have a handle on good free or relatively low cost software to produce a timelapse from a large number of still images? Outputting the file in the native resolution of the input images?
Second question, does anyone know of image manipulation software (Free or not) which allows for batch processing of a large number of images (Around 1200 for the night in this case) to bulk apply darks, flats and bias frames etc? I found a batch processing script for GIMP (Which I am using at the moment) but it does not appear to work correctly, it is supposed to subtract a selected image from another selection of images but it seems to go overboard, with the dark I shot at the appropriate exposure time producing visible dark spots where the hot pixels were. Manually opening the dark and light frame as layers, subtracting the dark from the light and flattening the resulting image did not do give them spots.
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