[g__day (Matthew)]

I'll be home bound for the next few months - major operation on my jaw next week (requiring bone graft from leg) - yuck. So whilst I'm recovering I thought amongst other things I'll brush up on my image processing skills.

It took me a long, long time to get Deep Sky Stacker working correctly to get great looking images for a Canon DSLR. I would often combine 10, 20 and 30 minute subs. My biggest three mistakes were 1) having goofed the BIAS shots (1/4000th of a second yes - but the camera lens was off - not on - my very, very bad), 2) not pushing the saturation up far enough so all my shots looked faded (about +21% is perfect for me) and 3) not colour aligning and setting the strech points well. Once I mastered this - shots looked great!

So I thought I'd download the 30 day trial of CCDStacker and compare it against DSS. Luckily there are some how to videos (designed for mono cameras) and the instruction manual follows a logical work flow. My first attempt at following all the steps on the video failed! CCDSTacker my subs as having a few hundred more pixels than DSS did - so it didn't like my master flats, bias and darks. So I had to use CCDSStacker to recreate BIAS, Flat and Dark masters so all images would have the same dimensions. After this I could readily complete the workflow - then guess how to add colour.

The last step didn't give me an image anywhere close to DSS quality. I had tried to process 5 * 30 minute subs of Eta Carina taken in April. The workflow was Calibrate (adding dark and flat frames), Auto scale, Debloom, register, Normalise, and Sum the images. By this stage everything looked a faded red colour with strange dark / light zone borders. Then I tried to add colour.

So all up my first go with CCDStacker was just a little better than my first go with DSS! It certainly appears that CCDStacker has alot more advanced functions than DSS; but it strikes me it was aimed at mono camera users.

I ponder has anyone before me done a solid comparison and review of DSS versus CCDStacker to highlight their respective strengths and weaknesses?

At my disposal now I have DSS, CCDStacker, MaximDL and CS4 - and free time! I am trying to figure out the best workflow I can configure with all this software to process DSLR images. I ponder before I start this has anyone else made excellent headway down this path? I believe many of these software versions have some overlapping workflow capabilities - I am trying to judge where to switch from one products capabilities to anothers and most importantly why!

Lets see what I find out!