Stack with no align (in RegiStax)

[rogerg (Roger)]

Hi all,

I'm wanting to stack a bunch of images with no alignment performed - they are aligned manually, and any auto alignment just gets it wrong.

Any ideas how I can do that in RegiStax?

Thanks

[beren]

http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html

[Kal (Andrew)]

I'll second deepskystacker - way better at stacking than registax and it de-rotates as well.

[bojan]

Yep, deepskystacker works much better with stars and deep sky images.

[rogerg (Roger)]

Thanks all. I should check out deep sky stacker it seems.

In the mean time I actually realised how to do it in photoshop, which works great in this case as I only have 2-4 frames for each shot to stack, and need to merge stacked frames anyway.

Thanks

[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by rogerg

I actually realised how to do it in photoshop, which works great in this case as I only have 2-4 frames for each shot to stack, and need to merge stacked frames anyway.

How do you do it in PS?

I remember something like setting the opacity of each layer to 1/#frames.. eg: 4 images, set the opacity of each layer to 25%.

But what else do you do? Do you change the blending mode to mulitply or something?

[rogerg (Roger)]

Much simpler than I expected

Leave the layer modes as "Normal" (not multiply, or anything else), and just set the weights as you prefer. A true average of the frames would be as you said:

Layer 3: 25%
Layer 2: 25%
Layer 1: 25%
Background: 100%

But it's quite nice being able to customise this I have found. Being able to give a little more or less weight to different exposures which are potentially of better or worse quality, longer or shorter exposure, etc.

I've been working most with 3 frames:

Layer 2: 33%
Layer 1: 33%
Background: 100%

It's amazing to see with only 3 just how huge the noise reduction is and increase in clarity when hiding/showing each of the layers, it's quite fun

Quite powerful to also be able to clone between the layers before flattening them (to remove dust/aeroplanes/etc).