I took a series of 20 shots of the moon with my DSLR the other night. Normally I choose the best 'one' and process it. I have known for a long time that picking the top of the set, say X% and stacking them in Registax or AS2 would give much better results. I've always struggled to do so. I'm not sure if it's because I used the Canon raw (CR2) file format or because DSLR have massive resolution, but stacking has never worked well for me. This time in particular I really struggled to get the photos to line up as I kept moving and recentering. I took a cue from fellow CN'er zAmbonii (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sTcrONM24w) and added a few of my own twists.
- Open photos in Adobe Bridge all at once and crop all, painfully and individually.
- Save as tiff with no compression
- Use Adobe Bridge to open all tiff files as layers in single image
- Select all cropped photos
- In Bridge select the menu "Tools -> Photoshop -> Load Files into PS Layers"
- Auto align using
- Select all layers
- Edit / Auto-Align Layers / Auto
- Then after some waiting most all the layers are 'really close' to being 'stacked' At this point you can either
- Set all layers but the bottom to 50% opacity and call it day.
- Export as tiff using
- File / Scripts / Export layers to file
- Once exported as uncompressed tiff you can open them in Registax and have a MUCH easier time stacking as you normally would!
- After saving a stack of 14 and another of the full 20...
- I sharpened in AstraImage
- Opened in PhotoShop again for
- Denoise with Topaz
- High Pass Filter with contrast
- Saturation