DeepSkyStacker - Full Tutorial (2021 Edition)

when it comes to post-processing your astro photography photos stacking is one of the most important steps so today i'm doing an updated tutorial for deep sky stacker i had created one a few years back here for youtube but it's been a while and there's a lot of things i've learned since then so i wanted to update the video and make sure that everybody whether you're a complete beginner or maybe you've used deep sky stacker a few times you'll get something out of this video before we go any further i want to make clear that this is only available for windows users if you're on a mac unfortunately you're out of luck so if you are on a mac you'll either want to get some type of virtual windows environment installed on your computer or just get a windows laptop of some sort that way you can follow along because a lot of these applications for astrophotography are windows specific and they're not built for macs just something you gotta deal with hopefully you have the latest version installed you can follow along with me step by step over on the left we've got three different sections register and stacking processing and options most of the time we're going to be in the registering and stacking option and then in processing really all we're going to do is save it as a tiff right here and call it a day and i almost never mess with the options so again most of our time will be spent up in register and stacking another thing to note is that some of these have red text which indicates they're a little bit more important than the others and you might be clicking on them more often so if you just start up deep sky stacker really all you have to do is click open picture files in the top left in red this will allow you to choose whatever photos you want to bring in but i want to be clear you do want to use the raw tiff fits files whatever it is coming out of your camera right now you don't want to be selecting your darks or flats or anything like that you want the photos of the nebula the galaxy the milky way whatever it is and in this case we're looking at my zwo cameras directory i've got everything laid out that way i can keep track of it i'd recommend you do something similar because it's very easy to get disorganized and that's going to be a nightmare when it comes to your processing so make sure you do have everything organized appropriately today let's try maybe the heart nebula that photo turned out pretty cool once we get into the heart nebula folder you can see that i've actually gone into even more organization i've got my bias folder my dark folder and then my light frame folder where i've taken photos with my blue h alpha and red filters after you've navigated to your own light frames folder you can select all of your photos either by clicking on the first one holding down the shift key clicking on the last one or hitting control or command a provides you only have your image files in this folder and then we'll hit open and you'll notice i selected all of my photos even though they use different filters that's okay i am using a monochrome camera after all and this will make more sense here in a minute but the very least we've now added in all of our light frames but you'll notice over here we have a little check box and it says light frame zero one of the weird things with deep sky stacker is that even though all these photos are loaded in they're not actually gonna do anything until we check the box so now they've clicked on the first one it says light frames one rather than going through and clicking every one individually just go over to the left and hit check all that will very quickly obviously check all of our life frames now we have 75 ready to go you need to make sure you always hit check all before you do anything else at least for this first part of the workflow now that we've got all of our light frames selected we're going to rate them in other words we're going to register them and all of this relates to the field here labeled score after we've registered our photos it will give them a score based on how good the photo turned out if you had some star trailing you might get a low score compared to the other images that are sharper and that's really the whole point of registering is just to rate our photos that way we can either manually remove them if we see that there's a really low rated one or we can use deep sky stacker to automatically get rid of the bad one so let's continue on over on the left and click register checked pictures of course we would only want to do this after we fit check all when we click register check pictures we'll end up in this interface here it should look something like this by default for our workflow today though we want to uncheck the box that says stack after registering because we don't want to stack anything yet we just want to rate the photos to get started after you've unchecked stack after registering then you can go to the advanced tab and we want to make sure that the star detection threshold has been set properly i could spend 20 minutes talking about this but very simply you're going to move the slider left or right depending on your own image and you want to find a reasonable amount of stars so if i cancel out this very quickly it's going to choose your very first photo here in the list whatever that one is in this case it's my first photo with the blue filter and here we see a preview image you can see a preview image of any photo if you just click on it and it will show you that photo unfortunately though the default view especially if using a dedicated astro camera is usually very dark and you can hardly see anything there so what i recommend you do is go to the upper right corner and it almost looks like a level slider from photoshop we've got our black point midpoint and white point if you want to see the stars better you can move the midpoint here to the left until you can see your nebula or galaxy that you're photographing and just like photoshop you can spend a little bit of time here adjusting your levels to get more contrast but really all i ever do is just move the gray point over to see the stars better this won't have any effect on your image itself it's just for the preview purposes now that we've got a rough look at the amount of stars in the photo we can go back to the register check pictures button over on the left click on the advanced tab and we want to run the star detection threshold all you have to do is hit compute number detected stars it's going to go through and look at the very first photo in your list here and it will give you the amount of stars that it found 2625 if i glance over at the photo like you know there's probably 2 000 stars maybe even more and that's probably gonna work fine the only time you have an issue here is if you run this filter and it finds you know twenty 000 stars that's not only going to put a lot of strain on your computer it might take all day to do what it needs to do so there i found 8 000 that's probably going to be too much for what we're doing if i move the star detection threshold up higher to 98 percent now it found zero stars obviously that's not going to work either so the whole point with this little section is just that you want to adjust the slider that way you find a reasonable amount of stars just based on a glance at your photo it's going to be different for all of us in my case there's probably you know 2 000 stars visible there so that should be good enough i'm not worried about it that works for me if that's all good and you go back to your actions tab and you don't have stack after registering checked remember right now all we're trying to do is rate all of our photos that we can get the score so with that said we'll hit ok and now it's going to go through and rate all of your light frames based on the star size and some other factors once this is complete we can move on with the rest of our workflow so this might take a few minutes but then we'll pick back up when it's done all right deep sky stacker has finished the rating and now we can see that with the score tab over here what you might want to do is click on it in other words the higher the number here the sharper theoretically the photo is the lower the number again theoretically the worse the photo is so if we go and we organize it this way so we have the lowest numbers on top this one was actually taken with my h alpha filter which explains why it has a low rating because the stars here aren't very big and bright compared to my blue filter so i want to make sure you're clear a low score doesn't necessarily mean a bad image especially if you're taking different photos with different filters however if you notice one score is substantially lower than all the other ones around it that would indicate a problem like here we have a blue filter that's only 3 000 rated and it looks like crap that's my whole point here is that if you have a photo here that kind of just doesn't sound right and the score reflects that you know you have a bad image now that i know that this photo is blurry i can right click on it then i can either remove it from the list so it no longer will be added to our stack or i can just delete it completely from my computer because i'm never going to use this photo for today though i'm just going to remove it from the list but if i was doing this on my own i'd actually just delete it because it is terrible there we go i've removed it from the list we've got rid of a bad photo i can continue to go down through here we see a few more blue photos out here with a low score compared to all the rest that probably means these are a little bit blurry and if you move your mouse over the stars you're going to see a high res crop over on the left that will help you to see if your stars are actually sharp in this case these two photos with my blue filter are definitely a little bit blurry so i'll do the same thing i'll select them both and remove them from the list and now we've very quickly identified the bad photos and removed them thanks to deep sky stackers registering in other words rating of our photos with that completed let's go back to our file name header here and click on it this will organize the photos by their file name again which is what we want that we don't get confused at this point we need to choose a reference frame this is only really necessary if you're using a camera with different filters for example i used my monochrome camera and i took a series of photos with my blue filter with my h alpha filter and with my red filter and if you paid attention very closely you'll see that the stars drift between each filter so when i'm going to use a reference frame that's going to set every single photo regardless of the filter they're all going to be stacked to one location so this is really only important if you're going to be doing monochrome images with different filters or even a color camera to some extent you're just going to want to go through your photos just generally and find an image where the object is in the frame the way you want it for example my red filter here the nebula drift a little bit to the right it's not dead center but with the h alpha photos i kind of like that positioning better so i'll just choose maybe the very first h alpha photo i took that looks great in terms of the overall positioning then i can right click on that image and use as reference frame after i've specified this photo as my reference frame i'll have a little asterisk next to the score and if you haven't rated your photos yet this asterisk might not appear so if you've been following my workflow today step by step you should be with us and you have a little asterisk now next to the score this designates that this is going to be our reference frame every single stack of photos with our blue or h alpha red will now be stacked to the stars in this location and what that really means is that when we get into photoshop we won't have to worry about moving the images to line them up it will all be done automatically here in deep sky stacker for those that are using a dslr and just taking 10 or 20 images with your dslr you don't really have to worry about this step again it's mainly for monochrome users with different filters now that we've chosen a reference frame though we can start stacking our different sets of filters and to be clear i want to stack all of my blue filtered images together then i can stack all of my hydrogen alpha photos together and then lastly the red photos but i wouldn't want to stack them all at the same time because then i'd have red data mixed with h alpha and that wouldn't work so at this point when you're ready to stack all your photos together again this is for monochrome users if you just have a dslr all you have to do is just check all your photos and do the same thing either way though i'm going to hit uncheck all over on the left i want to uncheck everything that way i can select just the photos that i personally want to stack now that i've hit uncheck all on the left i'll scroll up click on my very first blue photo hold down the shift key click on the last blue photo that way they're all selected then i can right click and then hit check that's an easy way to just select the photos from one set of filters with all of our blue photos selected and i still have my reference frame here for the h alpha then we'll go back to register checked pictures on the left that'll bring up this window and you'll notice it always does this it says register already registered pictures that's going to be a huge waste of time what that would do is it actually go back and rate all your photos again which we've done it so there's no reason to do it again make sure you uncheck that box especially this part of the workflow then we'll click stack after registering because we want to stack our photos and this is where you can set the amount of photos that you want to stack in our case we know that every single photo's sharp because we went through we found those low rated photos and deleted them however if you didn't do that step or maybe you're not quite sure you might want to put this to just 90 percent that way it will automatically throw out the lowest rated photos from this set whatever you want to do i normally just leave it at 100 because i know my photos are sharp i've checked them then we'll go to the recommended settings button down here here in the recommended settings you'll see what deep sky stacker recommends based on your photos in this case it's saying i can either use sigma clipping or auto adaptive weighted average these are different stacking algorithms that'll give you slightly different results i like using sigma clipping so i'll click on it it is now green which means i've automatically set the algorithm to sigma clipping down here it's saying i can use per channel background calibration i've never really had to worry about that so i'm not going to click on it and then i'll hit ok and that's really all you have to do is just go into recommended settings see what it's telling you and then click on different things to make them green and you'll be set and if you include your dark bias and flat frames it will also have some recommendations here as well alternatively if you want to be a little bit more advanced you can go to the stacking parameters button down here and this is where you can really set everything you want for example you can do the standard mode of stacking mosaic mode intersection mode etc and it kind of gives you an idea here of what's going on i don't want to see it on standard mode though they also have the ability to drizzle but this is something you really should never have to do unless you're photographing a really small nebula and you've got a lot of photos if you want you can hear over to deep sky stackers website and read about it but it's a pretty technical concept normally though for what we're doing it's not really applicable while you're over there on deep sky stackers website they also explain the different algorithms if you want to read up on those let's move on now to the light tab this is where you can choose the stacking mode that you want manually rather than doing it the way i showed you earlier so if there's something you want to do you can do it through here then we have the alignment again i wouldn't really worry about this just leave it on automatic intermediate files probably want to make sure you're on tiff there cosmetic if you do have a lot of hot pixels you might want to try and remove them here but you're probably better doing that in photoshop to be honest finally in the output tab this is where you can specify what your autosave.tiff will be called and where it'll be located and all that but as you'll see i don't recommend you even use those autosave.tips they're going to be 32-bit which is not very usable so for me i'm actually going to just turn off the output file for right now although we're doing a tutorial so i guess i'll leave it on and that's all there is to it there's not much going on here everything should pretty much be left on the defaults other than the stacking mode you're generally going to choose between average median kappa sigma clipping or median kappa sigma clipping i know that all sounds technical but it's really not that hard i'll show you some other examples in a few minutes with all that sorted though we'll hit ok after we've verified that we've got our recommended settings clicked on is hit the ok button and it's telling us i have 51 minutes of data in this case with my blue filter i don't have any offset dark or flat frames though and that's the nice thing is if you're looking closely it will tell you in red what you're missing so now might be a good time for me to say oh crap i forgot about my dark frames and in reality i did forget about them so i'll cancel out of this then over on the left we have our open picture files that was for our light frames but we also have the ability to add in darks flats and bias as well so let's click on the button that says dark files then we can navigate to our heart nebula folder the dark frame folder and then select all of our dark frames these should have the exact same settings as your light frames mainly the camera's temperature should be the same so on my monochrome camera i made sure that the cooler temperature was set to minus 20 degrees celsius same as it was for my light frames for those using a dslr this is where the dark frames aren't as reliable because when you take your dark frames it's very hard to get the sensor temperature to match your light frames and if the sensor temperature doesn't match the hot pixels the amp glow and some other factors will not match and therefore your dark frames might actually cause the file image to look worse when you include them that's why i don't really take dark frames especially if i'm on a dslr the only time i take dark frames is when i'm taking five to ten minute long photos on my monochrome camera because i notice the corners get a little bit bright when i take such long exposures and if you've seen my go-to lessons week one video what i learned in that video is that the dark frames help to reduce some of those problems but as i said most of the time i don't worry about the darks even though everybody online says you need to have your darks flats and bias as i've seen though personally they're not as necessary as some people online would make you think but i'll leave that up to you to figure out on your own the big thing is that the darks have to be taken correctly otherwise they are going to actually give you a worse result and i think that is a problem a lot of people have another point on the dark frames if you refer to the deep sky stacker manual they recommend at least 20 dark frames that way you get the best results so that brings us to another problem if you only have two or three or four dark frames that's not going to be enough to get a clean master dark frame and ultimately you're just going to cause yourself more problems and that's why i say if you're going to be taking your darks flats and bias make sure you're actually doing them correctly otherwise you might actually get a worse final image than you would have if you just stacked your light frames without any of this stuff i don't want to go off on the tangent too much there but at the very least i've now added in my dark frames and by default for whatever reason the dark frames are automatically checked so you don't have to worry about that i could also go back now and click on flat files and grab my flat frames but you'll notice here i don't have a fly frames folder because i don't need flat frames i don't have even yet and i don't have dust spots in my image those are the two main reasons you'd even want to take flat frame so i'm not going to worry about flat frames if you have a very heavy vignette caused by your lens or telescope then you would want to take those and include them here as well finally we have the offset or bias frames if we click this button we can go to our directory again and choose our bias frames at least 100 i would say but for the bias frames honestly you probably don't need them most of the time they don't really do much anymore for a lot of our cameras so for me i'm not going to bother to include them you can try doing a stack with them in a stack without and see if you can even tell the difference chances are you won't be able to that's something else you'll want to do on your own time that is the bias frames so now that you've added in potentially your flats darks and bias frames let's make sure we're still on the same page we need to go back to register checked pictures and again whatever reason it's telling us to register already registered pictures i don't know why it's not a big deal to just uncheck it let's go back to our recommended settings we are creating a master dark from our dark frames that has been set now if i hit ok it's saying i don't have any offset frames in other words bias or flat frames but it is including my dark frames properly from here i can hit ok it's going to go through and now stack my photos to create my first blue image and then at that point we'll be ready to move on so again if you want to include your flat frames and bias frames you can do that i'm not going to worry about them i'll only include the darks today even though i probably don't even need those either i'll hit okay it's going to add up all my dark frames create what's called a master dark which is basically it's going to stack the dark frame photos and reduce the grain in them that way you're only seeing the glowy corners and hot pixels things like that now that we have the master dart created it's going through it's going to line up all of the photos that we took with our blue filter after it's aligned all of them then it will stack them to reduce the grain and increase the detail at that point it will create the final image and we can save that as a tiff which we can later work on in photoshop and i know we're getting kind of long here you might be a little bit confused but once we get to this first one we have to cover all the the different things we'll make a lot more easy all right here's our final image coming into view now of our blue filter now you have some very basic adjustment options down here i recommend you don't even touch this at all you're better off doing it in photoshop what i'd like you to do is go over to the left and click on save picture to file this will allow us to save this image as a 16-bit tiff file this will be under the processing tab save picture to file make sure you're saving this in the correct directory it might be in some random spot that you're not aware of so again make sure you're saving where you intend to i'll save this in my tips folder for the heart nebula and we'll call this blue 2 in this case notice how it's a tiff file 16 bits per channel don't use the 32 bits because that's just too much data that actually causes problems i won't be applying any compression and as for the options i'm going to embed any adjustments but do not apply them and that would mainly apply to if you actually messed around with this stuff down here which i told you not to if that all looks good we'll hit save and we've now created our first final stacked photo that was a lot so let's go back through with our next set of photos and do it a lot quicker that we can actually make sure your phone along to get out of this window just click on register and stacking in the very top left in bold if you click on register and stacking you're right back to our main interface and at this point we want to select our next set of photos so what i'll do is click on my first b photo hold down the shift key click on the last b photo these were all checked from earlier we're going to right click and uncheck now let's stack our h alpha photos i'll click on the first h alpha photo hold down shift and click on the last one then we'll right click check now we have 40 light frames all of which were taken with my h alpha filter selected we still have our 20 dark frames loaded in there the next step is to go to register checked pictures on the left again uncheck the register already registered pictures that's a waste of time click on recommended settings in this case i've got 40 light frames i'm still going to use the sigma clipping and i'll use the sigma clipping for the master dark frame as well that looks good we'll hit ok and hit ok again and you can see how much easier this is now that we've gotten all that stuff out of the way really all you have to do is click a few buttons once you get the hang of deep sky stacker and you'll be ready to go so it's not as difficult as it might seem and in the interest of time we're going to skip ahead here to using a dslr so if yours to fall along you just save picture to file after this photo has finished stacking then you'd go back through and do the same process you would select your red photos stack them together save that as a tiff and at that point with my three filtered images i can now create a color photo in photoshop now that we've covered the basics of deep sky stacker let's go back through it one more time using images from a dslr it's going to be roughly the same thing but there will be some important differences as you would expect we're first going to click open picture files on the left then we'll navigate to the folder with our dslr images and by default your directory might look something like this where you've got maybe some xmp files or something else in between every single photo if that's the case then it might be easier if you right click in the background sort by type and when you sort by the type that will get rid of all the junk between your photos there we go now that we're sorting by type we can click on our first raw photo hold down the shift key click on the last one and then hit open we've now loaded in our raw files and if you're looking very closely you might notice that the icons on the left have changed this indicates i'm shooting with a color camera that is a bear array and these are the neff files straight out of my nikon d750 one of the nice things is that over on the right it should show you your camera's iso exposure and aperture one of the very first things i would do is just scroll down your list and make sure they all have the exact same camera settings it's very possible that you might have a few stragglers in here that were test photos or you stopped the exposure early whatever it is that's going to cause problems later on so that would be a very good time to just come through here and make sure all your photos have the same settings to start off with now we can scroll back over and then we could click on any one of these photos to get a preview as we saw before if you go in the upper right you can move the midpoint slider to the left to get a better idea of what we're working with let's also keep in mind that this is the raw data straight out of the camera no edits have been applied which might actually cause some problems later on if you have them you might want to include your dark flat and bias frames as well because when i'm using my tamron 150 to 600 millimeter lens i have a noticeable vignette you can't really see it right now but it's definitely there if i increase the contrast it might show up a little bit better i still don't know if you can see that very well but there are some dark corners and without those flat frames that will become a very annoying problem later on in photoshop on the other hand if you have some purple glow in the corners of your photo or maybe some banding that's where the dark frames and the bias rooms might come in handy so if you are going to be stacking your raw data straight from a dslr the dark frames flat frames and bias frames might really come in handy provided you've taken enough of them and you took them correctly in my case i don't have any of those calibration frames so we have to work with what we got which is only the light frames in this case we'll hit check all over on the left and as before i'll click on register checked pictures when we get into this window i'm going to uncheck the stack after registering box i know i've thrown a lot at you today but you got to remember our general workflow the first step is just to rate all of our photos that way they get a score and we can see which photos are good or bad after we've got everything looking like the way you see here then we'll go to the advanced tab and compute the number of detected stars in this case it found about a thousand that's good enough i'll hit ok and now it's going to go through and write all 39 my images i'm guessing there's a few photos in here that are kind of blurry so this is good that we're rating them right now that way we can immediately get rid of them and they won't cause us any problems down the road after our photos have been rated let's click on the score tab and it should now have listed these from low to high as we might expect a score 465 is going to give us pretty blurred stars see that we almost have double stars in the upper left corner we know that's not going to be a good photo let's right click and remove from list then we have another one that's significantly lower than the others 921 score this one also has pretty blurry stars we'll right click remove from list even from here 1519 that's still pretty low when you compare it to a score of 7 000 and 5 000 so you might want to just take a general look at the scores and say you know what some of these are just too low for me to worry about and in my case i will get rid of anything less than 5000 for today so remove them from the list there we go we lost about eight photos but the very least all the data left is nice and sharp now that we've got that out of the way all that's left is to stack our checked pictures and for that we'll click on register checked pictures on the left uncheck register already registered we will check the stack after registering box though and now that we've manually removed any bad photos we'll make sure we're stacking 100 of the images let's go down to the recommended settings when you get in here feel free to read through all of these for me i'm not going to worry about anything other than my light frame combination method which is sigma clipping i've already got that green so we're good to go i'll hit ok we'll hit ok one more time it's telling us we have about an hour and a half of data that's pretty good but i don't have my bias darker flat frames in this case i don't have them to begin with there's nothing i can do so i'm not going to worry about it i'll hit ok now it's going to go through and stack all my photos so you saw right there that there wasn't really that much involved we brought our photos in deep sky stacker we rated them we found the blurry photos and got rid of them and then we stacked it together and if you had your dark flattened bias streams you'd include those as well and then begin the stacking process once this is complete we'll take it into photoshop and then we'll take a look at how it worked out alright so we've got our stacked photo completed remember you want to click save picture to file on the left and then verify you're actually saving this in the correct folder because very often it's not in the right one and we'll call this andromeda and then hit save and we've now saved our image and that's how you're going to use deepsky stacker for your raw photos before we go i want to show you the final result out of deep sky stagger and give you some suggestions here we can see my final image of andromeda out of deep sky stacker there's not much to look at but after a series of edits i was able to get this image here which is a lot better and this brings me to a problem i have with deep sky stacker using the workflow that most people talk about online you're gonna have to do a lot of edits here to get a halfway decent looking photo and that's assuming you even know what to do in terms of levels and curves and things like that so my whole point here is that the general workflow you might find on other channels and on the internet in general might not be the best especially if you have a similar setup to me when you're using a dslr that's why in my courses and in some videos here on youtube i use a different workflow which gives me a much better starting point here in photoshop and let me just give you a brief idea of how that goes if we go over to adobe bridge or lightroom if you prefer lightroom we're going to select all of our photos that we want to stack together then after we've selected our raw photos and bridge or lightroom we can open them up again in camera raw or in the develop module in lightroom it's going to be the same thing either way here we see the raw data straight out of the camera what i want to do in this case is some basic edits to the photos and these changes will ultimately make your life easier when you get into photoshop after the stacking because we're going to fix all the problems right now using some sliders first we'll increase the exposure slider so we can see the galaxy then we can bring on the highlight slider to preserve the core detail and andromeda next we can move down to the optics tab and because i'm using a telephoto lens i can automatically fix the vignette without needing flat frames it's that easy i just click a button and it's done after i fix the vignette caused by my lens without needing flat frames i'll go back to the basic tab then i can increase the saturation all the way to 100 that we can see the colors in my photo better notice there was a lot of air glow on this knife which explains the overly green color cast then i can adjust my temperature intent to fix these problems it's going to be kind of hard to do because there was a lot of air glow but at the very least i can neutralize some of that overly green color cast if i think that looks good then i can lower the saturation from 100 to maybe something more reasonable around 30. at this point we can just make some minor adjustments to the overall photo that way there's not too much contrast to begin with we can always add that in later and i think that's a good starting point especially compared to the raw data which we see right here one thing that i should have mentioned though that i just remembered is that if you are going to be following this workflow i'm showing you today very briefly make sure if you apply the profile corrections for the lens where it fixed the vignette you turn the distortion correction from 100 to 0. if you leave the distortion correction turned on you might get really weird artifacts after you stack the image and you might not be sure what's causing it so i want to make sure i'm very clear you put the distortion to zero that way camera raw or lightroom does not try to affect the overall distortion of the image only the vignette and now if we turn on off the profile corrections you can see it's only removing the vignette nothing else and that's about all there is to it you could spend a little bit more time hearing camera if you wanted to but at the very least we fixed all the problems in the photo including the color noise this is a problem i see on a lot of astrophotography photos if you zoom in those photos tend to have a lot of color noise in them because when you're stacking the raw data that color noise is baked into every single one of those raw photos if we use camera raw though we can go to the detail tab and by default the color noise reduction is set to 25 which means it's automatically getting rid of all this color noise in your photo which would not be done if you're stacking the raw data like i showed you earlier which most people do but by using camera raw or lightroom and automatically removing that color noise you're going to save yourself some trouble now that we're in the detail tab by default the sharpening is set to 40 which actually makes the grain look worse so i'd recommend you put the sharpening to zero and see how that reduces the grain in the photo i would not touch the noise reduction slider though because when you stack all your photos together that will automatically reduce the noise and therefore you might actually lose some detail if you try and reduce it right now so for most people leave the noise reduction at zero leave the color noise reduction to 25 and put the sharpening to zero if you do all that you're ready to go now we've done pretty much all the edits we need to do here in camera or lightroom then over on the left with all of our thumbnails still visible here we can right click and then choose select all that way all of our thumbnails are selected with our top edited thumbnail still the highlighted one though compared to the others we can either click this button here that looks like some sliders with a circle or you can right click again on your top thumbnail and hit sync settings that'll bring up this window here normally just leave everything the way it is here you don't have to worry about checking anything just hit okay if you do that correctly now every single one of your photos will have the same items applied and oddly enough the first photo still has a lot of green that the others don't have but i actually like the color balance perfectly here see how we don't have any real color cast we just have the natural night sky colors that looks perfect so with all of our edits applied and synced to each one of our raw photos now we need to save these as tiff files so we can stack them together for this i'll hit ctrl or command a one more time to select all my thumbnails right click save images save images this will bring us to this window and you're going to want to change the file extension to tiff because these need to be in the tiff format that way they're not losing any important data in addition the color space should be set to srgb unless you know what you're doing if it's on adobe rgb then if you're sharing these photos online the colors might look really weird when you publish them srgb will preserve the colors that you see on your screen and then the depth a lot of people say 16 bits per channel that's going to take up a lot more space on your computer and especially in an image like this you're not going to probably ever notice the difference between 8 and 16 bits so for me i'm going to leave it on 8 but to be safe you could put it to 16 bits to retain more color information i'm not really worried about it though as for the compression make sure you don't have any applied tip format make sure you're saving this in a folder where you can find it and i sometimes even create a new one called tiff that way i know where my photos are being saved once i save my photos in the tiff folder then i can stack these together and i want to make an important note here if you took your flat dark and biased frames this brings up a bit of a conundrum because those are only really applicable to the raw data now that we've edited the raw data and saved it as a tiff your flats darks and bias will no longer work properly if you try to include them in your stacking process so you have two options first don't include the dark splats and bias second you could bring them in here in camera raw along with all of our other photos that we've just added and sync the settings because if your two photos you know your lights and your darks don't match up properly then they're not going to be calibrated properly either this is getting into a whole rabbit hole that i don't want to get into i just want to briefly mention that if you did take dark flats and bias then they're not going to necessarily work that well with these newly edited tips that we just created so bear that in mind again i just want to show you an alternate workflow that might work better for a lot of you especially if you're just getting into this and you're using a dslr but after we've saved these tiff photos we'll go back very quickly we'll do a final recap on deep sky stacker just to make sure you get it and then i'll show you the before and after on my edited tips versus my raw photos and we'll see which one comes out on top all right my photos have finished saving so i can click done in the lower right and we'll go back to deep sky stacker one last time hopefully you know the trill by now over on the left we'll click open picture files then we'll navigate to our folder that we created the tiff files in select all of them hit open next we'll hit check all on the left from there we'll click register checked pictures go to the advanced tab and compute the number of detected stars because i did all those edits to the raw photos now i'm finding way more stars than i would have before because i brighten the image significantly that's going to be way too many stars for this to work i'm glad we checked this so if i increase the detection threshold to a higher number that should give me less stars and this should work a lot better there we go that's much more reasonable could probably even go a little bit higher to be honest that's good enough for me at 75 then after we've gotten this selected we'll go back to the actions tab turn off the stack after registering and then hit ok remember this part of the workflow we're just trying to rate our photos weed out any bad ones delete them and then we'll stack the photos together all right our photos have finished registering we can see that these first three look terrible and i've already messed with the contrast so the score here is 10 26 and 96 compared to the rest which are a lot higher i know these are bad i'll select them remove them from the list i'll probably even get rid of this one as well because it's not as good as the others all right now all these other images are roughly the same score and we can stack them together for that we'll click on register check pictures on the left uncheck register already registered check stack after registering click on recommended settings just to verify that everything looks good looks good to me all i really care about is the stacking method which is sigma clipping we'll hit ok we'll hit ok one more time we see we have just over an hour of data that's fine then we'll hit ok it's going to go through and stack our photos together once this is complete we'll do a before and after we'll see how my workflow compares with the original workflow that most people recommend online when your photo is finished stacking we'll go over to the left and click save picture to file and then we'll call this one andromeda2 and then hit save remember though these will create those autosaves.tiff and i don't recommend you ever use those autosave.tips they're not going to have the flexibility that the 16-bit tiff files will and as far as i'm concerned the autosave.tips are worthless you should delete them and only use the files that you manually save here as we just showed you so keep that in mind i see a lot of people using the autosave.tips but that's going to cause you more problems than anything down the road let's go over to photoshop now and compare the two photos okay here we have the photo that was taken using the workflow most people recommend where you take your raw photos stack them together ideally with your dark flattened bias frames and then you'll be presented with an image like this on the other hand we have my photo which was pre-edited in camera raw to remove all the problems straight out of the gate then we save those as tips and then stack those high quality tips to create this image here and if you're a beginner i would highly recommend you do this because now you don't have to worry about doing levels and curves and all this crap in photoshop just to get a halfway decent looking photo i mean that's kind of what we started off with after doing a lot of work and me having a lot of experience in photoshop compared to me moving a few sliders in camera raw that was a lot easier the only issue with this workflow is that as i mentioned you might have some problems baked in your photo because i did not include darks flats or bias frames in my case that's just a slight purple glow here at the bottom of the photo if you're on canon this might manifest as banding across your photo those problems might be reduced pretty well if you use the workflow that we talked about here where you had your raw images taken in a deep sky stacker with darks flats and bias those should help to remedy some problems like the purple glow but realistically i'm not concerned about this i knew this would be a problem and i know how to work around it and for me this is a much easier way to create really amazing images of distant nebula and galaxies alright and that's about all i've got for you guys today i hope you enjoyed the video i know it went on a little bit longer than i intended but i really wanted to make sure we were thrilled and covered any questions you might have if you want to learn even more about astrophotography then i'd recommend checking out the courses over on my website there's two in particular that i'd recommend which are my deep space course and astrophotography post-processing course the deep space course is mainly focused on using a simple star tracker and a dslr and a telephoto lens to capture and edit really awesome photos of those nebulae galaxies on the other hand my astro post processing course is mainly designed for milky way photography and how to use those star trackers to get the best possible results either way though you're going to learn a lot and if you like this video you'll definitely like those courses but that's all i've got for you today and i'll see you guys in another video

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 14,832

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Id: XOKpYCwiDfI

Length: 45min 0sec (2700 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021