DeepSkyStacker vs Sequator

in this video we're gonna compare its ecuator directly against deep-sky stacker these are both awesome free applications you can use to stack your Astra images but recently deep sky stacker came out with a 64-bit version and in the past there's only 32-bit which meant more often than not a to actually crash in the middle of processing so now that there's a 64-bit version I wanted to create this video and we'll see which application actually works better so with that out of the way we'll head over to secretory first and this is the main user interface pretty simplistic which is actually kind of nice you know I have overly complicated setup so all we have to do first is double click on star images and you can either use raw or you can use TIFF files for this normally they recommend raw but in my experience using tips works a little bit better after you've done some editing in Camera Raw anyway once you've added all of your star images it's automatically gonna pick out a base image for reference choose early in the middle of the stack so you have to worry about that the noise images that's another word for dark frames so if you have those you can add them in and also the flat fields to correct for your vignette I don't know why either of those so I'm not gonna worry about it and I'll have to do is double click on output and specify the file name so I can name this ecuator 3 then we'll come down here at the bottom and this is where we have all of our different settings first we have composition you can choose either accumulation or you can do select best pixels and this is normally what I use and it says here it implements the Sigma clipping average which i think is the same process that's done in deep sky stacker so very similar process there and you can usually drag the slider over here to the right for a very strict radius so it should perform a little bit better and really that's all you have to worry about you don't have to really do anything else here but you could you know normally I turn on high dynamic range just to prevent the highlights blimp from blowing out but i'ma leave that turned off you'll notice too there's a yellow light here next to remove dynamic noises what that'll do if you turn it on is it'll try and find hot pixels and your photos and automatically remove them however I'm shooting 30-second exposures here so I'm not gonna have any hot pixels anyway so no point turning that on you can also try and remove distortion effects either the telephoto lens or a wide-angle lens but again I don't really have to worry about that with my particular lens secondly that turned off and that's really all there is to it so I can click start and then secretary's gonna go through and do all of its processing and once this finish is we'll head over to the deep sky stacker next and we'll try that processing all right secretory has finished the processing and this took about three minutes to do so pretty quick here now we're gonna head over to deep sky stacker and you can see the user interface is largely the same you know we have our open our picture files and our dark files up here our different settings down here so in some ways they're very similar but I'm gonna click open picture files to start select all of my RAW images again and then all I have to do now is hit check all here on the left that way they're all checked then I can double-click on any image if I want to and it'll load up a preview of the file and it usually does a terrible job of showing the preview that's not really what the images look like so I don't really understand why it doesn't do a good job but you can always come up here to the upper right and adjust the can looks like a level slider in Photoshop but this just gives you a better idea of what the photo might look like as far as I'm aware it doesn't actually affect any that processing though so that's just to see the image but the main thing here again was adding all of our picture files and then hitting check all on the left that's the first thing to do and if you had your dark frames or flat frames or anything else you can add those in as well I don't have them though so I'm not going to bother then all we have to do at this point is hit register check pictures and this is where we can choose all of our settings so you want to make sure that stack after registering is checked and for the amount of pictures here if you leave it at 100 it's gonna use every single photo but the way I like to do this is drop it down at 80 or 90 that way if there was some images that had some motion blur that I didn't catch it will remove them for me and then I'll give you usually a little bit higher quality final image then what we want to do is go over to the Advanced tab and there's this star detection threshold slider and I think it defaults to 10 so once you hit compute selected amount or whatever that was it's gonna go through and it's gonna look for the amount of stars you have in your photo and as far as I'm aware the more stars it finds the more accurate it might be with your aligning but it'll take obviously a lot longer if you've got like five thousand stars so if I move it to the right it'll find less stars and as far as I'm aware there's no real right number here if it shows you zero stars though that's not going to work and they would show you again five thousand stars or something like that it's gonna take forever so normally I try and get a couple hundred and no even just looking at the image it can get a very rough idea of how many stars are there so I think this is pretty good personally this is right around where I'm at as between 40 and 50 percent it seems to work okay for me all right with that out of the way we'll go to recommended settings now and it's showing me everything's already set in green you really don't have to worry about any of this it should just automatically pick the right settings for you and it's telling me I have short exposures with low signal and noise which is true these are only like 30 second images but you can do that or you can hit stacking parameters and this will allow you to change all the settings in the application so first we have the different stacking modes standards probably work best for everybody that's gonna be this green rectangle and this is where it's going to use a reference light frame I think it'll probably pick out the one in the middle of your stack mosaic mode this is where it's going to use all of your photos so if you do mosaic you might have some weird corners especially if your object drifted throughout the frame which very often happens to me so I probably wouldn't recommend that but you can try it standard modes probably fine though and if you have an older camera or a camera with low megapixels you might want to do the 2 times drizzle but anybody with a modern DSLR probably doesn't want to check that because it'll I think it at least doubles if not quadruples the overall image size so you can imagine it's just going to blow everything out and especially if you've got a very large object you're photographing likely Orion Nebula there's really no point to do the drizzle it's mainly for smaller objects so I'm not gonna worry about that for our stacking mode we can see here there's that Kappa Sigma which I believe is the same thing that's used in secretory I choose it what it defaults to someone leave it there and we'll go to alignment which should just be automatic intermediate files I make sure to leave this on TIFF and I don't bother with a calibrated file cosmetic this is where you can try and remove hot pixels but you don't have those in a 30 second photo so I'm not gonna worry about it and then finally output you want to make sure that you have all the same things and down here I always make sure I put it in a special folder if you click on the name it'll get your right where you need to go you can specify a new folder but everything here looks good and all I have to do is hit OK hit OK one more time and this is where it's saying I don't have any dark frames or flat frames or anything like that but it's kind of nice to choose you how much exposure time you actually have so in this case at about 30 minutes not really all that much but it should be okay to get a decent photo of Orion and then once you have all of your settings done we'll just hit OK and it's going to go through and do a lot of processing but as you can see there's quite a few more steps here and deep-sky stacker but it's still more or less the same process really all you're doing is adding in all your files hitting check all then you had a register check pictures do your star detection threshold to find a couple hundred stars usually then you just have to hit OK and hit OK usually and that's really all you have to do it's actually pretty simple once you get over all the different links and the settings and all that by default normally everything works out ok somebody hit OK and then once this finishes we'll look at both objects in Photoshop and we'll see which one comes out on top alright so deep sky stager has finished the processing and the output image looks terrible but this isn't what it's actually gonna look like so don't worry if you see something terrible it's not going to be the final photo and at this point you can even close out of here and head over to Photoshop but one thing I have noticed is that deep sky stager usually takes twice the amount of time as sequitur so that's already one advantage of using secretaries it's a lot faster but right now we have our autosave TIFF this is straight out of deep sky stacker and of course our secreto image and one problem you're gonna have with the deep sky stacker photo is that a lot of your adjustments are grayed out and that's because it saves it as a 32-bit TIFF file so to get around that we'll go up to image mode and instead of being on 32 bits we want but this down to 16 that we can do our normal editing and when you click on 16 it's gonna bring up this window and it also probably ruin the photo so what you need to do is change the method to exposure and gamma that I get it back to normal and you could increase the exposure a little bit if your photo is kind of dark but in this case mine is okay so there we go and now we have a 16-bit TIFF we can work with and what I want to do is drag my secretory image over that way they're both in the same workspace and then I'll rename this so we don't get confused here so there's secreto and here is deep sky stacker alright now the first thing I noticed here is that secreto has a more realistic color balance or at least the colors look better but why don't we zoom in and we'll see how well each one looks up close and the images aren't quite lined up but that's okay one problem I notice almost all the time with secretaries that's just a little bit grainy and there's a lot of color noise in the photo that's already kind of visible compared to deep sky stacker it appears to be quite a bit cleaner and this really isn't a big deal you can fix this in about 5 seconds if you have color noise all you have to do is go up to filter Camera Raw filter and then go to the detail tab and we have our noise reduction sliders here so I normally zoom in all the way increase the color to between 10 and 20 is more than enough and you can also do your luminance noise reduction here as well just a little bit to take some of that grain out then I'll hit OK and that kind of fix the problem right there and they look pretty good both images now still I think the SEC would or has a slight advantage just due to the color bounce but that's something you'll have to do in your editing so I'm gonna run through a very quick edit for both images and we'll see just how well the final image comes out and this is something I really cover in depth in my new deep sky course which has like 10 hours of content it's supposed to just be a little bonus but it ended up being a full course so if you want to learn more about how to edit your deep sky images of nebulae and galaxies you can head over to my website and check that out I probably will have some tutorials here on YouTube as well the future but you can already see that had a nice impact on the photo and I'm gonna just do a few more edits we're not gonna spend too much time here did hey but I just want to bring out some more this faint detail in the photo I'm pretty happy with that I think that's a good starting point for the secretory image there we go alright so that's secretory done now let's hit up deep sky stacker and I'll do my initial contrast adjustments like so and what I'm doing is I'm just using the hand tool here and curves and I'm trying to add contrast to bring out some of this fainter detail which very often tends to get lost and by adding multiple curves levels or curves layers rather you're able to continually stack these adjustments just to bring out you know more detail and color in the photo but one of the problems I'm having right now still this color cast and that was it's not really that hard to get rid of but sometimes can be kind of a pain especially it looks like today it's giving me a little bit of trouble but nothing we can't handle here and then we'll do a saturation layer and then we'll make these all clipping masks alright one more because it's kind of greenish and her head let me try yeah that looks a lot better alright I'm pretty happy with that so there's secretory versus deep-sky stacker and one more thing I'll do you might notice some weird banding when you're doing these edits and that's just because of a glitch in Photoshop spar as I'm aware it creates an ugly banding that won't really show up when you flatten all of your layers so I'm gonna merge all of them very quickly all right so we have sequitur on top and deep-sky stacker on the bottom and am i zoom in on the deep sky stacker image we have a lot of color noise that's visible now because I didn't fix it at the start of the workflow and it was kind of hidden away at first but now it's really becoming a parent just how awful it looks so again to fix that I've got a filter Camera Raw filter and then we'll just zoom in all the way and not very hard at all you know would that take 20 seconds to fix it and already the image looks a lot better so with all that of the way there's secretory and deep-sky stacker they look largely identical the colors a little bit off and that's just because I went through there very quickly using a curves adjustment and I really wouldn't put too much stock in if they look you know if one looks better or worse in terms of colors but the secretory image is noticeably grainier still you know it might be a little hard to see in the video but in this case deep sky sticker is definitely cleaner then secreto and I did a little bit of noise reduction on Sega rhetoric too so it shouldn't be that much grain here so that is kind of a problem and you know it's definitely a bit grainy so I know this one through kind of quick but now we can at least see how each image looks from both applications and I think the big takeaway today is that they're both gonna work great they're both free you can't go wrong either way especially now that deep sky stacker has the 64 bit version they won't crash on you so it can actually use it and with all that in mind you know the more I get comfortable using deep skies the more I'll probably start using it but if you're still a beginner to stack your images there is something to be said about secretory it's very straightforward it usually takes about half the time of deep sky stackers Baltic process and the colors usually tend to come out a little bit better than deep sky stacker but for the end result you can both make them look largely the same if you know how to edit your photos and the deep sky stack a photo usually does come out a little bit cleaner as we saw today but again I can go up to filter Camera Raw filter and I can just do a little bit more noise reduction and get rid of that grain but it's still not gonna look probably as good as the deep sky stack or image even after doing that yeah they're comparable so I think that's the big takeaway today is that regardless of which application you use you're gonna get a great result either way but the big thing really comes down to knowing how to edit your photos because this is how the secretory man started off I mean there's not a drastic difference just because I want to it quickly but it really does help to understand the proper ways to edit your photos here in Photoshop alright well that's about all I have for you so as we saw today secretory deep-sky stack are both great options for PC users if you want a free photo stacking software they're both going to produce an image largely the same the big thing though that it comes down to is how well you can edit your photos and it can be very difficult to learn how to use all these curves and levels adjustments there's just a lot to cover so if you want to learn everything you need to know about editing your deep space images you can over my website and I did just release a deep space course which has 10 hours of tutorials so I'm going to show you how to take these images how to actually find the nebula and of course how to edit them to get the best possible results so might want to check that out I also have 50% off on all of my star tracker tutorials if you've been thinking about getting one of those now is a great time but that's about all I have for you and in the future we're gonna be doing some on location videos I know you guys want to see more of those so I'll head out in location and I'll show you some different ways you can set up and get better results with your tracker

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 54,022

Keywords: deepskystacker, deep sky stacker, sequator, photo stacking, noise reduction, photoshop, orion, nebula, galaxy, astrophotography, star tracker, stacking software, tutorial, deep space, edit astro images

Id: HLXwpw863yQ

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2018