Easy Workflow For Stacking in SharpCap

welcome Joe or anyone else who's watching this video from the link in the shark app form I'm gonna run through a very easy workflow to get very good results from using the live stack and it's going to cover a couple of things one is the before stacking things that you have to look at and that's it close all of your menu items in sharp cap because you don't need them except for the one which controls the camera and within that is exposure and gain and down at the bottom of the menu is something called the display histogram why I've written this big reset in capitals I'll explain to you during the demonstration that I show you a live demo of stacking but within this histogram the reason why these three things work so well together is there's a signal that the histogram gives with the shape of the white curve that's in the histogram and when that signal is met by a combination of gain and exposure the images are fine and the best in my opinion to start stacking then I'm just going to cover the few main options within live stacking that you're going to need to look at and it's these once you get into stacking the first thing you should do is find the tab with the histogram don't worry about any of the others just reset it and then when you start stacking after about the second frame gets in or whatever you'll see that the align checkbox becomes alive make sure you check that then just occasionally look at watch when the frames are being stacked and after you get an amount say four or five or six frames you can start to do what I call two histogram art which is where you move the sliders around and there's really not many adjustments you have to do but stressing here I'm not going to talk about what each of these individual things actually do I'm going to talk about workflow because often you can read these manuals or someone will tell you on the web about how a particular tool works but they don't tell you when to move them and why you should move them or if you should move them so this is what this is about it's using those few very rudimentary controls that I just showed you on that checklist as a workflow okay so let's crack on oldest minimize this for a second and start up sharp camp where I've got my Z WOA is I 2 2 4 camera installed and ready to go now unfortunately I'm by the way I'm using shut cap 3.2 for a very good reason and it is because outside for the last three days has been pouring with rain and wind we have a cyclone which is like a hurricane and the Northern Hemisphere off the coast and it's just been terrible weather and I'm still doing a live demo though for you and it's the reason why I'm using the pro version of paid for the pro version of shark app because of this option right here folder monitor camera and this is very good for beginners because about a month ago when I was out doing some imaging doing some EAA part of what I did was I clicked an option in shaft gap to save all of the individual images as it was stacking I didn't just save the final nicely stacked image I saved all of the images that were stacking and the reason is the next day I copied those off and I often do this I copy those images off to a folder and I kept them to muck around within whenever I like because you can drop those saved images the individual frames that you shot during the night and you can paste them into this monitored folder that sharp cat monitors and you can replay them and stack them in the day the night no matter what the weather and just practice your your hobby practice how to use all of these many control panel options and so forth which aren't showing because I haven't connected the camera yet but you know what I mean so let me just do that quickly here's my zwa camera okay I setup because it's such atrocious weather outside I've set up just pointing at my TV just to get you going as if we were focusing the camera for the first time out in the dark so let me unpin the thing here so the auto-hide isn't on now all I've done here is I've minimized every menu option here except for the one or two that contained what we need camera controls contains exposure and gain and I've made sure that auto is not set do not use auto in the dark because it hunts in exposure and hunts in gain trying to get some image on the screen and I've always found it very flaky I personally always use this in manual mode none of the rest of this stuff matters for the purposes of getting a good image except down here I've got the display histogram showing and straight away I will reset it for no other reason then that's what I always do and I'll explain the reasons why I always use that in reset mode and I'll explain that when I actually get to the stacking demo okay but for now the reason I want to show you about focusing is the following many people try to throw the camera on straight away in the dark and they can't find focus and or when they are trying to do their star alignments they find that it's extremely difficult as well so my recommendation for a beginner is always to use your eyepiece to do your star alignments and then once you've done your alignments go to the brightest star in your location in your sky and Center it using the hand control because once you've centered it in your eyepiece and then put the camera in you know that the star will be sort of centered in the view of the camera you're not going to have to insert the camera and be looking at very faint stars where it's hard to focus by using the eyepiece for your star alignments and to go to the brightest star in your location and center it when you put the camera in it's got to be in the field of view of the camera you may however and let me just go over here and drop the gain so you can't see anything oh I just see what's going on here make sure to in the dark you've got a long exposure checked and you're using down the extreme left here of the curve which is about there we go a half a second because when you first try to focus you insert the camera you should see that really bright star centered or roughly centered that you went to use the go to the first thing you should do is maximize the gain and you will definitely get to see the star at that point you do your focus and I'm not going to bore you with that because I'm sure you know how to focus but it also serves the purpose of introducing you to the next thing is should you not be able to see the star even at maximum gain then usually you've grabbed this slider or these drop downs and go to the next highest setting so that's half a second showing at the moment so let's go to one second and it takes a shot and brings up a brighter image so you should be able to focus but more importantly now you can see down on this histogram here's this signal that you can see that helps you identify when you've got a shot that's ready to stack it is nothing more than the white curve that's on this histogram don't bother with any of the other curves just look at this white curve and you can see that the very left-hand edge of that curve intersects with the vertical axis it shouldn't to get the best amount of detail and signal they call it that white curve should start just just off the vertical axis but start from the horizontal axis and you can see it doesn't so the way I'm going to do is when you go to your first target it should be one of maybe a half a dozen of the brightest nebulas or brightest globular x' biggest and brightest nebulas biggest and brightest globular x' in your location because the bigger and brighter they are they're more likely you are to find them even if your go-to isn't totally accurate at high gain you'll get a good serve the edge of one of them whatever and soon know which direction to go okay but secondly your job is not to go out there as a beginner and hunt down faint galaxies and tiny little targets or go to random stuff which you have no idea if you've landed on or not because you don't really know what they look like your job as a beginner is to go to those half-a-dozen big bright nips and Big Bite globulars purely so you can practice this craft of working out about all the sliders because when you're at this maximum gain I'm going to explain these two controls of exposure and gain you can see here that I need to get that peak away or the whole curve away so that that line can intersect down here the way you do that is because you're at maximum go there's only one control to change remember we were only looking at exposure and gained so we have to increase exposure so let's try two seconds and watch the histogram come in well yeah it's probably good enough to go it's right down at this point just above the mouse the next thing to look for when that happens and hits that point it's weird it's the right hand of the curve hit and it really doesn't it this by the way this version of shark app always seems to go berserk at this far end here but I can see it's not intersecting kind of around this region here we're I'm waving the mouse that 50 percentile it should hit somewhere it kind of like just past that point and it's not that means gain is too high so let's drop the game back now the reason why it's important that we get that game back is look at this mottled effect that is noise stacking does get rid of the noise but if you start with a very noisy image you're going to have to stack a lot more to get rid of the noise so it it's in your best interest to drop this noise as much as you can so let's drop the noise now we'll go back kinda like one slider width and wait for the image to come in nope it's still too far to the right so we'll drop it another slider which to the left wait for the image to come in oh just about right but this curve is no longer intersecting right in there corner so we probably have to go to like maybe three seconds here we go wait for the image to come in looks good but again now a little bit too far to the right let's drop gained and now that or another slider with probably too much it should intersect just a bit past there so let's go just a half a slider width see what we get wait for it to come in that looks fine it's just intersecting down on the corner there and just intersecting past there for the purposes of this we're right to go but here's the thing you saw that juggling act I just did here and sure enough we've got much less noise going on now and even at three seconds we would actually be able to start stacking at this point but the idea is with the six biggest brightest globs and six biggest and brightest nibs is for you to actually do exactly like I just did and start stacking and using the techniques I'm about to show you in stacking but after you finish stacking that first object you went to do whatever it is I would then get you to change these settings like this you'd say to yourself writer I'm now gonna try and drop the gain again and go for whatever is twice that so let's try six seconds all five that'll be five point nine seconds wait for the image to come in you can see it's off to the left-hand edge but we've got to get this right head inch back how by dropping the game so you can see what I'm doing is I'm teaching you how to reduce the gain and still at low seconds worth of shots get the image ready in this correct signal position to start stacking with even more with even less noise the idea being that you shoot first of all as we did earlier three seconds with a higher gain give it a go at that very short but noisy setting and see how you go stacking learn how to control and how long you have to wait but stay on that same object and double the exposure time and reduce the gain so once again you've got this nice correct histogram signal and stack again and you'll see how different the controls are to move around and how different the quality of the detail is you'll go on this looks a lot more detailed or this is a lot easier than stacking those really noisy high gain shots so what you do after doing this with six seconds is you guessed it you'd go to like twelve seconds and drop the game so you still get a histogram that looks kinda like this the correct signal rising off of there dropping to there but again you try stacking and you'd say it would be even less noise because less gain and because of the longer exposure time more detail and what'll happen is you'll find a point where you start to recognize that your particular camera on that particular scope you're using is best for your taste to be maybe 20 second exposures at whatever gain gives you the signal down here in the histogram and you go from now on you know what I'm just gonna keep shooting at that but then you'll go to a different target or maybe the globulars and you'll find some different conditions all of it all of that testing all that trial and testing that you're doing by changing the gain and the exposure to always give you this signal that stacks very well you start to get a consistency of image and you start to get to learn a heart on different objects you kind of get to know by experience what the best settings are to choose and that helps you in the future that's why I'm saying pick those biggest six brightest biggest nebs and globs for your area and just concentrate on those for at least three months trying all those different gains and Expo exposure times it's a really cool thing to do okay because you really learn how it all works okay so now we've learned how it's just a matter of controlling exposure and gain and looking for the histogram special signal that I've told you and you've actually seen that the noise when you drop the gain is greatly reduced even though we've now I think trebled the exposure time the noise is really really reduced by the using the slower gain and you know how to get the image ready for stacking as I said though I can't really show you live stacking simply because terrible conditions but I'll show you how to do this with some saved images let me just close my camera well unplug it and I'll go to the camera folder option so what I've done is when I at last live stacked out there all right with my Canon DSLR by the way rather than my said wo camera it's the same end effect I stacked and saved each individual frame that was used in the stack I saved him off to an archive directory that was named appropriately and for this demo I've grabbed those images and copied them into the folder that this camera that this software has been set up to monitor so I'm using the folder monitor camera camera option and I can replay it all and try it out don't worry about looking at the image police over here what I want you to concentrate on the camera controls now changes to a source folder you browse to the folder we saved those and you click on the first file and it loads them all in for you it recognizes what type of file it is in this case it was TIFF files by that extension and loads of malting you can see 1 out of 10 frames of that particular object and it gives you these vcr buttons and what i'm going to use for this is this one step forward one frame at a time okay the reason why will become apparent shortly we're going to do some live stacks but I also want to show you the next thing you need to do whenever you're using sharp cap and you start to do your imaging the current frame it says is m83 which is the object name because it was a dear salah it uses ISO rather than gain and it's called this shot I've called the shot I for ISO 1600 which is again sitting if I were using yzw I'd have something like g3 40 something like that there for the gain but after that of it is 64 seconds 60 these are 60 second these are one minute frames because it's a DSLR it works the best for me with 60 second frames with my zwa that'd be like s 20 like 20 seconds the next word frame means this frame or sorry this image was purely to frame I'd been moving the thing around all over the place and originally it was down here and I used the arrow keys to get it up to this position just because I liked a kind of wide field view it's like a rule of thirds there is a line vehicle at one third here's the second third it always seems to make things appear more interesting to me you look around and go wow and then a draw your eyes - in this case a galaxy now I'm shooting a galaxy because I've been doing this for seven years of all sorts of cameras as a beginner this should be or one of six bright nibs or gloves right okay but it says also the next frame and the next frame has the same naming convention in but it has this x9 at the end that means I'll stack I was going to stack nine shots with my zlw I usually just put X because it's so fast at just 22nd frames I offer and let 50 bill that really doesn't bother me too much so I just put X there you can do the same if you're shooting deer solarz but from this I know I should not really stack that first frame the one I really want to start stacking from is this this is just my framing shot so I'm ready to start stacking now so I come over here and click live stick and don't worry about all of the windows and stuff all you need to click on is histogram and Espoo that workflow let me just go back down there and show you first thing I do is reset it once I select the histogram let's do that reset is right there for the histogram and down here for the color balance next I said make sure the align tech box is on it only becomes active you can see it's kind of hidden there it only becomes active once the second frame is staked but you check it now because you can see it's well I can't actually press anything I can see it's actually checked if it wasn't I would get very odd pause and hover over it right now because when the second frame came in from the camera automatically after 60 seconds always noisy w/o after just 20 seconds I want to be pretty quick with the zwa to click align frames because what that does is it aligns each star in this image on top of every star in all of the frames and that yields very sharp stars because no matter how good your mount they always have little aberrations and it drifts ever so slightly so say I was stacking with my z wo 50 frames if I looked at the first image this star right here at the end of the mouse might be there at the start of the frame and on the 50th frame it could be just a tad over to the right and that would mean if I did not align the frames everything would be streaky everything would have blur of about that dimension between the first and 50th frame would be a streak for the star and naturally all of the detail and the object would be blurred as well whereas by aligning the frames when the second frame comes in it kind of imagine it being a transparency that you'd overlay over this first image and align each star bang on top of the one underneath and right to through to the 50th frame every one of them is kind of like a transparency where every star is perfectly over lined so you get a net a very bright single spot for the star with good detail that's why you must always check this and when the second frame comes in if that wasn't checked for whatever reason make sure you check it so that it does align the frames okay the last thing we have to look for is the status of this track stacked or dropped it's over here and if I hide it using that button there Auto hide it shows me down here as well how many frames it's processed and how many it's dropped and you look for the odd one may drop but after it drops it continues into stack correctly that one in a blue moon dropped frame is usually heat haze or something like that and if it continually drops it means there's a cloud over your image where you're imaging stop imaging and move to another object okay so next there's nothing more than to actually start stacking so 20 seconds later if I was shooting with a zwa 60 seconds in the case of my deer so are the next frame would come in I step forward and over here it should go and say stacked one and there we go now this is ready and did I say the second frame I meant the first frame that was stacked so now that it's got the first frame to actually stack you can check see what I mean if that was unchecked I would immediately check it ready for the second frame to come in so now we do what is the third frame which is really the second we're gonna stack and here it comes book and now you can see something interesting the histogram when it does this it means it's kind of processing and this it's seeing a lot of noise in these images but as soon as I get to about the third of the fourth stacked frame I'll go to four frames here we go so there's four frames stacked it starts to get nice and sharp you can still see fuzzy here and fuzzy here it's just as its handling the noise but even at this fourth frame you can start adjusting this histogram so now we reach the reason why I'm so insistent that back when you are setting up your first image you never ever adjust it using the order stretch or this grab handle on the thing you always leave it in that reset mode now it is going to display a different histogram here which is actually a reflection of the stacking histogram when you're stacking but if you're not stacking and you're using this to try and set up the image so the white curve comes off the exes here and finishes about there so you can start stacking when you're doing that always reset it why the answer is if you adjust this then the auto stretch here in the in the stacking histogram and the auto colorations down here for me maybe it's just my setup on my system but for me they go kind of nuts it's very tough to get an accurate auto color good balance or an auto stretch and then only have to move a couple of things if I've done an adjustment over here that's why I much prefer to have this reset so it's it's just got no stretches applied to it at all I just use that to find that correct signal and start stacking because it enables me to do the following remember this is just four minutes worth of exposures now four stacked shots if I click this auto color balance and I'll do a time down there's two of them one is auto balance based on stars and when you've got a lot of stars an image that's a good thing the next one is auto color balance from the histogram Peaks that's usually if you got nothing but nebulosity and I mean the whole image covered by nebulosity but you can flip between the two if you wanted to try it out but for me for that image with lots of stars I'm going to press this auto color balance so you stay watching the image up here which I think has I'm a big car blind I think that's a green here and I think it's gray so I'm going to press the star color balance in three seconds so watch that image three two one Preston and yep I can see from my eyes it's done a good job because I can see this is a very nice white star and I'm pretty sure these are red stars here and what I'm seeing here looks quite a blue I can see the amp blow this is an unmodified and uncooled Canon DSLR that cost me $200 secondhand so yeah great bang it works straight away next we'll do the histogram adjustment and by the way if you have to use these manually it's up to you what you are just and how the image looks because remember it's just yours it's like you are painting a bit of art I don't care what you do it's your interpretation and how you move this slider surround it for me I like they had pre accurate colors so that I can with my colorblindness especially see what's going on and marvel at what's what I'm actually seeing next the auto adjustment of the histogram watch this boom now it looks extremely bright and it always does this with these shots but I'll explain how to simply fix it down below it's got a black level slider a mid level slider and a white level slider and for me it always does this yellow curve where the mid level is pushed that intensity of brightness which is what I'm seeing here it pushes it too high so I always grab this mid level slider first and start moving it to the right to decrease look at look at the image changing I go this far that it's still a pretty bright mid-tones with still a bit of gray in the background at that point I usually zoom in to see stuff around the object and the reason why is I'm about to adjust the black level and what the black level does is it concentrates on all the really dark stuff in this image and the aim is to make the space between the stars as dark as I could get but at the same time without destroying any of the dark dust lanes in the nebula so I want to spawn in this case the galaxies so now I take it off auto zoom and zoom in maybe 50% okay and I'm gonna just seem to that and go up a bit with it so I can see okay so now I start raising the black point to darken the space between the stars at the same time I'm watching things around these faint galaxies arms I don't to lose too much of that sort of the star arms which is very faint so I go up with the black point and I'm watching those two things the darkness of the space as well as making sure I don't blow away too much of the detail it's causing it's called clipper clipping data around those faint two galaxies arms it's probably good enough the white level should I have to adjust it looks after the white stuff it makes everything white really bright and you've got to be careful with especially nebulas that you don't start blurring and bloating some of them all really bright nebulosity for this image I'm quite happy at the white point I'm not going to worry about it and I'm starting to see now that that's actually not a bad image on what got a little bit darker with the mid-tones which is all this big bright stuff and raise the black point just a tad more trying not to destroy anything that's probably gonna do and to pop to make these colors pop a little bit I'm gonna raise this which is actually saturation easy to tell this adjusts the redness in the image the greenness the blue which was all Auto adjusted by that for me but this is saturation so if I blow that up by pushing it up it makes the colors pop just a little bit more so a watch and that's good enough so what is the Shamy this is where this is pretty cool for doing AAA which is after all is about observing and because it's observing I'm actually going to make the space around that look a bit less black I don't mind a bit of gray around the object because I'm observing there we go and I'm trying to see the faint detail so I'm marveling now at just how far the stars go out from that galaxy which I had clipped before by pushing the black point too far in and by clipping hopefully on your while you're watching this you can see the very faint glow of the stars all around the edge of that thing if I raise the black point too much you can see that outer edge is sinking away that's clipping data I've still got data back at this point here I can see it's yes taking it away maybe a fraction more at that point so there you go I can see just amazingly far the very faint bits of this these are stars and the black areas in here are dust you can see the blue and pink starburst where stars are being born and the red hot sorry the red cool stars and the blue hot stars are within these galaxies arms as well as some big bright ones here this is probably a star in the foreground but isn't that amazing and now if i zoom out or don't and I hide this what I hired or what I hired that there we go so there's my image just four frames 60 second frames and that's the sort of thing that you need to practice watch the video a few times make your own notes and you may want to while you're watching take a copy of that and as I say there you go it's a wonderful wonderful tool and it has got lots of other options within its many menus and settings but like I said don't get sucked into trying those at first your job is to pick those six really good big bright nebulas big bright globs and just start practicing with what I've just shown you here thanks very much for watching Cheers

Channel: Carl Smith

Views: 22,011

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Id: 0Fvm_DjOgaY

Length: 37min 1sec (2221 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020