Sequator - The Best Astro Stacking Program?

hey guys today I want to becoming sequitur which is a newer application you can use if you want to you do any kind of photo stacking whether that's the Andromeda galaxy the Orion Nebula or even wide-angle photos so let's say you a 14 millimeter lens and you want to stack multiple photos to reduce noise this is the perfect application because even Photoshop can't do that the fact that there's a lot of distortion with wide-angle lenses among some other factors Photoshop just fails to align it properly but using secretory we can actually do that so it's a really powerful free tool you can get and this is the website right here just a quick note this the author is Chinese I believe so some of the wording is kind of funny but it's still very easy to follow along with and the application runs much better than deep sky stacker if you've used deep sky stacker before you're aware that it's a 32-bit application and it constantly runs out of memory if you have any other kind of applications open butts ecuator I've used it to process probably six different examples at this point and they all are done within 20 seconds so it works extremely fast and it's very stable here we have the interface itself and the first thing you want to look at is these check boxes up here we've got base image star images noise images vignette in an output so your base image you really don't need to worry about that what I've been doing is just double-clicking on star images and then from here you can either choose your RAW files so you can see I have the the Neph files here for my d750 but I would recommend doing your initial edits and then saving those as TIFF files and using the TIFF files for this process it's gonna look a lot cleaner and it's gonna work better but anyway once you have them you just select them all they'll load up into the program here and you'll see we have the green dots which means we're good to go for that the noise image if you've done any kind of a sure photography before you've probably heard of dark frames same thing here if you're not familiar with the concept of a dark frame yet essentially as soon as you take this normal photo here you'd put the lens cap on and take the exact same photo or even two or three of that photo if not more and that's going to map out things like hot pixels on the photo as well as some kind of amp glow and things like that they're not necessary but they can help we also have vignette assal so-called flat fields in astrophotography and these are used to map out the vignette and this was taken with her broken on 14 millimeter which you can see has some pretty heavy vignette to take a vignette anemic as it's called here what you'd want to do is either put a shirt over your lens and make sure it's tight and photographed for a bright sunny sky and that would map out the vignette or if you had a brightly lit wall in your house you can take a photo of that and that would remove the vignette but frankly if you've got Camera Raw or Lightroom you can do that in post-processing so for example I'm gonna load up one of my RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw and if you go to the lens correction tab most lenses have a profile correction and you just click that and it's going to fix the vignette automatically in this case this is the Rokinon it doesn't have that automatic correction it's what I've done is just manually come in here and you can see that's what it looked like before I just increased the vignette to remove it anyway and I had to change the midpoint so it did that so you don't have to take the flat frames you can just do it here in post-processing and get the same effect really but once you have all your final photos saved its Tiff's we'll bring these back in a secre tour like we just did next you want to you have your output here we'll double click on that and this is where we're gonna name our file so I'm gonna save this as test2 and now I have a green check mark we're good to go there then this is where we can really choose all the different settings so first thing we have the align stars but you'll notice I have a foreground here this is a 14 millimeter photo so what I want to do is choose freeze ground and we have a couple different options here we can do selective which will try and remove aircrafts and things like that but you really shouldn't need to worry about that and then you can also do a line only I wouldn't recommend that but you'll notice here the sky region turned to red which means we have to do something so once you click on freeze ground instead of leaving it on accumulation will come to the sky region area again we have a couple different options we can use boundary line and this is where I'll just click and set that which I guess if you're shooting at the ocean or something and you have a legit straight boundary that'll work okay I would recommend using the irregular mask though this is gonna be a much more intuitive process and now we have this paintbrush just like in Photoshop and I can just highlight the sky and it's a very quick easy way to do this blending here you want to make sure that you don't cover up any of the foreground or that will mess this up if you need to change the size of the paintbrush just use your mouse wheel to make it bigger or smaller and just paint in as much as the sky as you can but again make sure you don't touch the foreground at all and that's that's gonna be good enough for what we're doing and again you'll notice this checkmark turn blue now so that's good auto brightness you can double click that turn that on in my experience I would rather use the HDR option that seems to work a little bit better and this will make more sense once we do a deep sky image I'm going to do that next but fright now I would just recommend turning on high dynamic range the remove dynamic noises what this will do is try and remove hot pixels in your photos and it works reasonably well so if you go through this process and you know she have some hot pixels in the foreground try doing it again with this option turned on but for now I'm not gonna worry about it the reduced reduced just see again this is where the the language is a little bit weird but this is going to reduce the distortion of a wide-angle lens so if you had some extreme coma or start trails on the corners you can enable this and it's going to try and fix it again this is the Rokinon so it doesn't have any distortion really to worry about so I'm gonna just that off I haven't actually messed around the light pollution yet because there's very little in this photo and frankly I don't have any really badly light polluted images to test so we have to skip that one for now you can enhance the Starlight and why don't we just do that for now to test it out because I have noticed when I'm doing these tests the stars do seem kind of dim so we'll be able to see before and after for that and then finally color space you probably wanna leave that srgb once we have our green check boxes up here and everything looks good down here we'll hit start and this is where you can really see how well this application works if this was Photoshop for example I'd probably be here for at least a minute if not two minutes waiting for us to a line and inevitably it would fail so it's really amazing how well this application works but there we go that took less than 20 seconds probably and we're just about done there once it finishes you can hit close and then this one actually looks pretty dark compared to the other one so I'm gonna hit open and here's my image and they definitely brighten the stars compared to my previous example just to show you oops this was the the previous attempt I did versus this one here I'm just gonna drag them both over so we can see them better I'm assuming this is the only thing I changed was the star brightness which is a rather enhanced star light so it appears that caused the overall image to be darker and if we really zoom in nicely I'd probably looking at the two side-by-side I'd probably leave that turn off so again I'd probably turn that off for future reference so let's look at my original image here if I increase the brightness quite a bit so we can see what's going on it looks pretty good there's some purple amp glow down here there's a hot pixel but that's because I didn't do the noise reduction and that's mainly from the Rokinon lens right here somewhere here is a one single raw file and I had eight stack together so you'll notice it's pretty noisy and there's the difference before and after basically we're getting rid of all this noise by stacking eight photos together and it does a really nice job especially here in the river that looks a lot cleaner and if you're able to take you know ten to 20 images you'd get even more noise reduction out of this technique if you look real close you'll notice there's a very slight softening of the stars just because there was substantial motion between each photo I was taking 15 second long photos with a one-second pause in between and the stars do move quite a bit over 16 seconds especially when you're doing 8 photos total so it's expected to lose a little bit of sharpness but it doesn't look terrible by any stretch so that's an example of the wide-angle I was really impressed how well this works as I've mentioned it's impossible to do this as far as I know in Photoshop for a variety of reasons and deep-sky stacker that probably wouldn't work there either so as far as I know secretory is the only free application that can do wide-angle photos which is really nice so why don't we look at a deep sky example next and that will kind of give us a better idea here I've got my Orion photos here and what I'm gonna need to do is save these is Tiff's real quick and then we'll edit those in secretory all right so I got my Orion Nebula photos edited it real quick so we can try those next again I recommend saving your photos from raw to TIFF and that tends to work a little bit better for this whole process since this is a deep sky photo things are going to be a little bit different from what we just saw I've loaded up my star images again I need to specify the output I'm just gonna say this is testing in and then our composition we don't have a foreground anymore so I have to worry about is choosing either accumulation or select pics pixels either ones probably gonna work well enough the problem with accumulated exposure though and this is what happened the first time is I'll just show you what's gonna happen if you leave it on accumulation and you leave off high dynamic range and auto brightness and we just hit start what's going to happen is it's gonna blow out the detail in the Orion Nebula that's gonna be impossible to get that back and again you can see how quick that took that probably have taken me five minutes at least it's not ten to twenty minutes to set up and deep-sky stacker so much faster but see how all that detail got blown out so you need to remember when you're in sequitur to specify either high dynamic range or auto brightness when I did auto brightness and actually made things worse so in this particular case I'm going to turn on high dynamic range and that will preserve the detail there also for accumulation can also do select best pixels and this will probably help a little bit with your noise reduction once I've done that I don't need to worry about any of the other issues so I'm going to change my output to test to test one and we'll process this again and there we go all the detail is retained and I can do a quick curves layer adjustment to bring out that faint detail there do another curves layer to get rid of that color gradient and let me just stop those highlights from getting clipped all right so that looks pretty good there there's a little bit of noise but again that's only because I had maybe eight exposures that were ten seconds long so that worked very well but very quick and it does a really good job we can try one more example and for that I'm gonna do a 35-millimeter if you've seen my noise reduction using median stacking in Photoshop that's kind of my first tutorial I ever did we basically did this whole process with the stacking and the noise reduction inside of Photoshop and that process did take quite a while so let's see how much quicker we can do it here in secretory so I'm going to reopen the application just like my star images and you know what this is another case where I did not edit the raw files first and when I ran this through initially before making the video there's still some ugly than yet and if I would have just edited the raw files first it would have looked a lot better so I'm gonna cut again edit those real quick and then we'll continue on alright so here I have the 35 millimeter exposure and for this one what I'm gonna do again is do the freeze ground just because there is a little bit of foreground there and then I'll go to get into the sky region which turned red I'm gonna use my paintbrush here and just paint in the sky real quick making sure not to touch the foreground at all now that I've done that I want to make sure to turn on the high dynamic range and I really don't need to worry about anything else in this photo I just need to set my output again and then we'll see how quick this takes now again if you saw the original Photoshop tutorial this it worked pretty well because at a 35-millimeter a 50 millimeter you only have about eight to ten seconds to take the photo and by the time you take 20 there's enough the stars don't move enough and you're able to actually stack them inside a Photoshop again if you try to do that with a 14 millimeter lens it's just too wide and there's too much distortion and it will never work properly so it's nice that you can do quite angle telephoto any kind of stacking inside of secretory and again this would have taken at least two to three times as long inside of Photoshop just to align the images but I'm gonna cut this again and I'll see you inside of Photoshop all right so we have the finished secretory image loaded up into Photoshop it looks pretty good what I'm gonna do first to just increase the brightness so we can see a little bit better and also I brought over a single frame of the 20 that I just stacked and what I'm gonna do is just toggle between the two and you can see just how much noise was removed so this is the original one single image this is either six or eight seconds long it I think ISO 6400 but look at all the noise there versus the 20 photos stacked it's really remarkable how much noise I got rid of and overall we're not losing very much sharpness and I'm not noticing any weird artifacts or anything so it seems to do a really nice job secretory of stacking photos not only very quickly but without any kind of weird artifacts and it's very straightforward to use I haven't really had any issues with compared to deep-sky stacker deep-sky stacker seems ridiculously overcomplicated now having as this and even Photoshop you can use that for a whole lot of things but the main reason I used Photoshop for a lot of my noise reduction and stacking was just because it was relatively straightforward but now that the secretory is out this does everything that Photoshop can do a much faster easier and it just makes your whole process a lot nicer to do so that's just been a quick look at sequitur again he's got a few quick start things and info on the website here so if there's something that I didn't quite cover well enough you might find the answer here but we did explain pretty much all there is to the application so if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and thanks to the commenter I can't remember your name that pointed this out to me the other day because this is definitely going to speed up my workflow and I'm glad we got to look at today

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 144,439

Keywords: sequator, sequator tutorial, photo stacking, photoshop, reduce noise, reduce grain, photograph the milky way, deep sky stacker, tutorial, photography, astrophotography, photo stack to reduce noise, reduce noise milky way

Id: ql4bEnJc4hE

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 06 2018