I find your tutorials the best not only for astro work but, Photoshop in general. The knowledge you drop is so well explained. Thank you Ian, hope your life is going well.
Fantastic tutorial. Super in-depth, detailed and well explained. Definitely knowledge in this video that other people never talk about. People would pay good $$ to learn those techniques.
Thanks for explaining this is a very clear, step-by-step procedure. It is quite a bit of work - however, totally worth it to end up with a great final exposure.
Excellent ! I tried this workflow with success following every step. The only thing I will do differently next time, is to use the image in the middle as reference instead of the first or last one. This will minimise the alignment effort in average. Thanks again for sharing experiences.
Absolutely brilliant tutorial. First person on RUclips to go this in-depth. I live on Maui, which gives me access to Haleakala. I can't wait to give this a shot.
Thank you very much for taking the time to post this. I really enjoy astrophotography, and I am fortunate enough to live in a part of the country where the night sky is extremely dark and I can literally walk out my front door, set up my tripod, and shoot the Milky Way. It's dark enough here to see it very well with the naked eye. I've been wanting to learn about image stacking for noise reduction, and this helped me tremendously.
Wow. That is complicated but the benefits are pretty obvious. Now I know how to do it right. Thanks for such a great, detailed video. Now I need to watch the rest of yours...
7 лет назад
Thank you. It helped me a lot! The difference between image before and after is unbelivable!
I've been struggling , after viewing your Auto Align video, because of the problem you described here. But I love the ability to do this in Photoshop, rather than another add on or star stacking program. This tutorial hits the mark big time... well constructed, very informative and extremely helpful... Excellent in a word.. Thanks
Thanks Ian. I actually shot the milky way in August with the RX100M4 (inspired by your tutorials on how to shoot it) Now I get another help with optimizing the quality. Will try it out. Thanks, Regards from Germany. Cheers
Thanks so much for this excellent tutorial on noise reduction stacking. Nice and direct and to the point. I used it to learn how to process my first stacked Milky Way shot. And hopefully you find some other specks to hang out with soon so that you won't be lonely forever.
Excellent tutorial Ian. I can not wait to do this. I live in a horribly light polluted big city and need to drive out to west Texas to find a dark sky. Maybe a camping trip to Big Bend.
Thank you, Ian! I have only done manual stacking twice and each time this video has helped guide me through the process with such detailed explanations. Superb content!
Just finished my first milky way stack. Thanks for the video. It was hella tedious manually stacking 11 frames but it was worth it in the end, the result i got
Excellent tutorial, as well as the one on processing in LR. Just done my first milky way shoot, so really new to this. I found that beyond central alignment in transform, none of the other adjustments really worked well. So I used puppet warp which is fantastic for aligning parts of the image without affecting other aligned parts.
Thank you so much for making this video! I have found out through a lot of photos that this auto alignment error happens a lot. Thank you for solving the issue and helping out my pictures
So I know you did this video a while ago... but I just used this method for an image that I posted to a FB group... they begged me for your link so you should be getting more hits for a bit :) thank you for sharing this so clearly it's helped me tremendously.
Awesome tutorial! I´ve been looking for a long time for a workflow, that is quick with good results. Maybe this is the perfect one! I used to get rid of the distortion with Hugin, then stack on Deep Sky Stacker, then retransform in Hugin, then combine fore- and background in Photoshop and give the final touch in Lightroom. It takes so much time and the result is still not perfect. You made my day Ian Norman!
Seriously thank for you this! This was so helpful. I just got done shooting some milkyway shots at Joshua tree. And tried using the automatic star stack and it only blurred out my image, even to the point where it looked like there were no stars. This is really going to help my shots out so much more. Thanks a lot for the great tutorial and education!
It angers me that my versions of CS6 doesn't have support stacking. It's infuriating because it's there, just grayed out. Wish I anticipated that before buying it but am really glad that this tutorial links to one to help folks like me.
Thank you so much Ian for all of the information. Your work always inspires me to get out and shoot more. I just recently purchased a Sony a6000 and a Rokinon 12mm f/2.0 I figured for the money I could get that body and lens for less money than the newer a6300 body. Really excited to test this method out with my new gear. I know the a6000 isn't the best in low light, but I think stacking will help clean things up a little. Thanks again for posting this stuff!
Thank you so much for this great video. I tried it out on some cellphone shots and the method reduced the noise quite a fair amount! Even when DSS didn't want to work for me.
I have tried for so long to get a good shot of our galaxy. I shoot the 5DII with Rokinon 14mm f2.8, the canon is not terrible by any means but I know not the best for noise compared to a couple other full framed. It was enough to frustrate me with the unclean look of my galaxy shots. Anyways, I tried this technique for the first time tonight, combined with your other tut, and some minor adjustments for my own tastes, I have definitely found my post processing workflow for this kind of photography without having to go out and getting a Sony A7RII (though I would love to have one down the road). You just made my day
Ian, thank you so much for this detailed and well explained tutorial. I'm going to Zion, Bryce, and Grand Canyon in the middle of October and I hope to shoot my first Milky Way or sight sky shots. This tutorial helped out a lot and thank you for making it.
Hi Ian, thanks for this, i followed along (complete astro noob here), and it worked great with shots from my first astro shoot. I could only use 4 exposures as i didnt have stacking in mind at the time of shooting, but it was a good practice run for next night I head out ;)
This is a wonderful, useful technique. I can't wait to try it out in a few months. I have older Canon bodies that are very noisy at high ISO. This should help very much.
Thanks Ian- Just attempted this with Jpeg files (my photoshop won't read my nikon raws_ - only used 3 Jpegs and still this method significantly reduced noise will still retaining lots of detail. Love this method! Alex
That was all I needed to subscribe and I look forward to watching more of your excellently made tutorials in hope they're as good as this one. As Timelapse photographer I spend most of my time using LR-AE-LRT and the end finished product lands in Premiere Pro to edit the film. So Photoshop has never really been an important step in my workload and there are so many things I still have to learn in PS and you have accelerated that learning curve tremendously with this Tutorial. Thank you very much.
The amount of times you say "relatively" is relatively numerous. Haha, on a serious note, fantastically helpful video. I find myself returning to it frequently. Thanks for sharing your knowledge! 10:50
Great video! Also consider using Dark frames to further reduce noise and Flat Field frames do wonders to help eliminate vignetting etc. These are standard procedure in proper (tracked) astrophotography and can be used in landscape astro images also, it just takes a little time and thought. Keep up the good work Ian, Landscape astrophotos can be as simple or complex as the imager chooses, that to me is part of its appeal
+photon_trap To echo this... flat frames are way more effective than "vignette correction" and can serve one additional useful purpose: reducing dust. The easiest way to take a flat frame is to turn on your tablet or iPad on a plain grey or white screen, cover the lens with it and take normal exposures. Best to do this before you change the focus since vignetting actually changes with aperture, focus or zoom changes in the lens. Great work, Ian.
Awesome tutorial! Not gonna lie, I think ill take my chances with a single exposure and ironing out noise than going through this for a bit less noise. Hopefully in the near future as sensors advance we won't need to do all this. Happy I found your RUclips channel. Cheers
You should invest in a light tracker like an iOptron Skytracker Ian. I have one myself and delighted with how easy it is to set up. That coupled with your A7s will get mind blowing results id say !!
Thanks for the great tutorial! Probably one of the best free stacking tutorial I've seen on RUclips! (btw I'll probably buy a star tracker instead of going through this whole process.
Wow, well I'm going to try and use some of this information to make my M42 image better. I used a celeston 6SE telescope so the Orion nebula is pretty big in the frame.
P.s. I don't think you mentioned about incorporating the North Star if possible (if in Northampton hemisphere etc). This will help aligning images as you always have one star to choose as master star to rotate around.
Great technique, great vid! If you download the corresponding lens profile and apply it in LR before PSP that must make it less distorted maybe? Thanks mate
This was a great explanation and walkthrough. Would you be able to do everything you did in this video using just Photoshop Elements and Lightroom? I'd prefer to just outright buy a program if I can, and not do a creative cloud thing if possible.
This is a really helpful video. Thanks. If you're using the auto-align feature how do you remove the mask you've applied after the alignment process? My stars all aligned great and after copying the layer mask to all my layers. Now I just need to know how to remove the mask overlay so I can get my foreground back.
Very helpful video since I exactly got those smeared stars with using the automatic solution. One question though since I am a total Lightroom and Photoshop newbie and only got this software two weeks ago: Why do you have a second circle around your brush circle? What does it display and if it's helpful, how can I turn it on? I only have the brush circle. Perhaps someone else can answer this question, too?
You can alt click to the eye icon on layers to hide all layer but the cliked! Also just press and slide the mouse over the eye icons... you can turn on/off them, you dont have to click all of tham! :-)
I live in a small/med size town and even a long exposure doesn't give me half as bright an image as the one you took with that point and shoot. :/. Dying to try this out though!
thanks Ian, really informative. would you use this technique if you were shooting on high end gear (Sony A7s with fast wide lens)? Or is it more useful when your limited by more budget gear?
I find your tutorials the best not only for astro work but, Photoshop in general. The knowledge you drop is so well explained. Thank you Ian, hope your life is going well.
The best milky way instructional stacking video I've seen! Your the man Ian!
Fantastic tutorial. Super in-depth, detailed and well explained. Definitely knowledge in this video that other people never talk about. People would pay good $$ to learn those techniques.
Thanks for explaining this is a very clear, step-by-step procedure. It is quite a bit of work - however, totally worth it to end up with a great final exposure.
Excellent !
I tried this workflow with success following every step.
The only thing I will do differently next time, is to use the image in the middle as reference instead of the first or last one. This will minimise the alignment effort in average.
Thanks again for sharing experiences.
Align to the frame that represents what you want the final image to look like.
Absolutely brilliant tutorial. First person on RUclips to go this in-depth. I live on Maui, which gives me access to Haleakala. I can't wait to give this a shot.
Thank you very much for taking the time to post this. I really enjoy astrophotography, and I am fortunate enough to live in a part of the country where the night sky is extremely dark and I can literally walk out my front door, set up my tripod, and shoot the Milky Way. It's dark enough here to see it very well with the naked eye. I've been wanting to learn about image stacking for noise reduction, and this helped me tremendously.
That manual alignment method is so straight forward and simple, thank you for sharing.
+Ian Norman (Lonely Speck) I have no problem with a bit of labour if it gets results. Now if you could get the clouds here to go away. ;)
You sir, put this clip together with enough knowledge to inform and enough simplicity that it could be easily followed. Great video.
You have a wonderful way of explaining what you're doing and being thorough. Very nice.
Still useful today, thanks so much for helping me manually stack photos of Comet Neowise over Minneapolis!
Wow. That is complicated but the benefits are pretty obvious. Now I know how to do it right. Thanks for such a great, detailed video. Now I need to watch the rest of yours...
Thank you. It helped me a lot! The difference between image before and after is unbelivable!
I've been struggling , after viewing your Auto Align video, because of the problem you described here. But I love the ability to do this in Photoshop, rather than another add on or star stacking program. This tutorial hits the mark big time... well constructed, very informative and extremely helpful... Excellent in a word.. Thanks
Thanks Ian. I actually shot the milky way in August with the RX100M4 (inspired by your tutorials on how to shoot it) Now I get another help with optimizing the quality. Will try it out. Thanks, Regards from Germany. Cheers
Thanks so much for this excellent tutorial on noise reduction stacking. Nice and direct and to the point. I used it to learn how to process my first stacked Milky Way shot. And hopefully you find some other specks to hang out with soon so that you won't be lonely forever.
Excellent tutorial Ian. I can not wait to do this. I live in a horribly light polluted big city and need to drive out to west Texas to find a dark sky. Maybe a camping trip to Big Bend.
there are no words that can describe how thankfull i am.... THANK YOU million times my friend!!!!
Thank you, Ian! I have only done manual stacking twice and each time this video has helped guide me through the process with such detailed explanations. Superb content!
Just finished my first milky way stack. Thanks for the video. It was hella tedious manually stacking 11 frames but it was worth it in the end, the result i got
Excellent tutorial, as well as the one on processing in LR. Just done my first milky way shoot, so really new to this. I found that beyond central alignment in transform, none of the other adjustments really worked well. So I used puppet warp which is fantastic for aligning parts of the image without affecting other aligned parts.
Thank you so much! I was depressed that i could not align my stars from Perseid 2016 untill I saw this. You saved that day!
Extremely useful and well explained method! Thanks a lot Ian!
Thank you so much for making this video! I have found out through a lot of photos that this auto alignment error happens a lot. Thank you for solving the issue and helping out my pictures
So I know you did this video a while ago... but I just used this method for an image that I posted to a FB group... they begged me for your link so you should be getting more hits for a bit :) thank you for sharing this so clearly it's helped me tremendously.
Very clear, thorough, and helpful. Thank you.
Awesome tutorial! I´ve been looking for a long time for a workflow, that is quick with good results. Maybe this is the perfect one!
I used to get rid of the distortion with Hugin, then stack on Deep Sky Stacker, then retransform in Hugin, then combine fore- and background in Photoshop and give the final touch in Lightroom. It takes so much time and the result is still not perfect. You made my day Ian Norman!
Thank you Yan for this amazing tutorial, it is one of the most detailed tutorial I've seen on RUclips. regards,
Seriously thank for you this! This was so helpful. I just got done shooting some milkyway shots at Joshua tree. And tried using the automatic star stack and it only blurred out my image, even to the point where it looked like there were no stars. This is really going to help my shots out so much more. Thanks a lot for the great tutorial and education!
Very impressive, quite a long method but no doubt it pays off. Great work.
A great job as always.
I have always followed every one of your videos.
I hope you post more often.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge! I'll try asap!
It angers me that my versions of CS6 doesn't have support stacking. It's infuriating because it's there, just grayed out. Wish I anticipated that before buying it but am really glad that this tutorial links to one to help folks like me.
Very well explained.. Will be giving this another bosh tonight. All the best
Thank you so much Ian for all of the information. Your work always inspires me to get out and shoot more. I just recently purchased a Sony a6000 and a Rokinon 12mm f/2.0
I figured for the money I could get that body and lens for less money than the newer a6300 body. Really excited to test this method out with my new gear. I know the a6000 isn't the best in low light, but I think stacking will help clean things up a little. Thanks again for posting this stuff!
Thank you so much for this great video. I tried it out on some cellphone shots and the method reduced the noise quite a fair amount! Even when DSS didn't want to work for me.
I have tried for so long to get a good shot of our galaxy. I shoot the 5DII with Rokinon 14mm f2.8, the canon is not terrible by any means but I know not the best for noise compared to a couple other full framed. It was enough to frustrate me with the unclean look of my galaxy shots. Anyways, I tried this technique for the first time tonight, combined with your other tut, and some minor adjustments for my own tastes, I have definitely found my post processing workflow for this kind of photography without having to go out and getting a Sony A7RII (though I would love to have one down the road). You just made my day
Will be trying this next week. Thank you for such a great tutorial! Your images are so inspiring!
Ian, thank you so much for this detailed and well explained tutorial. I'm going to Zion, Bryce, and Grand Canyon in the middle of October and I hope to shoot my first Milky Way or sight sky shots. This tutorial helped out a lot and thank you for making it.
my pleasure! shoot right after sunset at that time of year! do you have a good time of month with no moon?
oh no, i just checked. the moon will be out during oct. 11-15, which is when i'll be at the national parks
Wow, this solves the existing problems with the Rokinon 14mm. Thanks!
Hi Ian, thanks for this, i followed along (complete astro noob here), and it worked great with shots from my first astro shoot. I could only use 4 exposures as i didnt have stacking in mind at the time of shooting, but it was a good practice run for next night I head out ;)
This is a wonderful, useful technique. I can't wait to try it out in a few months. I have older Canon bodies that are very noisy at high ISO. This should help very much.
Thanks Ian- Just attempted this with Jpeg files (my photoshop won't read my nikon raws_ - only used 3 Jpegs and still this method significantly reduced noise will still retaining lots of detail. Love this method! Alex
Fantastic job. And your images are absolutely jaw-dropping.
Thanks for the tutorial and taking the time to show all the details!
That was all I needed to subscribe and I look forward to watching more of your excellently made tutorials in hope they're as good as this one. As Timelapse photographer I spend most of my time using LR-AE-LRT and the end finished product lands in Premiere Pro to edit the film. So Photoshop has never really been an important step in my workload and there are so many things I still have to learn in PS and you have accelerated that learning curve tremendously with this Tutorial. Thank you very much.
Great video! I've been wanting to get into astrophotography and been disappointed by the amount of noise in my images, this'll be really helpful :)
***** I'm sure it will. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for sharing of this great advanced method of layers aligning
The amount of times you say "relatively" is relatively numerous. Haha, on a serious note, fantastically helpful video. I find myself returning to it frequently. Thanks for sharing your knowledge! 10:50
Great video! Also consider using Dark frames to further reduce noise and Flat Field frames do wonders to help eliminate vignetting etc.
These are standard procedure in proper (tracked) astrophotography and can be used in landscape astro images also, it just takes a little time and thought.
Keep up the good work Ian, Landscape astrophotos can be as simple or complex as the imager chooses, that to me is part of its appeal
+photon_trap To echo this... flat frames are way more effective than "vignette correction" and can serve one additional useful purpose: reducing dust. The easiest way to take a flat frame is to turn on your tablet or iPad on a plain grey or white screen, cover the lens with it and take normal exposures. Best to do this before you change the focus since vignetting actually changes with aperture, focus or zoom changes in the lens.
Great work, Ian.
How would you apply them to this process though? Care to explain a bit further please?
Great work guys! I've lost count on how many times I had to step back though. ;-D
GreatWork Ian, thanks for spending time putting this together.
Amazing in-depth tutorial! Thanks for being AWESOME!
Thank you so much for spending that much time for the Tutorial !!! Really appreciate it
Great tutorial!
I thought I recognized the trees on the left, and I was right. I know exactly where you were standing for this shot! haha
Very clear and detailed explanation. Subscribed !
Great tutorial as always, Norman. Very detailed and informative. Thanks !
Awesome tutorial! Not gonna lie, I think ill take my chances with a single exposure and ironing out noise than going through this for a bit less noise. Hopefully in the near future as sensors advance we won't need to do all this. Happy I found your RUclips channel. Cheers
You should invest in a light tracker like an iOptron Skytracker Ian. I have one myself and delighted with how easy it is to set up. That coupled with your A7s will get mind blowing results id say !!
brilliant tutorial! thanks a bunch! really appreciate all the effort that goes into making these tuts.
Amazing Ian Norman ! Thank you so much for help !
Rip to everyone using this method! 4.5 hours later! Thank you Ian
Amazing work! And that you did this with an RX100 M3!
Really appreciated! Thank you Ian, stoked to play with this.
Thanks for the great tutorial! Probably one of the best free stacking tutorial I've seen on RUclips! (btw I'll probably buy a star tracker instead of going through this whole process.
Thanks Ian a great tutorial as usual
hope I could do such photography
Very helpful and clear. Thanks! Can't wait for a clear night now :D
Thanks for another great tutorial Ian.
Wow, well I'm going to try and use some of this information to make my M42 image better. I used a celeston 6SE telescope so the Orion nebula is pretty big in the frame.
Would defiantly recommend using a notepad and pen to write down notes while watching the video but great video thank you for the help !
Great tutorial! Thanks so much, just what I've been looking for!
P.s. I don't think you mentioned about incorporating the North Star if possible (if in Northampton hemisphere etc). This will help aligning images as you always have one star to choose as master star to rotate around.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS AMAZING TUTORIAL!!!!!!!!!
Great tutorial. Thanks for sharing.
Awesome tutorial!
this was incredibly helpful. Thanks a lot!
Great technique, great vid! If you download the corresponding lens profile and apply it in LR before PSP that must make it less distorted maybe? Thanks mate
Thanks so much for this tutorial
Awesome video! Very inspiring
This was a great explanation and walkthrough.
Would you be able to do everything you did in this video using just Photoshop Elements and Lightroom? I'd prefer to just outright buy a program if I can, and not do a creative cloud thing if possible.
Amazing tutorial. Thank you so much!
This is a really helpful video. Thanks. If you're using the auto-align feature how do you remove the mask you've applied after the alignment process? My stars all aligned great and after copying the layer mask to all my layers. Now I just need to know how to remove the mask overlay so I can get my foreground back.
Good job man...Nice tutorial
Good job Norman and thank you
Very helpful video since I exactly got those smeared stars with using the automatic solution. One question though since I am a total Lightroom and Photoshop newbie and only got this software two weeks ago: Why do you have a second circle around your brush circle? What does it display and if it's helpful, how can I turn it on? I only have the brush circle. Perhaps someone else can answer this question, too?
You can alt click to the eye icon on layers to hide all layer but the cliked! Also just press and slide the mouse over the eye icons... you can turn on/off them, you dont have to click all of tham! :-)
Great explanation!! Thanks a lot!
Great tutorial! This technique is very similar to mine.
awesome workflow for manual align!! I suspect this works better than auto align.
Thank you so much for making this informative tutorial. You have truly helped me a lot with your videos, I cannot thank you enough. (:
This is really good, thank you!
I live in a small/med size town and even a long exposure doesn't give me half as bright an image as the one you took with that point and shoot. :/. Dying to try this out though!
thanks Ian, really informative. would you use this technique if you were shooting on high end gear (Sony A7s with fast wide lens)? Or is it more useful when your limited by more budget gear?
awesome tutorial, thanks!!
Thank you. Great tutorial!
Very good results. thanks
genius, tks lot, u saved my many bucks by buying expensive gears for astro photography
great tutorial! looking forward to try it
Question: Can you print it out afterwards? At what size do you see the noise on the printout?
Nice tutorial !!Can ask you something?What features must have a computer for this process?THANK YOU!