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Sequator photo stacking software4/11/2024 ![]() As you get deeper into astrophotography, Sequator can grow with you, thanks to support for light and dark calibration frames. While Sequator’s user experience involves a slight learning curve, it offers a lot more functionality than stacking in Photoshop with Smart Objects. It offers the ability to create starry landscapes with less noise, stack deep sky images to improve signal-to-noise ratios, and even create star trail images out of a series of short exposures. Best of all, it’s donation-supported software created and maintained by the author Yi-Ruei Wu. While astro stacking can become wildly complex quite quickly, Sequator keeps things simple and accessible for beginners. Trying to balance exposure time requirements against the need to keep stars sharp means that stacking images for longer “effective” exposures is an important part of many astrophotography workflows. ![]() Cranking up the ISO or significantly boosting your exposure in post can reveal noise problems even in cameras with strong low-light performance. If you’re into astrophotography and want to capture the Milky Way, or a starry landscape, you’ll probably run into problems with noise. I’ve been exploring stacking to a greater extent, after getting the Nikon Z 105mm, and I’ve really been enjoying it. If you’re interested in exploring it, however, it’s definitely worth giving Helicon Focus a download - their trial is a great way to get started with stacking, and is a generous 30 days. In Helicon’s case, this means better support for retouching, alternate rendering algorithms for different situations, support for hundreds of images in a stack, and more.Īrguably even more niche than stitching panoramas, focus stacking at this level isn’t very common. Again, like PTGui, it’s quite fast, and has a far richer feature set relevant to its niche, compared to Photoshop. Helicon Focus is the option for the dedicated macro shooter to expand their plane of focus, and it does an excellent job at it. In this case, that’s turning stacks of images into a single image with much greater depth of field than would otherwise be possible. Helicon Focus, like PTGui above, is a tool dedicated to one specific photographic operation. Once you’re ready to move on to serious stacking, or just have a tricky set of images to stack, however, there’s one program to turn to. In my previous article on focus stacking, I focused on the easiest and most accessible option for most photographers who are new to stacking: Photoshop. Considering that I’ve had handheld panoramas that failed to stitch in Lightroom or PS come together effortlessly in PTGui makes this software a must-have for me. PSB for Photoshop that preserves all the images on individual layers, with layer masks pre-applied, letting you easily clean up any issues on image margins in Photoshop.Īt $150 for a personal license, it’s not cheap software, but the performance and time saved versus Adobe’s stitching options are almost priceless. It can take TIFFs from Lightroom, and spit out a. Lastly, it integrates perfectly with the Lightroom and Photoshop stack. The interface is clean, and thanks to being focused solely on panoramas, gives you instant access to a number of key panorama-related features. I’ve covered many of these features in my full review, but some of the ones I’ve found most useful include the ability to manually set control points, a live preview, GPU acceleration, masking, and support for a wider variety of projections. Beyond just being significantly faster, PTGui offers a host of features. PTGui, meanwhile, stitched the image in 43 seconds, including me changing the default projection. Manual control over control points can make a huge difference when stitching complex images Photoshop took 210 seconds to stitch the 20 image pano, with the end result having both perspective issues and some stitching errors. My work with a relatively simple 20 image panorama proved yet again the need for a dedicated panorama stitching tool. There are times, however, where Photoshop just doesn’t cut it. In fact, that workflow is even well supported from Lightroom, letting you quickly move more-complex panorama sets from Lightroom (typically after a failed stitch there) over to Photoshop. Photoshop can create 200+ megapixel panoramas from a set of images, and it can do a pretty good job at it. If you’ve got a program like these that you rely on, let me know in the comments! Panoramas Furthermore, these aren’t the only great specialty programs out there - these are just the ones that I’ve worked extensively with and have found a place in my workflow. While I’ll be referencing Photoshop throughout this article, as it’s my tool of choice, a lot of these points will apply to alternate “jack of all trades” photo editing tools, like Affinity Photo.
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