Without doubt the best basic tutorial on DSS out there. Peter cuts straight through the BS with practical sensible advice that is repeated enough times that after even one viewing you feel you know what you are doing. He simplifies the plethora of options within the program. When you need darks, when you need bias frames etc. I reprocessed some of my images directly afterwards and found I could save lots of time by eliminating darks and biases altogether. Simply brilliant, many thanks
I will say this. It takes a long time to actually absorb pre/post/ and shooting astrophotography. When I first started researching, this channel was one of the first. Now that I have a little field knowledge of astrophotography, I am able to absorb this a lot easier. Up until this point i have been using sequator, but dss is a lot of more sophisticated. I learned this when I tried to stack the green comet this year and sequator only stacked the stars and would only treat the comet as an artifact and removed it. I bumped my head all day yesterday trying to play with dss. This video brings me a ton of clarity. Clear skies
Especially the parts about saving as a 16 bit tiff /not using auto save .tiff and not re registering already registered pictures. Also the star detection not having to compute a ton of stars.
Peter, thanks a lot, you have done a great contribution for astro-fans like me, and you have made all the details quite clear, I highly appreciate this dedicated video you have made. Keep going on!
HAHA! I've got some work to do. I went out and snapped 20 images of just the night sky to have something to practice with. My highest score was -21. That's less than zero!
Great tutorial! Where in the second workflow (the DSLR one) would you put enlargement with some AI tool like the one of Photoshop or Topaz - would it affect negatively the stacking, if enlargement is done before it? In addition could Topaz DeNoise be used instead of Camera RAW's also before the stacking, or is it better to use it after the stacking? I am wondering also why you emphasize so match on removing color noise in Camera RAW - isn't actually the whole point of stacking in removing the noise - both luminance and color? Of course you can improve it with additional noise reduction, that's why I am asking also about Topaz, but my assumption is that stacking should do a bigger amount of the noise reduction task, while noise reduction should only add a smaller proportion of additional smoothness, no matter whether it is used before of after the stacking? Another question: could DSS be used to remove only hot-pixels for ultra-long exposures like 1 hour and more, used for single-photo start trails?
Hi, all the file you import on DSS are RAW files, right? Do you have any idea why my final processed image (autosave) has much less resolution as the original tiff or raw (lights) ? I mean 150mb, but when I enlarge it, it seems very pixelate ......thank you
Congrats Peter great video ! I have a question how can i change a Color FITS file to a Color TIFF file to make the adjustment as you indicated on camera raw; i achieve doing this by using FITS liberator buy it give a gray scale file. I hope you can give some light ! Thx !
This was a great tutorial, but I have so many questions. I do panos, and my friend has recommended doing flats and darks, I usually only do 3 light frames, because of the limited time frame of the mw, do I sort them into panels, with lights and darks and flats? Are your folders in your camera folder? I'm using a dslr? Do I need a dark and light master for every session I go out? Or do I just get 1 master for all? Do you have a cheat sheet for this video
Thanks Peter. When the final stacked image is displayed, occasionally it is very washed out, almost white. I’ve been in the habit of moving the middle slider to center on the slope, hitting apply and saving the image. You suggest not doing this. Does it lower the quality of the saved image?
Thanks for this very important Tuto especially for beginners. I took with my Nikon D5200 between 100 and 300 lights the M45 M42 and M31 with 6s/3200iso. I stack first with DSS (or even sequator) and then arrange with Lr. My Results are really bad... 1/ Should i invert and do LR on raw files export on Tiff files and then stack with DSS ? 2/ should I arrange iso and exposure time , my DSLR is limited to 30s ? Thank indeed for your great help
Are you still in southern Utah? I work for my local cable station, WLOO CATV in Waterloo, WI, and was planning on taking a trip to the Valley of the Gods this fall to film a show about it for our channel. I thought it would be cool to meet up with you while I'm out there to document how you go about photographing deep space objects on an average night. I like that your channel is more geared towards the casual astrophotographer. You don't need 10 grand worth of equipment to get amazing shots, and I think that's a great way to get new people interested in this. Let me know what you think.
Absolutely smashing tutorial. This was my hobby and passion for quite long time but due to countless failures and other reasons I was one step away from getting rid off my astrophotography gear. I watched this tutorial and I have created half descent picture of M64, and this is by far the best picture I ever created.
Is there any way to open a .fits file in photoshop. I wanted to try the method of editing the files in PS before stacking but my files are all .fits files and I can seem to find a way to either open them natively or convert them to .tif before opening them.
I shoot in HaRGB with a DSLR color camera. I followed your steps all the way through. I've put in my Ha lights frames, I've put in my RGB lights frames, and then registered them. Once they were registered, I turned the RGB frame of the best score into a reference frame, and them unchecked the rest of the RGB images. I added my Ha calibration frames, and made sure the RGB reference frame was unchecked. Once this was all done, I ran the stacking process, but the final result came out with a black image with a blank histogram and no data. What am I doing wrong?
Hi Peter. I agree with the comments below...one of the best DSS tutorials I've watched. Many thanks for your patient way of guiding us through the different stages. Your tips and suggestions along the way are also so helpful! Could you help me with something? I will keep this simple, for me (as I am a novice) - I registered and stacked three .fits files for the Orion Nebula (R, G and V), but after stacking, the resulting image appears greyscale (the image doesn't seem to have any colour information i.e. the histogram on the bottom left does not show the RGB channels. When I open up the image in GIMP, ssme thing. I am unable to see any colour data i.e. whether I try levels or curves, there is no way to adjust the colours - the image seems to be greyscale. Could you tell me what I am doing incorrectly?
Hey bro, I can't thank you enough from an extreme amateur. I was just doing a test stack and couldn't get it to stack more than one light image. I had something set wrong and now I have a better idea of what I am doing. Thanks a lot! Great video, great explanation and awesome captures!
I just downloaded DSS on my Dell Laptop. The left panel is not available. I have one panel with buttons for Monitor, Stack, and Stop. No way to add files. ???
Brilliant,thank you so much. I have had Deep sky stacker for a while but haven't used it yet! I now have the knowledge, and confidence to start mastering it cheers Peter.
Starry Sky Stacker is an application available for the Mac. At least there are some alternatives, but I agree that finding Mac software can be difficult.
@@Ascard ...No its great for DSLR. Multiple nights is good. I have stopped using darks and bias frames. But my exposures are usually less than 5 secs each
16:13 hmm when I turn off "Create output file" I dont have any result after stacking. There is no file to save as. So I check "create output file", dss creates 32bit Autosave file after stacking(and saves it in specific folder), and there is an option "save picture to file" and then I can save this file as 16bit tiff. So I always end up with 2 files. Or maybe I miss something?
