Stacking for Noise Reduction in Starry Landscape Stacker (Better Than Sequator?) 

With SLS you can create a sky/foreground mask (b & w image) in Photoshop and import it along with your images and it will do a perfect separation ignoring the painting option. Also, I’m curious why you convert to sRGB at that point instead of continuing to edit in AdobeRGB or ProPhoto. Thank you as always for sharing.

Rest in peace Alyn, you now belong to the stars you always loved man

Alyn you helped us glimpse the beauty of this world we live in and then left us to remind us that the glimpse won’t last forever. So treat it as the rarest treasure. I miss your voice on the RU-vids.

Just wanted to share that, in my experience with StarryLandscapeStacker, sometimes disabling lens distortion correction makes a big difference in terms of fixing a problem where the warping effects of the correction appear as a weird pattern in the noise that the stacking can't solve. It doesn't always happen, but I've just gotten into the habit of always turning it off (but leaving on the vignette and chromatic aberration corrections as needed).

This was a great tutorial. I've been using SLS for a couple of years now, and the guides provided by the developers were very basic. A commenter earlier noted that the stars in complicated tree foregrounds might be recovered by zooming in and adding more red "sky" dots in between the leaves (needles). BTW, Joshua trees probably make the best night sky foregrounds. I'm going to try to catch the green comet (C/2023 E3 ZTF) using one as a foreground this weekend.

Just a tip in processing the original raw files - to avoid sharpening the noise raise the Masking slider up to 70 - 80 %. Hit Option while moving the slider to see a B&W mask showing in white what will be sharpened and it’ll be just the stars and bright edges. Thanks for the tutorial!

I purchashed this and its really not that good for astro stacking. The main problem is works with non-linear images or ones that have already been stretched. Problem with that is all the best faint details and data from an astro image basically gets wiped out when you convert right to a non-linear file. Sure, it can reduce noice especially with brighter background sky areas and stars, but if you're trying to stack for the benefit to pull out very faint data, this won't work for that.

I'm a Windows gal so I use Sequator. Just wish you could zoom in when painting out the sky part of your base image. Otherwise, it has a lot of great options/features.

yeah. that intro to the astrovlogs where you sign your name in the sky is captivating. gives a good feel. like hearing the netflix "ba bong" at the start of a movie. right on.

Great video. Very helpful. It's interesting that you find Sequator to be better than Starry Landscape Stacker. I've found the opposite. My main issue with Sequator is that it really tends to accentuate the light pollution in the horizon. I stacked the identical set of images in both and Sequator gave me very noticeable orange glow, and Starry Landscape Stacker did not. Had that happen a couple of times. With regard to the masking, it depends on how meticulous you are with the application of the red dots. Along the horizon I zoom in and go into all the nooks and crannies and put in closely spaced dots. It's more time consuming, but much more accurate. The other option is like was mentioned by someone else, that you can import a mask from PS and use that. I'm actually wondering when both of these pieces of software will start to incorporate algorithms similar to what LR and PS have now to detect the sky. Not sure how difficult that will be to incorporate.

Contradiction in settings. sRGB's narrow color gamut vs. 16 bit data. Use a wide gamut space with 16 bits.

Thanks for another great video. Not a Mac user. but the program differences help to better understand how the editing processes are working

How do you figure out whether to make more shorter exposures for a stack vs less longer exposures or somewhere in between?

Great video. I use StarryLandscapeStacker and have observed the same result. Playing around with the method used when you save does have an effect. You showed Min, Max, and Mean. I do not recall at the moment but there is an option that seems to keep stars near complex object better. I think it has Dup in the name. But there might be other artifacts that occur using that method. Anyways. I am looking forward to your next video to see what you do. Thanks.

Just did my first stack. I think I might sell my trackers for wide view.

Wishing you and your crew a Wonderful Happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year🥳🎉🎊🤶☃️⛄🎄🎄🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅

Hi Alyn, hope you are doing great. At the end of your video, you mention a new program for stacking and noise reduction. At the time, I believe I watched the video, but I can't find it on your channel anymore. Could you share the video again? Thank you and big hug from Brazil.

On my mac , i have vmware and a windows os just to use sequator. Great pieca of software

Excellent and enjoyable tutorial as usual. The author of sequator endorses stacking the raw files though most seem to use work flow of stacking tiffs. What do you think of using the raw files?

Hey Alyn! Thank you so much for your comparison, just at the right time. (Had a conversation with Uros Fink who says SLS is superior and I doubted it, but had no personal experience with SLS); in my opinion Sequator is a gem as long as you're not into PixInSight. On a side note: I always see you lifting shadows in preprocessing; Sequator itself is best used with linear data and in my extensive use of Sequator I saw this ring true. I even deactive the camera curve and switch it to linear. Then I'm able to get h-Alpha data out of my unmodified camera alot (I also switch off denoise and sharpening except for color noise because Capture One does a better job beforehand than in post). I love how you stay simple with your pictures (esp. not moving the tripod); do you also do this when tracking? In front of a leafless tree I tend to move the tripod in that case because it's a pita to blend fore- and background together and I need to do a lot of content aware filling with the sky to get the blurred tree out of the picture. I'm not sure which one of the two techniques is more true to life, moving the tripod or fill afterwards when tracking. What is your take on this? Cheers from Germany Jan

I'm new to astrophtography but photograph wilife in bad light all too often. Have you tried the Topaz products for this workflow? I use it all the time for wildlife and tried it with my first handful of night-scapes as was so impressed for both noise and to reduce "oval" stars.

Hi Alyn, Very good video for those individuals not familiar with SLS. I do like creating a mask that is more accurate and exporting prior to SLS stacking… Especially when there are complex backgrounds. Just out of curiosity, I haven’t noticed the other software you said you were going to discuss in your next post processing video. Is it a stacking or masking software?

Great tutorial! thanks a lot!

What the best situation to use stacking method in? To reduce noise, would you use a star tracker in most situations?

I used to think Starry is better than Sequator until I found this video. Luckily I am windows user so I have to use Sequator anyway. Thanks for clarifying this. Cheers

Thanks for the tips!

Where’s this at 17:10 ?

Extremely useful. Thank you! I’ve used StaryLandscapeStacker for a couple years. I did not know you could bring it up from Lightroom. I did notice the lack of stars between complex trees, though. Do you use two separate computers, or do you run a PC emulator to run Sequator? Too bad it’s not available for Macs. I look forward to getting my “fix” in your next video.

Do you activate lens distortion control in camera when shooting astro panoramas?

I'm curious if you've used Lightroom's new AI denoise and your thoughts?

Great video. I wonder how many one minute tracked photos I can stack in Starry Landscape Stacker for the best result. Or is it even worth it to stack tracked photos?

Why sRGB as your colour space when you export as tiff using your Stack preset? Wouldn't you want the deepest colour space?

Do you ever get moire patterns from stacking TIFFs?

Why your stars are elongated (not round). Didnt you use a tracker? Thank you

So now you're adding a cliffhanger to your videos, leaving us waiting for the next episode to find out what's better than Sequator or SLS! Can't you still run Sequator on your Mac anyway?

I have a couple of questions that pertain to making edits prior to stacking, at least in Sequator. 1. I noticed you made some edits prior to stacking. Can you get the same results by stacking the RAW images first, then making the edits after stacking, since Sequator accepts RAW images? 2. Nico Carver cautioned against editing prior to stacking because altering the original data can create noise that you have to deal with in post. He says that even converting an image to TIFF, with no edits, can create noise in the data. I realize that his advice was specific to DSOs, but I was wondering if you've encountered that with landscape astrophotography, or if it isn't noticeable since it's wideangle and not zoomed in on a particular area of the sky.

Very interesting. How did you created the masks for the tree example on both software? I guess on sequator you did the mask manually, right? Could that be difference on the masks?

You mentioned in your video, about a video you did for Sequator. But, I did not see a link for it. Do you have a link or a date for it that I can search for. Thanks

Nice!

RIP

How are other noise reduction software such as DXO Pure Raw 2 and Topaz compare to Starry Landscape Stacker and Sequator?

What if you're a Linux user ?

Müthiş

still can't believe ur no longer with us shine bright mate 😥

Affinity photo2 stacks and aligns in one go much easier than this workflow. And you can do it on an iPad no need for expensive computers. Just another option. Great video as always.

Great video. I wanted to share something that will probably affect your channel. I just realized I am not getting all the notifications of your videos uploaded. I know I did select that option when I subscribed a while ago. If I try to correct it, I can't. I see a message that shows the request is invalid or that I can't do it because is content made for kids. I imagine you don't upload videos as "made for kids" because that limits that function. Apparently there is a bug in RU-vid. I saw a video saying that if I go to my settings and confirm my account I will not have that problem anymore. I tools screenshots of the issue but I know perhaps there's no way to share with you. I would suggest you ask publicly to your viewers if they have the same issue and they cannot change the notification bell to all videos.

1st

Yer just a fraud lol composites are not real photos lol 😂 only kidding like yer work ps I’m a kristine rosé student