Simply put, these blending modes compare the images and choose the brightest pixel at each location. This rule is applied to each of the 3 RGB color channels separately. Note that this behaviour is on a channel by channel basis. If the pixels in the current image are darker, they are replaced with pixels from the previous image. The opposite works for the Darken blend mode. If the pixels of the selected image are lighter than the ones on the previous image in the stack, they are kept in the image. Blending Modes available in StarStax: for star trails, you have to use either Lighten or Gap filling blending modes. You can select the blending mode in the preference panel.
#STARTRAIL TIMELAPSE SOFTWARE#
Lucky for you, Starstax acts as a blending software thanks to its many blending modes. Star trails images are created by blending the images in Lighten or Gap Filling modes. If you took darks, add them by clicking on the icon in the tool bar. StarStax will then combine your dark and light frames without any further work from you. The dark frames will then be subtracted from your light ones to greatly improve image quality.
Take some photos with the same settings and at the same temperature as your light frames, but keep the lens cap on. When you do long exposures, one way to handle thermal noise reduction and removing stuck pixels is to take the so called dark frames. By Culling the images, you can deselect unwanted images, like this one.
For example, if a passing car or plane ruined the exposure.Ĭulling your images is fast and easy in StarStax. Once the images are loaded, you can visualise them and deselect those that you don’t like. Once you have your images in a format that StarStax can read, it’s time to load them. Drag and drop all of them into the leftmost panel of the interface. More on why you should do that further down. If you use Camera Raw, make sure you disable the Automatic Lens Correction first. Converting my Olympus RAW files into 16-bit TIFF images with RawTherapee. You’ll need to use a Raw Converter, such as Adobe Camera Raw or RawTherapee (free and multiplatform).
#STARTRAIL TIMELAPSE HOW TO#
How to Prepare Your Imagesīefore you start using this software, you should know that StarStax cannot read RAW files. From the top to bottom, they display the Preference Panel, the Tool Panel for the Gap Filling blending mode and a useful Help section. There’s three more icons on the far right. And finally, you have a settings panel with different options for image combination on the right. The dark files are displayed centrally where images appear. On the left, you’ll find the list of images. You can also find the zoom controls here.īelow the top bar the interface is split in three main panels. These allow you to load your images, load dark calibration files, save the final image, and process the images. You can find a set of icons on the top tool bar. In comparison, StarStax has a very simple interface. Sliders, tools, layers, menus within menus, and so on. The StarStax User InterfaceĪ lot of photographic software out there has complex and cluttered interfaces. StarStax is nowhere near that complicated. Then manually subtract dark files from your images, and so on. But you have to load every image as a layer in the same document. When it comes to Photoshop and similar software ( Gimp, Affinity Photo, etc.), you can create star trails. This means that you have to combine tens, if not hundreds, of images. This improves the image quality and the amount of data you can reveal with histogram stretching and other advanced editing techniques.įor star trails, in the era of digital sensor, it is best to take a big number of rather short exposures. It involves taking calibration files and multiple images to stack together later on. The simple answer is that night photography is tricky. So why do you have to use a specific software for your star trails? You can create star trails in Photoshop, too.
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