#Star trail stacking software how to#

Converting my Olympus RAW files into 16-bit TIFF images with RawTherapee. YouвЂ™ll need to use a Raw Converter, such as Adobe Camera Raw or RawTherapee (free and multiplatform).

#Star trail stacking software how to#

How to Prepare Your ImagesД«efore 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. ThereвЂ™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, youвЂ™ll find the list of images. You can also find the zoom controls here.Д«elow 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 InterfaceДЄ 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.ДЇor 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.