doigal wrote:
I'm hoping to get a clear night on an upcomming trip to tasmania next month, if I do i'll have some RAWs to work with! I know a bit of scripting but havnt done any with photoshop before, certainly if it can be scripted i'm happy to give it a crack when i get back in march.
Probably the easiest way to get around the random number of layers is just to ask for the input at the start. I dont know if 'shop can do this.
Also, whats your opinion of lots of 30sec shots vs a few 30min shots?
Cool - when you get to working on that let me know!
Lots of 30 sec shots will require lots of processing power (if you're getting 20MP 14-bit raws it might be a little too crazy!).. a few 30 min shots will give you a bit more noise.. so it's a trade off.
I'm looking forward to trying this out and I have the perfect FG in mind for it. You can be sure, though, that it's not in the Seattle area anytime in the near future.
Since I should be fairly near to my car, I thought that I'd use a small generator to eliminate the battery issue.
At some point in the past I ran across a star trails blending action.
From Chris and Dawn Schur's Astrophotography site:
"Purpose:
To stack a directory of images (not RAW) to make a composite equal to one long exposure. Set camera for 15 - 30s, put in burst mode, and lock cable release down to take a cardfull of images. The main advantage of this program is that only two images are open at the same time, thus will not tax the memory and hard drive.
Directions for use:
Create a blank all black image, the same size as the images you wish to stack. Leave it open. This is where we will stack all the frames. To initiate the batch stack, load action into action pallete. Then File --> Automate --> Batch. Select directory of files as source, and NONE for output directory. Hit Ok, and the images will open, stack and close in succession. When finished, the flattened image left on the desktop can be saved under any name. Note: It takes a lot of time to open large uncompressed Tif images and may take over an hour to stack hundreds of images! But the results are as seen in the above image."
Q Smith wrote:
At some point in the past I ran across a star trails blending action.
From Chris and Dawn Schur's Astrophotography site:
"Purpose:
To stack a directory of images (not RAW) to make a composite equal to one long exposure. Set camera for 15 - 30s, put in burst mode, and lock cable release down to take a cardfull of images. The main advantage of this program is that only two images are open at the same time, thus will not tax the memory and hard drive.
Directions for use:
Create a blank all black image, the same size as the images you wish to stack. Leave it open. This is where we will stack all the frames. To initiate the batch stack, load action into action pallete. Then File --> Automate --> Batch. Select directory of files as source, and NONE for output directory. Hit Ok, and the images will open, stack and close in succession. When finished, the flattened image left on the desktop can be saved under any name. Note: It takes a lot of time to open large uncompressed Tif images and may take over an hour to stack hundreds of images! But the results are as seen in the above image."
I haven't tried the action myself just yet so I can't personally vouch for it but the examples looked good.
-Quent...Show more →
Thanks - just took a look at the action directions, and it uses lighten blend mode. So it may work for some applications, but if you're getting gaps like I have usually found, then it won't help much.. then you'll need to use my LSB method, which I'm pretty sure I invented.. so you won't find an action for it anywhere (yet!).
I'm running a mac pro with 2x 2.66 coreduo's and 7 gigs of ram, and loading 32 16 bit 12 mpix files into a smart object and setting it to maximum isn't too bad, maybe like 5-10 minutes at most? (that accomplishes the same thing as this action would).
So much for going to bed early. Yes, I could just come back tomorrow but I'm hooked. Thanks for posting this. No doubt it is appreciated by many (me included of course).
Wow Floris, thank you so much for putting together this tutorial! The advanced star blending technique and the slightly defocused star idea were particularly helpful. Your photos, as always, are beautiful.
Man, I wish you had put this out last week before I went to South Coyote Buttes and the Wave!
What great work in this, it really shows. An additional example to show I think would be "Star Spots" Like in my case, with it in the 20's and a 2 mile hike in the snow awaiting me, I really couldn't stay for 3 hours to shoot star trails, but once it got dark, I did shoot some stationary stars shots for a while.
Floris, I would think that Outdoor Photographer and/or PCPhoto might be interested in making your tutorial into an article. Tom Bol has done several articles for those magazines and he might give you some ideas. I had him as a photo-workshop instructor and found him a great fella.
Great tutorial!!!
Tim
