![]() ![]() In this particular image I did some temperature adjustment to cool the image down a bit, bumped up the whites and highlights a touch and added a small amount of dehaze. My first step in the stacking process is to do some very basic edits in Camera Raw (or Lightroom / Luminar), which can be found with Photoshop. The final 3 images were taken with the same settings, however I used a soft torch light to illuminate segments of the bridge for 2-3s at a time. These were shot at 10s, f1.8 on a Sigma 14mm Art lens using my Nikon D850 and a Sirui tripod. The first 10 images were simply images of the night sky. On the night, I took 13 images in total for this one composition. I’ll be using the images I took at Kilcunda Bridge (Victoria, Australia) and I’ll be taking you through my whole process. Note that these programs are specifically designed for stacking astrophotography, with Sequator also being designed to handle images with foregrounds. Similar programs exist for Apple users, for example “Starry Sky Stacker”. Since I’m a PC user, I use the program “Sequator”. I’ll be starting with the automatic technique. This week I wanted to run through one of the techniques I use to stack. Now get & make others spellbound by the star trail photograph you just took.In my last blog post, I discussed the benefits of photo stacking. However, it is not saved by default & you need to save it manually(CTRL +S). Once done, you’ll be presented with the final composited photograph. Depending on the number & resolution of the photographs along-with the processing power of your computer, this process will take time. Once satisfied, hit ‘ok’ & you can go for a siesta. If you have not shot any dark frames, let the directory of dark frames be same as the one you selected for light frames. Because of the speed issue, this is disabled by default.Īs of now the plug-in works with the following file : jpg, jpeg, tiff, tif, bmp and png. This slows the process down considerably, around 3-4 times slower. Live display update (MUCH slower) : This will display the frames to the screen live as they are stacked together. They will be named trail00001.jpg, trail00002.jpg and so on. Intermediate save directory : The directory to save the intermediate frames to. ![]() Save intermediate frames : Checking this will save an image after each frame is layered, allowing you to make a time lapse of the trail building up. Use Dark Frames : Do you want to use dark frame noise reductionĭark Frames : The folder containing all your dark frames, ie the ones you took with the lens cap on. Light Frames : The folder containing all your light frames, ie the ones you can see the stars in. Now launch the startrail compositor & you should get a similar window. Make sure you restart GIMP after you’re done with changing the file permission above. This would give the necessary executable permission to the users for the file & you should be able to see the plug-in under the submenu. #chmod u+x ~/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/startrail.py If you’re not able to see the new sub-menu, make sure the permission of the plug-in file is executable to your user. Now launch GIMP & you should find a new sub-menu by File>Create>Python-Fu>Startrail. Once downloaded, copy the plugin file to ~/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/ directory on your machine. The plugin is known as ‘ gimp-startrail-compositor‘. Here is a small GIMP plugin which will help you elevate all that pain & concentrate more on shooting part of star trails. However most of the times when it comes to post-processing the photos after shooting a star trail can be a pain. ![]() Its one of the most beautiful vista of nature. Star-trail photographs are mind boggling to look at.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |