Deep Sky Stacker (DSS) Settings

[glowingturnip]

Since lots of people seem to have problems with the settings in DSS, I thought I'd share mine, after a long afternoon of trial and error trying to see which settings helped and which didn't:

raw/fits settings:

auto white balance (experiment with this, is usually better than camera white balance)

AHD

set black-point to zero (turn off if not using bias frames)

register settings:

register already registered

auto detection of hot pixels off

stack after registering

advanced:

with median, aim for 20+ stars

stacking params:

standard or intersection (intersection would save cropping off the junk after)

align rgb off

light - auto adaptive weighted avg 5 iterations, experiment with per-channel or rgb-channels background calibration (recommended settings usually tells you which to use)

dark - median kappa, hot pixels off, optimisation and optimisation factor off

flat median kappa

bias median kappa

alignment auto

cosmetic - all off

check the recommended settings dialogue before running, see if there's anything it's drawing your attention to - can ignore the things telling you to use average or median (seems a bit silly they're there) but consider any others.

when saving, no compression, and always 'embed adjustments but do not apply them'.  If you apply the adjustments it almost always screws up the picture (particularly in clipping the histograms) making further processing very difficult.  Shame really, because the levels/luminance sliders and overlaid curves/histo graph are really quite nice to use,

Cheers

[dph1nm]

set black-point to zero

Using this (with bias frames) kills my Canon 1000D reductions (flats no longer work), so I always have this switched off.

NigelM

[Russe]

Great stuff! Thanks!

Would you stack 300s ISO800 & 600s ISO800 together in two groups with their respective calibration files?

[glowingturnip]

hmm, I think i'd keep both stacks completely separate until you're ready to blend them in PS to be honest, if you stack them all together, it's going to average out the exposures, so looking like 450s with most of the outlying data chucked away.  I haven't tried stacking like that though, have a go