Best stacking and processing software for a beginner (Mac)

[buzzc150]

Hi. I’m wondering what would be a good starting point for first time stacking? I looked at Deepskystacker but it’s not available for Mac unfortunately. I’m willing to pay. Should I just go straight for light room/photoshop etc ?

[RolandKol]

If DSO, Pixinisght is considered as a Flagship. Around £100, has a full trial.

Quite tricky to learn, - but once learned, very good and fast.

There are also "Bundles", - for image Acquisition and pre-post processing. 

List can be found here, http://www.astropix.com/html/i_astrop/software.html

I hope someone will add to this list as majority are Windows based.

Not sure about planetary for MAC, -  Autostakertt and Registrax alongside with PIPP probably (all free) but never paid attention if they are AppleFriendly.

[cjdawson]

Astro Pixel Processor is well worth looking at.  This is the stacker that I've chosen.  Works a treat on both windows and Mac (I have a MacBook Pro that I use)

After that, I take the stacked image and do further processing in Photoshop, more tweaks than anything else as APP does the heavy lifting for me.

 

https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/

[PeterCPC]

+1 for APP.

Peter

[Adreneline]

+1 for APP - apart from the trial period you can also 'rent' for a year (the option I went for). I also use PI but when I last looked it was 230 Euros.

[rickwayne]

I have been using Siril a lot, which is free software. I swap back and forth between running DSS in a Windows virtual machine with VMWare Fusion (which I need anyway for work), and running Siril. Siril has quite good features for stacking, although it produces tons of intermediate files that clutter up your disk and have to be deleted. I have been less successful using it for nonlinear processing (stretching, gradient removal, background calibration) but it does have those features. Annoyingly, it has a nice "autostretch" for visualizing your images but it doesn't modify the image, or at least I've never figured out how to do that. I occasionally had issues with getting it to handle color correctly when I was shooting with a DSLR, but your mileage may vary.

For my just-finished Horsehead image in mono, I stacked in Siril, opened the resulting FITS file in FITS Liberator and used its auto-stretch, saved that as a TIFF, and did everything subsequently in Photoshop. Worked a treat and really beat using the Level or Curves tool a dozen times in PS to do the initial stretch. (Since Photoshop's Curves and Levels tools only allow you to set control points with 8-bit accuracy, you don't want to try to do a big stretch all in one go.)

Both Siril and FITS Liberator have a variety of other tools which you might find useful, such as image statistics (nice to know the min and max pixel value at a glance so you can know if you're clipping the background or blowing out stars). FL has a whole bunch of stretching functions to choose from but I tend to just use Arcsinh.

I've also done start-to-finish stacking in Photoshop as well. That tends to perform better with fewer sub-exposures, and the stacking isn't as sophisticated. If you select stacking mode Median, you'll eliminate the odd meteor, aircraft, or whackadoodle gradient caused by a car sweeping its headlights across your scope, but you won't get as much advantage out of stacking. Stack mode Mean will eliminate noise and enhance subtle tonality better, but gets more easily thrown off by artifacts in the image. This M31 is all-Photoshop.

PixInsight is really the class of the world for this stuff, but I keep hearing about its learning curve. If you're going to be doing deep-sky stuff, I highly, highly recommend Charles Bracken's book The Deep-Sky Imaging Primer, which equips you with all the background you need to really get going. And he emphasizes PixInsight in the processing chapters. I also see Making Every Photon Count recommended a lot in this forum, but haven't read that one.

Feel free to ping me for questions about how to work either program for stacking and processing. And welcome!