Deep skystacker ground/trees problem

[Astrid]

Hello, fellow stargazers!

Managed to shoot the Milky Way a couple days ago (this being my first wide-angle shot with 80 exposures, each 15 seconds, ISO 1600)

Stacked the images in DSS like usual but hit this problem:

(Sorry for the green tint, I will edit in photoshop later... )

The trees are smudged and blurry unfortunately. 

I was very confused as to why this happens, but from what I can guess, either DSS interprets the leaves as stars or just doesn't care about the foreground. 

So, my question is, what are your solutions? Is there an option like in Sequator (a software which I tried, but didn't do literally anything to the image: the stacked image looked exactly like the original exposures...) where you can 'fix' the ground and let the software detect the stars in one particular area?

I thought about using a mask with the ground in photoshop, but it's just way too time-consuming and it probably won't look that good due to the smudging being bigger than the actual trees, but I'm afraid this might be the only way around.

 

 

Thank you very much for the advice and clear skies! 🤗

Edited May 5, 2021 by Astrid

[Budgie1]

I've not tried this yet but, as I understand it, DSS has done exactly what it should. It has locked onto the stars and stacked those. 

You have taken 80x15s images, so that's 20 minutes of exposure time + a bit extra for the gaps between images. In that time, the earth rotates quite a lot and the stars appear to move. So DSS has followed the stars and left the trees alone. If it were the other way around the trees would be great but the stars would just be streaks of light with no detail. 

The only way to overcome this is to separate the trees from the sky and treat them as two different images, then combine them in PS or GIMP. Like you say, Sequator has this feature but I've not tried it, although I did see the feature demonstrated on AstroBackYard. 

[TerryMcK]

Martin is absolutely correct. Take a picture of the trees then combine it with the stacked stars. You will have to cut out the sky from the tree picture and then underlay the stars on another layer if using Photoshop, Gimp, Affinity Photo or similar. Trevor Jones shows how to do it in the link posted by Martin above.

[Astro Noodles]

I rather like it. The effect that DSS has produced seems impressionist.

[Guest]

I think it's excellent. Leave it like it is.

Steve