What software?

[davidscanlan]

Hi

As you all know I am new to imaging with the Eos 450D and wanted to get underway with the software element know

I have been told Gimp is good for stacking...for some reason dont like my RAW files and keeps coming up with loads of TIFF error message....dont know what the hell is going on there :-(

Wanted to ask does anyone know of some good software to use for bringing out the images more and hopefully something that is free :-)

Any ideas??

[Dave Smith]

DeepSkyStacker should do the job nicely - and it's free.

Dave

[davidscanlan]

Does it allow you to manipulate the images, eg change contrast, brightness etc?

Although it says Deep Sky Stacker will it also work on other astronomical subjects?

As you can tell....complete newbie to astrophotography :-)

Dave

[davidscanlan]

Just had a play and seems to be a pretty good little package :-)

Would enhancing the pics come after they have been stacked?

Dave

[russ]

Not sure what Deepskystacker can do but Paint.net will let you do - Curves, Levels, Hue & Saturation, Brightness & Contrast, resize, sharpen, layer. Not as powerful as Photoshop but it's free.

[Beyond_Vision]

I would take a look at Deep Sky Stacker it's works very well and best of all it's free

DeepSkyStacker - Free

Regards

Kevin

[Dave Smith]

Just had a play and seems to be a pretty good little package :-)

Would enhancing the pics come after they have been stacked?

Dave

I think some processing can be done in DSS but I normally use photoshop for processing and just use DSS for the stacking. Photoshop is not free. Others should be able to advise there. You may have a copy of photoshop elements come with the camera, that will do much of the processing.

Dave

[ollypenrice]

Dave, I thnk you have just won Understatement of the Year! 'Photoshop is not free.'

By gad, no it isn't.

Olly

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Dave, I thnk you have just won Understatement of the Year! 'Photoshop is not free.'

By gad, no it isn't.

Olly

I second that!

I use Gimp (under Linux), ImageJ (also free, and you can extend it yourself + TONS of free plugins available) and MatLab (NOT FREE) at work for many image processing needs.

The TIFF errors thrown up by GIMP often refer to proprietary TIFF tags (tiff is expandable). If it encounters a tag that is unknown, it will throw a warning, but that need not be a problem in further processing.

I do not like the latest version of GIMP, they have messed up the GUI (again).

ImageJ is a toolkit originally aimed at medical image analysis, and allows either GUI/menu-based processing, or full-fledged Java-based coding of new image processing methods. You can also record sequences of existing commands and create new plugins like this. It is much better than Gimp at image math.

[davidscanlan]

Thanks for all the info so far guys :-)

Will defo have a look at paint.net but I am also finding a combo of Deep Sky Stacker and Infraview works quite well

DSS wont be good for lunar though which is what i am really interested in so can anyone suggest something good for lunar work...tried registax but it keeps bombing out on the memory front which seems to be a common issue judging by some of the comments on SGL

Dave