Help with Deep Sky Stacker

[blinky]

What I was getting at is why shoot in RAW in the first place if the first thing you need to do after getting the images on to the PC is to convert to TIF?

[Jeff RV]

Sorry missed your point on that one! Did'nt read it fully.

[moondog]

What I was getting at is why shoot in RAW in the first place if the first thing you need to do after getting the images on to the PC is to convert to TIF?

RAW is the best format provided your stacking software can read it ! You are only converting your RAW files to TIF's so that DSS can read them. Astro software like Maxim and ImagesPlus ( the one I use ) can read and process RAW files without conversion. You don't get any lost data with RAW files - TIF, (even 16bit) and particularly JPEG loses data in comparison. Once data is lost i.e. faint nebula details you can never get them back!

MD

[daz]

Hi Blinky And All, Think the advantage of "Raw over Tif" is, Raw is all Data is saved from camera, totaly unprocessed, native size image (ie not 648x480) Where tif is part processed i think....

RAW images contain the colour (ISO, white balance, etc) information separately from the data I think. The RAW software reads this and applies the 'recipe' to the data. TIFF, although uncompressed, has the all the data at the pixel level, and has 16 bits per pixel.

JPGS are the worst for quality because everything is compressed to reduce the file size, and as MD says, once the data has gone, it's gone.

RAW = HUGE Files

TIFFs = A bit smaller

JPGS = weeny

[blinky]

For some reason if I set the camera to RAW I can fit 22 images on the 256MB card but when set to TIFF it shows space for only 16 images. Anyway I take it there is not really much diffrence between RAW and TIFF then?