Is Registax as frustrating for everyone else?

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Please Help!

I posted this lunar image the other night and tried to stack 7 RAW stills and Registax only stacked 2, however I was pretty happy with the result. I have since tried to recreate this image and just cannot, despite all settings being the same. I gave up on it and decided to try various settings like picking multiple alignment points etc. only to get an output that resembles a football made from random bits of material. I have had a look at the manual and to be honest I am getting nowhere fast. If nothing else can someone clarify why stills are so dark in Registax when you import them yet the exposures are fine? I knew this would be a steep learning curve but I feel that I am still on the sheer vertical, covered in ice and my crampons are back at base camp!

Any help whatsoever would be very much appreciated.

Frustrated from Dingwall!

[RobH]

If it's any consolation, I have never managed to get a decent result out of it.

I've given up with any attempts at lunar or planetary imaging as a result

[jgs001]

I can't get registax to process raw stills, only avi's from small sensor cameras. To be honest, for the moon, I find AVIstacks works more easily and faster.

[Zakalwe]

Forgive me, but I still don't know why you want to stack small numbers of full frame images? The idea of stacking is to take large numbers of frames and stack them to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (either as bad seeing "wobbles" the image, or sensor noise from high ISO or long exposures). The signal is constant in every frame, but the noise isn't. Stacking then removes the transient events (the noise) to improve the S/N ratio.

You won't need to do this on full frame images, as the signal-to-noise ratio is high. To take a full Moon image you would use a low ISO and fast shutter speed, hence there is low noise.

Why stack in this scenario? I am clearly missing the point of what you are trying to achieve.

As for the darkness, yo could lift them using the brightness and contrast settings.

[PeterW]

Try Avistack... seems to be able to deal with all sorts of bad drifting with no problems. Use the default options, bit of post processing magic and there you go. Let your PC do the work. I did try Registax in typical bloke mode.... jump right in and do not read any form of documentation..... no chance, couldn't get it to do anything. When the new version of Registax comes out I will give it another go, but Avistack seems to work for the meantime.

Cheers

PEterW

[Jannis]

i've been arguing with registax for as long as i've used it, and still it wins.. i've given up. tried avistack, and it works like a dream! does everything automatically, and you get a guide in each step with information on what each settings does and so if you're unsure.

took me about 10 min to learn the basics from it, and with registax? god, if i DO get it to accept my pics, it takes like 10 min to stack a coupple of pics, and they won't even be acurate. and it i DO get them stacked, it have eaten up all RAM and virtual memory, and just gives me the error "out of memory, cannot safe final pic" (now that's on a PC with 4GB RAM, and was attempting to stack 10 raw frames @ ~20MB)...

with AVIstack, it's like "open the files by clicking here" -> "now, stack the pics by clicking here!" -> "does these pics look lined up OK?" -> "ok, good!, now click here to stack it all and go and have a 5 min break!" -> final pic done and ready for PS, if needed..

edit: note though, AVIstack doesn't support raw from canon at least, but converting them to TIFF first shuold work ok, and i didn't see any difference from that and when stacking RAWs.

[Jannis]

You won't need to do this on full frame images, as the signal-to-noise ratio is high. To take a full Moon image you would use a low ISO and fast shutter speed, hence there is low noise.

Why stack in this scenario? I am clearly missing the point of what you are trying to achieve.

As for the darkness, yo could lift them using the brightness and contrast settings.

I actually noticed quiet a bit of difference in quality from a single frame of the full moon and 8 stacked frames.but mainly when i was trying to drag out the colours. But also a bit improvement in the clearity because of turbulense in the air.

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Just downloaded and tried Avistack, it just will not work on my laptop Windows 7 64bit and I used the 64bit version of Avistack, error message Codec not supported. Downloaded the necessary DLL & DLM files installed, all to no avail. Tried the 32bit version on my Desktop PC, same error, downloaded DLM,DLL files, installed and it worked - WOO HOO. Tried to stack 7 JPGS and it went through the process right to the end then I got an error saying something along the lines out of memory unable to write array and the program shut down, AAAAARRRGGH!!!!! Can anyone shed any light on this as up to that point it seemed to be going well.

Tried again, this time error message read CONVOL: incompatible dimensions for array and kernel. Please consult the supplier of the product. So far just as bad as Registax!

[Jannis]

yes, i never got the codecs working for AVI stack, but raw avi works perfect, though it's quite huge files. i only used 64 bit verson.

i had to convert the AVIs to old format AVI to be sure it will work, meaning uncompressed avi. I use virtual dub for this, works perfect.

Never had the out of memory problem though. had it constantly on registax, but never on avistack, not even with a 2GB pc running W7 64 bit.

[Sierra Golf Mike]

There is obviously something amiss, my desktop is 4Gb Quad Core so it should not be running out of memory.

[jgs001]

I think it only fair to say, that the author of Registax has done a very good job, and it does work very well.

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Spent most of the day now on Registax and Avistack. Avistack just could not handle big jpegs at all, it just ended up crashing. Registax copes no problem but I just could not get consistency, I'm beginning to get somewhere though.

Zakalwe, I take your point but I thought I'd try stacking stills because the facility was there and it does give a different looking result, compare the two photos below. First one is a single frame Photoshopped, second 3 x stacked in Registax them PS'd

[prbaxter]

I find registax a bit hit and miss. Some days I can throw in some AVI's and it handles them no problems, but most of the time I cannot get anything aligned - even using the same methods as previously used.

Its mega frustrating.