Questions concerning the workflow when stacking

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PaulFurman
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Post by PaulFurman »

I haven't explored whether there's an advantage to pre-processing; that would be an interesting study. I use adobe lightroom so it would be pretty easy. In fact I have done stacks from raw (accidentally) and benefited from being able to correct exposure. I just didn't have in-camera joegs to compare.

I've never seen much value in high bit depths or even TIF over JPG. However, I am a big fan of raw shooting - but not for stacking because the disk space becomes preposterous if you do large stacks. The same goes for my amateur time lapse video work.

Raw is great for correcting exposure/contrast & white balance problems but with care that can be handled with a light tent to reduce contrast and setting custom white balance before shooting a stack. I also turn down contrast for the in-camera jpeg processing. Perhaps I am giving away contrast with that move but it seems like boosting contrast later generally works fine.

The bigger issue seems to be noise, which is increased with PMAX stacking. DMAP is a lot more work to retouch and only sometimes practical in my very limited experience. Ordinarily I would recommend increasing exposure to reduce noise but blown highlights are an issue for macrophotography so we get back to soft lighting to reduce contrast. If you ever have a low contrast subject, definitely 'overexpose' it up to your acceptable limit for highlights. High-key (overexposed) can work well in this regard.

Phil Savoie
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Post by Phil Savoie »

Thanks for your notes, I'm moving residence at the moment; always fun. Please excuse my late response.

I'm using the image processing software in Photoshop CS5 and 16 bit TIFF files.

Thanks again,

Phil
Phil Savoie

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Phil, enjoy your move!

You can see there is quite a range of workflows.

As I wrote to you in email, using 16-bit TIFFs preserves the highest quality and keeps the most options open.

But the raw conversion does take some time, and the files are substantially bigger than JPEG.

As a result, for many of my deep stacks I shoot JPEG only, after carefully setting color balance and exposure so that I don't have to do much processing after the stack is run.

--Rik

Craig Gerard
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Post by Craig Gerard »

Phil,

You might consider using intermediary RAW image processing software such as PhaseOne Capture One Pro, Adobe Lightroom, Bibble, etc. They enable you to work with batches of images much more easily. The first two mentioned also have tethered shooting capabilities; not sure about Bibble.
If I had to choose one of the above; it would be PhaseOne Capture One Pro V5.

Craig
To use a classic quote from 'Antz' - "I almost know exactly what I'm doing!"

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