I finally stopped stacking my astro shots in Photoshop

For years I used Photoshop's built-in stacking mode for all my deep sky images. It worked okay for bright targets like the Orion Nebula, but my Andromeda shots from last September looked noisy no matter how many frames I threw at it. A guy named Tom on the Cloudy Nights forum kept pushing me to try DeepSkyStacker, and I finally gave in one rainy afternoon. The difference was night and day - DSS picked up way more faint detail in the dust lanes with half the effort. It still takes some fiddling with the star detection settings, but I haven't opened Photoshop for stacking since. Has anyone else found a free stacking tool that beats the paid ones for certain targets?

3 comments

3 Comments

rubyshah24d ago

Oh, DSS is actually free not paid, but yeah it totally crushes Photoshop for faint stuff!

noaht1524d ago

Wait, hold on. Wait wait wait. It's actually FREE? I totally thought you had to pay for it, I've been avoiding it this whole time for no reason.

wells.olivia22d ago

Right, because nothing says "fun hobby" like paying Adobe to give you noisy star shots. Glad you finally saw the light, took you long enough.