Used to stack all my astro photos in GIMP layer by layer... so much wasted time

I spent like 2 hours manually aligning 30 frames of the Orion Nebula back in 2019. Now I just run everything through DeepSkyStacker and get better results in 10 minutes... has anyone else stuck with an old tool way too long before switching?

3 comments

3 Comments

cora_west58d ago

Dude I did the exact same thing with M42 back in 2017. Manually layered like 25 frames in Photoshop and the result still looked like garbage because I didn't know how to properly align the stars. What finally made you actually switch over to DSS? Was it one specific terrible result that broke you or did you just slowly realize you were wasting your life? I swear I kept telling myself "this time the manual stack will look better" and it never did.

faith278d ago

Oh come on, is it really that serious? I mean yeah manual stacking is a pain but was your life really being wasted over some star alignment? @rowan_ross sounds like they made it work though, so more power to them I guess.

rowan_ross8d agoMost Upvoted

...and I kept telling myself "real astrophotographers do it the hard way" which is SO dumb. It's not about the tool, it's about the final image. DSS literally freed up my weekends and I got way cleaner stacks my first try. The star alignment in manual stacking is just ROUGH unless you're some kind of wizard. I still keep GIMP around for tweaking the final output but yeah, never going back to hand stacking.