Finally, it was great to see these apps handle far more than the 4 image limit that Photoshop can handle without having to handle the alignment manually. It was also good to see how well both apps did with separating the ground from the sky, stacking, and then combining the stacked results of each back together again. It was good to see that noise was significantly reduced with both Starry Landscape Stacker and Sequator. It's not as good as owning my own Mac computer but this approach is cost effective and it served my needs well. Running Starry Landscape Stacker which runs only on a mac was a bit of a challenge so I rented a virtual mac desktop from. I tested them both using a 10 image sequence captured at the Upper Terraces near Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.īy the way, I'm primarily a PC user so running Sequator was easy. I was also happy to see apps handling the separation of the foreground from the sky in order to produce results that include sharp details with reduced noise in the foreground as well as the sky.įirst on the scene was Starry Landscape Stacker which runs only on a mac and then more recently an app called Sequator appeared on the market for the pc only. Dark frames are captured after capturing the light frames using the same settings with the lens cap on - to capture hot pixel noise. I was looking for an application that stacks multiple light frames in order to reduce noise but I was pleased to find that apps now handle dark frames as well. So with some promising options, I decided to take a look to see how well they work.

More recently, a few apps have appeared on the market that give us some decent alternatives to Photoshop with improved capabilities and ease of use.

Free star stacking software