Request Starry Landscape Stacker - Mac

Landscape Photography at Night with Stars as Points







Reflections in Yosemite, August 2016

Made with Starry Landscape Stacker 1.5.0 from 23 light frames.

Canon 5DS, Canon 11-24mm f/4L USM, 11mm, f/4, ISO 12800, 15 sec, f/4

Original image is 50 mega pixels.

You can purchase Starry Landscape Stacker from the Mac App Store or download a free trial. Starry Landscape Stacker is also available in two bundles with my other stacking apps.

Starry Landscape Stacker is a Mac app for making images of the night sky with stars as points and low-noise. It uses "stacking" or "image averaging" to combine a group of images that were captured in rapid succession with identical exposure settings and the camera in a fixed position. The result is an image with stars as points and much less noise than you could achieve with a single exposure.

The basic idea is to take several images (at least 10, more is better) with a high ISO setting (3200+) and short exposure time (< 20 sec) each one of which is noisy, and then average these images. The averaging process reduces the noise. The difficulty with this is that the stars are moving relative to the ground so you must separate the sky from the ground and align the stars before averaging. You can do this with image processing tools like Photoshop, but it is a slow and tedious process. Starry Landscape Stacker will do most of the work for you. Also, Starry Landscape Stacker does not simply average the images, it takes the median of the images after outlier elimination. This produces a much better result than simple averaging and automatically removes airplanes and some other artifacts. Starry Landscape Stacker can also do dark frame subtraction and flat-field compensation to further improve the image accuracy.

There is a useful review of stacking apps on the Night Photography Workshop website.


How to use Starry Landscape Stacker
Ian of Lonely Speck has made a nice video about Starry Landscape Stacker.

Shooting Starry Landscapes

Preparing Images for Starry Landscape Stacker

Processing Images with Starry Landscape Stacker

Tutorial Videos

Situations where special care or techniques might be needed include

Aligning Reflections Of Stars (as seen in the image above)

Trees and other Foreground Objects with Gaps

Using ISO Invariance

There is no support for Microsoft Windows