[Better feedback during lengthy processes]

The beach ball is typically a sign that the system itself is very busy with an application, i. e. that the application can’t respond to anything at that moment. So if you see the beach ball there is nothing the application (or the developers) can do to tell you what it’s doing since it means it’s just too busy dealing with itself, i. e. it has no resources left to tell what it’s doing. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#System_usage

 

That means it’s not an issue of the application but you probably need more RAM.

Ah, thanks for that info. And yes, I truly need more RAM.

[Better feedback during lengthy processes]

First of all, well done! I've been contemplating an Adobe free lifestyle and Affinity Photo may just be the first piece in the solution.

 

So I wanted to suggest that the app give us better feedback when it's doing something. I'm running it on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro Retina with 8GB of ram and see the spinning beach ball a lot, no really, a LOT. 

 

Of course I'm working on multiple layers of 24MP raw files. That's enough to tax a system! Still, it would be very helpful to see some progress bars so I know what the app is thinking.

 

Cheers!

[Arbitrary rotation center]

No, not tracks, I need them positioned exactly on top of each other. I can then post process them until they look like this: https://flic.kr/p/Ba4GcN

[Arbitrary rotation center]

Ideally auto align would be the bomb, but it's hit or miss on astrophotos; the scene is dark and stars are tiny. The situation is this, the camera is locked down but this damn planet rotates at just over 1000 MPH at the equator (I'm in Costa Rica, 9° north of the equator). In this case, my shutter is open for 4 seconds, then there's a 6 second break, then another shot at 4 seconds and so on up to 32 shots. You then want to align and stack those images and use the mean filter to eliminate noise (because you're shooting at a high ISO). Are ya with me? I've got a jpeg of my first and last frame blended, the rotation is obvious, but I can't seem to get it into this post.

[Arbitrary rotation center]

They have the same rotation centers (around one star) but each layer has a rotation value slightly more than the last.

[Arbitrary rotation center]

Cool, thanks. But I am I right in assuming that there's no possibility of working at 100% with this workflow?

[Arbitrary rotation center]

Okay, I give up. Can you set an arbitrary rotation point? I've got 32 layers of an astrophotograph and to align them, I need to rotate them individually around a specific point.