EddyQ

I recently photographed the milkyway with very good results in Affinity Photo. The stacking alignment failed as it often does with photoshop and for good reasons. Turns out, the stars do not move the same amounts. So, even if you manually align in the center, the average stack will have fuzzy stars outside the center. The best approach (IMO) is demonstrated by Ian with PS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzVSm64zq44 This same process can be done with Affinity photo. Works great at noise reduction and produces much sharper stars and details.

Perhaps. But I believe photo manipulation before stacking is useful with other applications other than astro photography. For instance, once you have layers the way you want them, then stack. There is a group function, but it doesn't seem to do the nice stacking features such as mean, object removal ect. . . I did manage to align manually my milkyway shots with Affinity photo with very good results. Basically followed the process in Ian's video: Took a wee bit of time to do a warp mesh alignment on each of the 8 photos.

Perhaps this is a different issue, but my 8 photos of the milkyway fail to align properly. They are 20 second exposures taken in succession on a good tripod. The only movement are the stars as the earth rotates slightly. Most of the photo is the sky, but I do have the ground at the very bottom (which does not move). Is there a way to mask out the ground objects before align and stack? I am assuming these objects moving differently than the stars are causing the algorithm issues. After importing the photos and stacking, I have tried to add masks to each individual photo layer. That did not change anything. Any thoughts?

I have 8 photos taken in quick succession (20 second exposures) of the milky way stars and was hoping to get some noise reduction by stacking in Affinity Photo. However, when stacked the alignment fails and stars are blurry. This is a common problem with alignment algorithms due to other things in the photo that are moving in different directions such as the ground objects. I was hoping I could mask these ground objects and then have the algorithm do the alignment. I've reviewed all the videos relative to stacking and I am thinking this approach is not possible with Affinity Photo. Any help would be appreciated.