LRTimelapse emulation?

[Astro Road]

Hi All,
 

My photography almost entirely consists of landscape astrophotography at a hobbyist level, and like so many others am looking for alternatives to Adobe due to the lack of value from their subscription model for occasion usage scenarios.

So far I am loving Affinity Photo and have found it to be one of the few affordable popular Photoshop alternatives to have really great layer and masking functionality which is essential for my genre of photography. The controls here I've found superb and so logically laid out the learning curve has been pretty insignificant. Also, the "add new stack" feature is an absolute life saver for blending dozens of photos as I tend to do.

Anyway, to the point. One of the crown jewels of Photoshop for landscape astrophotography is the LRTimelapse plugin. The only capability of LRTimelapse I'd truly love (and have not seen in other software) is to have is the ability to apply an incremental crop to all selected layers. Idea being you set the crop on the top layer and the bottom layer, then LRTimelapse will calculate the incremental crop required on all layers in the selected stack to transition from the first layer to the last. This can be used to produce stunning vortex images that would otherwise require slow zoom motors being hooked up to you zoom lens as you actually take the images. Tutorial of how LRTimelapse does this here;

https://youtu.be/_XiIRozt8iU

Is there anyway I can do something similar using the layers inside of Affinity Photo?

 

[stokerg]

Hi Astro Road and Welcome to the Forums,

I'm not aware of a method to get the same effect in Affinity Photo and from searching the Forums, it doesn't appear its currently  possible.

You can use Affinity Photo to create star trails as shown on this article, which may give you a similar effect, depending on your images.

[S. Schraebler]

Hi Astro Road,

created the holy grail effect with Masked Stretch in Pixinsight recently. Needed that for a Lunar Eclipse video. With Masked Stretch you have the capability to define a target background and a target foreground. By applying auto generated masks and auto generated histogram transforms, the image is being transformed iteratively in tiny steps. I append a description of the Process Container "macro" I used. Since the transformation depends on a measurement in the original image's histogram and an iterative transform to target black and white point, I cannot tell how to implement that in Affinity Photo, especially the planning for the iteration steps. Perhaps we will see something like that in later versions. Basically, it's an autostretch method, just a little bit more elaborate in protecting the lights with masking techniques than the auto correction that's already there. 

Best Sighard

 

Edited April 14, 2020 by S. Schraebler