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Stacking images - Affinity seems to "lock up"?


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Hi All, I'm trying to "stack" a number of raw images for the first time, playing around with simple astrophotography. (think photos of the North Star with star tracks all around in a circle.) Having some difficulties, I've tried researching but did not find what I was looking for.

1. Running Affinity on a 2015 iMac, 3.1 GHz processor, 16 GB RAM, Catalina 10.15.5 (beta) if that helps.

2. Files are about 20 mB each, CR2 format.

3. I'm loading about 25 files using "new stack".

THis process seems to bring the system, and/or Affinity, to it's knees. Am I "biting off more than I can chew"? When I run the Activity Monitor, I see that Affinity is using very little CPU, generally less than 1 %, but it is using up to, and sometimes more than the 16 GB of memory. I have a blank screen in the Affinity workspace. I've closed down all other running programs, makes no difference.

So - Is Affinity still running slowly, do I just need to wait this out, or have I exceeded the limits of my system? Any guidance would be appreciated, thank you!

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First, although Photo will let you Stack RAW files, they do not go through the proper development process that would occur if you were to Open them or (new, recently) run them through New Batch Job. They will probably end up darker than you would like, if you do anything else with them other than File > Open or File > New Batch Job. Though, as you're on a Mac, if you configure Photo to use the Apple RAW Engine you may have better results than if you use the default Serif Labs RAW Engine. I can't test that.

So, when you get it working, if they are too dark, you may want to try switching to the Apple RAW engine, or try using New Batch Job to convert them to TIFF files, and then subsequently stack the TIFF files.

But none of that really answers your question.

You may just need to wait it out. Or you may need to try it with fewer files until you get things working. Or, possibly, it's an effect of needing to process the RAW data before any stacking can be done. So it might be beneficial, as an experiment, to convert the files to TIFF and see if that works better for you.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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10 minutes ago, Gytramr65 said:

Thanks, Walt! Not to challenge, but to better understand - why TIFF rather than JPEG? (I'm still pretty new at all this.) Thanks!

Any use of JPG loses some image quality. If you save with high enough quality levels, you won't lose much, and you may not notice it. But there is always some compression, and it is a lossy form of compression that throws away data.

TIFF saves with either no compression, or with lossless compression, retaining more of your data than JPG will.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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15 hours ago, Gytramr65 said:

Walt and Kosadeschamps, thank you both! I'll try the suggestions you provided and let you know how things work out.

Marty

That worked! Thanks again to you both. I discovered that combining the photos in a "stack" was not the way to do things, as Kosakdeschamps suggested, in focus merge, and using TIFF images, all came together nicely.

This was my first attempt at such a project. I was going for capturing some simple star trails, I've attached the resulting photo for your amusement.

A creative astro 1 04_20.jpg

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Nice work. And thanks for letting us know you succeeded :)

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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