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Stacks: How to get out of the "Stacks Group" that has the Stack Operator?


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Hi all,

I've got a number of images I've brought in as a stack.

I shot these with camera locked down, but I was using a strobe hand held on the object, like for a product shot...moving the light source around.

I plan to start from the bottom up on the stack, and mask and brush in from each consecutive photo areas I like....highlight from this one, etc...

 

But I don't know what this stack group is it puts on it and it seems to have a group blend mode that I don't want...did I bring the stack in wrong?  I'm not used to this behavior...I need to bring in the stack of images, I need them aligned, but I need to be able to turn them all off...start at the bottom and layer each one on as needed with masks...generally on each one I'll use the lighten blend mode.

 

Kinda like light painting.....

 

Is there a different way to bring them in, of do I need to do something after I bring them in?

 

Hope I'm clear on what I'm trying to do....

Thank you,

 

Cayenne

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You may want to try Maximum or Minimum or Mid Range. Click on the odd little symbol near the check box.

688753043_ScreenShot2020-05-08at1_40_06PM.png.b92cfdd797ac1f39b7d2f40863caae10.png

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.5 | Affinity Photo 2.5.5 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.5 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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But doesn't that affect everything below it?

I"m wanting to paint IN each individual layer as I need it...and each one will be blend mode usually...of lighten, but not necessarily.

 

I don't want an over all mode, I want to address each layer separately.....

 

Is there a way to get rid of that stack "group'....that might be simpler?

 

C

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The nature of the Stack is that it is a Stack group.

What you may want is to just place each image into one document. Then you can mask out the parts you don't want on each layer, probably be easier if you have 'lit' different parts with the flash as you describe. I recall doing some of that back in the day with film and that was a pain to align the different negatives.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.5 | Affinity Photo 2.5.5 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.5 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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20 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

The nature of the Stack is that it is a Stack group.

What you may want is to just place each image into one document. Then you can mask out the parts you don't want on each layer, probably be easier if you have 'lit' different parts with the flash as you describe. I recall doing some of that back in the day with film and that was a pain to align the different negatives.

Ok..I guess I"m looking for something similar that is very commonly done in PS.

I need to bring in the images all at once, not have to open them one at a time....AND...I need to align them.

This is pretty common to do, I know AP has it's own way of doing things at times and there is often a secret Mickey Mouse handshake thing you have to know to click or do to get it to work the way everyone is used to doing.

I just know there's something here we're missing.

I appreciate the advice so far....but I know there's got to be a way to do this VERY common task....

 

Thanks in advance,

C

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Use Place ... File > Place...

First open one of the pictures then place the rest of them. If the camera was stationary they should all be aligned. I would investigate further but I don't have any images like you describe so I can't really help regarding your wanting to use Stacks. Should work though, I will ponder on it further.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.5 | Affinity Photo 2.5.5 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.5 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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Further to this Align and stack etc,

Open up a new stack like you want then click the disclosure triangle on the stack layer and select all the image layers, copy then make a new document from the clipboard. It will take a while if you have a lot of high res images. The new document is all aligned layers and you can mask and blend those.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.5 | Affinity Photo 2.5.5 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.5 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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28 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Further to this Align and stack etc,

Open up a new stack like you want then click the disclosure triangle on the stack layer and select all the image layers, copy then make a new document from the clipboard. It will take a while if you have a lot of high res images. The new document is all aligned layers and you can mask and blend those.

Wouldn't it be simpler to use Arrange > Ungroup, or to right-click on the stack in the Layers panel and choose Ungroup?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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15 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Wouldn't it be simpler to use Arrange > Ungroup, or to right-click on the stack in the Layers panel and choose Ungroup?

UNGROUP!!!

 

That did it....THANK YOU!!

 

Ok, I think I"m good to go, but wow, that was definitely not an intuitive set of steps, and I couldn't find the documented anywhere.

And, what I"m doing isn't exactly a niche use case....this type of thing is used widely in real estate shoots and product shoots.  

Seems it might be a good thing to have an option added to the "Stacks" import screens, to select if you want it in a group or not.  I've never seen a need for it to be first put into a group on initial creation of stacks, although after you've processed all, you might or might not want to, to do a group mask.

While I'll study the current group mask that is generated...I don't quite know what to make of all the "stack operators"....they all seem to do something different, when what I would expect would be the normal blend modes.

Again, I found a document on the stack operators and will study them, but if they are taking suggestions, I might ask if when creating stacks, if putting them into this group by default could be made optional.

 

Thank you ALL for the response and help, I can move on now.

 

I love Affinity Photo, but whew...these idiosyncrasies and hidden ways to fix them can certainly be challenging!!

:)

 

cayenne

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You're welcome.

The stack needs to be a group so the proper options (median, etc.) can be applied, I believe.

As for documentation, it's a group (and labeled as a group), so the standard documentation for groups covers ungrouping a stack, too. :)

-- 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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I must be missing something in this discussion. When you create a live stack group, each image in the stack can be adjusted and masked using child layers for each image. There is no ungrouping the Live Stack Group to work on each image. At least that's how I made an action sequence as I described at

 

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36 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

must be missing something in this discussion. When you create a live stack group, each image in the stack can be adjusted and masked using child layers for each image. There is no ungrouping the Live Stack Group to work on each image.

I think the point wass that cayenne did not want the additional processing (median, mean, outlier, etc.) that happens automatically when a new stack is created. Cayenne wanted total manual control over the results, with none of the automatic processing except alignment.

-- 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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5 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I think the point wass that cayenne did not want the additional processing (median, mean, outlier, etc.) that happens automatically when a new stack is created. Cayenne wanted total manual control over the results, with none of the automatic processing except alignment.

Yessir, exactly!!  The stack operators was a new concept for me, I'd never seen before coming over from PS.

I was merely wanting to simply bring in a number of images and align them.....nothing more.

That is a common operation from "the other side" and I was needing that here.

 

Again THANK YOU for all your help on this.  

 

It's the simple things that are different that are often hard to get around...I know the concepts, but the implementation and getting around things like this that are "extra" that I'd not expect are sometimes walls you bang your head into.

 

C

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