Improvement for Creating Stacks - Choose whether to Align, Scale or Rotate

[Didge]

Hi,

I've only been using Affinity Photo for a few days and have found it amazingly versatile and powerful (goodbye Photoshop) !

My main interest is Astrophotography, so I'm mostly interesting in aligning and stacking images of deep space objects (DSOs) and planets.

An 'Astrophotography Stack' is great for aligning DSO's, but I've been using 'ordinary' stacks to align images without stacking them (which doesn't seem possible using Astronomy Stacks).

AP does an amazingly good job of aligning/rotating/scaling images, but for planetary alignment, I usually want to translate images, but do NOT want to rotate or scale them.

For example, for images of the recent Lunar eclipse, I want to align almost 1700 images, then composite individual frames into a movie to show the progression of the eclipse.

AP does good job of trying to rotate all the images so they align, but it doesn't do a perfect job.

Also, I actually want the rotation to be preserved to show how the moon rotates over time.

Also, sometimes AP scales the images just a bit too much or too little, so if you composite the frames into a movie, the moon erratically gets a bit bigger/smaller as the movie progresses - particularly as the moon's brightness changes during the eclipse.

So, when creating a stack, I'd like to be able to choose whether I want to  :-

- Align

- Scale

- Rotate

the images during import - by having 3 checkboxes to select which operations I want.

This can also significantly decrease the processing overhead when importing a large number of images - in an evening of astroimaging, its not uncommon to capture thousands of images, so if you only want to translate images, not having to rotate or scale them will save a lot of time.

Gary