Alignment not working in the stacking feature.

[ve2cjw]

I have been doing some testing in stacking pictures I took of the Orion nebula. The pictures are good and the stars are pinpoints. The problem is that I tried all alignment parameters and the result is never aligned. I had high hopes for this function but it doesn't seem to be very good. Stacking is one of the main reasons I bought Affinity Photo, the other being to replace Photoshop Elements. I could always use Deep Sky Stacker but I had great hopes for affinity. I could always try to align manually but that's a lot of work. Anyone has ideas?

[Callum]

hi Ve2cjw,

 

Welcome to the Forums :)

 

Please could you provide some of the images in question so I can look into this further for you and see If I can find a way to make them align?

 

C

[RGWM]

I am having the same problem. I took 20 shots of Comet Neowise a few days ago and Affinity Photo couldn’t align them at all. The composite look the same wether I selected to automatically align or not when creating my stack. I used a flimsy travel tripod and pushed the shutter button for each shot, which I didn’t think would be a problem because I understood that even handheld shots would be sufficient. Assuming I needed to have the shots better aligned in the first place, I tried again two nights later with a very solid tripod and using the self tmer to do 10 consecutive shots (the timer’s limit). Again I was disappointed to find no alignment adjustments at all. Is this mainly a problem for astrophotography with it’s fine points of light? My photos did include the horizon along the bottom of each shot.

[thomaso]

Hi RGWM,
welcome to the Affinity Forums!

9 hours ago, RGWM said:

I tried again two nights later with a very solid tripod and using the self tmer to do 10 consecutive shots (the timer’s limit). Again I was disappointed to find no alignment adjustments at all. Is this mainly a problem for astrophotography with it’s fine points of light? My photos did include the horizon along the bottom of each shot.

This sounds the camera did not move and all images show the same horizon while the light object above was moving, right?

What result do you get – and what did you expect, in particular what objects should be aligned but aren't? Don't all images in the resulting stack show the horizon at the same position?

As Callum has asked before: Can you upload images? e.g. the 1st, 5th, 10th

[RGWM]

Thank you for your quick reply and sorry for my late response. 

I have uploaded three groups of files to my Google Drive. There are three images which include the horizon, three images with the horizon cropped off (to eliminate its influence), and three images where I tried to manually align the shots including rotating them (centred on the comet's head). In all three cases I couldn’t get the images to align. There seems to be distortion going on. Is it possibly related to the fact that I forgot to turn off image stabilization on my Canon M5 while shooting from a tripod?  There would be about 15 seconds between each shot since they are from the first, middle and last of each sequence. I just upgraded the program before trying again with no luck.

Here is the link to the files:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13U7sloX9Qqqn45MP1qU6kZrW6oz4SL07/view?usp=sharing

Thank you for looking into this. I have high hopes for your product,

Bob Morgan

[thomaso]

31 minutes ago, RGWM said:

In all three cases I couldn’t get the images to align.

I am afraid not to understand your approach. What do you expect to be aligned in the pictures? The sky-only images show moving objects, moving at different speeds and in different directions. An alignment needs to know which part (objects, pixels) should be aligned, while others are ignored (not aligned). If the alignment should happen for the comet (as your manually adjusted group makes me think) then the objects around must be unaligned, – right?

The horizon images get aligned in APh as I would expect: the foreground, the static part, the coast line, is used as the alignment center, while clouds and stars aren't aligned cause they were moving. If here the comet should get aligned then the cost line would display unexpectedly – however, how should the software know if just a few certain comet pixels should be in focus and get aligned while the larger and static parts shall be less relevant?

I assume for this kind of images you would need special software with specific knowledge (data) of planets and stars and their spherical space which actually has no horizon, no center and therefore no unambigous perspective. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the universe and its geometry, so hopefully other users or Callum will come up with more helpful advises.

p.s.: can you show or link to a group of astronomical example images with a successful alignment according to your needs?

[Mark W]

I bought Affinity also expecting it to be able to stack from watching James Ritson tutorials. I had a number of photos of Jupiter which could be stacked fine on other programs but, when attempting  both ways of adding the photos into Affinity, the result was absolutely terrible. While the individual subs could be worked on in Affinity because, when loading them individually,  Affinity would simply show  the photo correctly exposed;  When it came to stacking, Affinity would totally overexpose the planet while I noticed that the moons would show up in multiple orientations because Affinity had rotated the photos. When i tried "File:Stack" it's hard to explain how that came out but, frankly, it was just a mess.

I knew Affinity could not stack from a video file but I had entirely anticipated it would do a good job of a bright planet with individual subs, given it could do  the job well - it  appears although I have yet to try - on deep sky objects which are far less bright. The stacking feature was one of the main (if not  the main) reasons I purchased it.