Stack and Panorama output

[ms.fuentecilla]

Hello

Stacks and panorama both output in RGBA 16 bit. Is it not possible to output into 32 bit? It would be good to have the extended flexibility obtained when using RAW as base files. With panoramas it is within reasonable bounds to pre-process individual frames but that is often somewhat excessive for stacks.

All goes otherwise very smoothly

Michael

[walt.farrell]

11 minutes ago, ms.fuentecilla said:

Stacks and panorama both output in RGBA 16 bit. Is it not possible to output into 32 bit? It would be good to have the extended flexibility obtained when using RAW as base files.

You can use 32-bit HDR images as input to File > New Stack and you'll end up with the new document as a 32-bit document.

However, if you use RAW images you end up with 16-bit. I suspect that suffers from the same problem as using RAW images as input to a batch job, in that it doesn't use the same Develop processing, and skips some (all?) of the Develop Assistant settings. Maybe when Affinity resolves that issue (someday in the future, I hope), it will work better for both cases.

So for now, if you want 32-bit output from your stack:

1. Open the RAW images and Develop them to RGBA/32, then
2. Export as HDR, then
3. Stack the HDR images.

This approach may also work for your panorama wish, but I don't have any files to try it with.

[ms.fuentecilla]

Thank you Walt. This had occurred to me, hence my comment about using it for panoramas that typically have around 3 to 7 components. But it would be a tedious process for a stack of 12 or more, especially as batch processing also fails in the same way.

Something to wait for then.

Michael

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, ms.fuentecilla said:

Is it not possible to output into 32 bit? It would be good to have the extended flexibility obtained when using RAW as base files.

Maybe, but probably not. That is because:

1. Most DSLR's capture image sensor data at no more than 16 bit resolution (& most at only 12 or 14 bit).
2. RAW bit depth is about dynamic range, & most of the 'extra' LSB data is likely to be noise.

There is also the practical consideration for stacks that a bunch of 32 bit depth stacked layers would create an enormous amount of data to process.