The current rage of “stacked Milky Way” (or night sky) captures is quite different from the star trail or timestacks style of captures. Huh? The words stack and stacking are overloaded with many different meanings. Let’s see if we can add some precision and clarification.

Here are some of the variations possible:

• Auto Blend Layers with Stacking: Used for macro/focus stacking, HDR, and generic image blending – NOT for astro images!
• Lighten Mode Stacking: Creating Star Trails!
• Statistics Mode Blending (Stacking): Can perform the same operation as Lighten Mode Stacking when the option “Maximum” is used, however Statistics are heavy weight and more complicated to do in our opinion.
• Align and Stack: Deep sky astrophotography using several images taken one after another as quickly as possible. Photoshop doesn’t do this well, but we describe how in the next section. Align is the distinguishing word here.
• Tracked Stacked Images: For still astrophotography images with less noise and greater detail. A device is required that tracks the sky rotation – the word tracked is the key here.
  

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  Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge “Stacking”

• Group into Stack:  Not stacking at all! It really just means “create a group”.

The above is NOT an exhaustive list of the kinds of stacking you may hear about!

Stacking Types Explained

Group into Stack

Let’s start with the easy one: Stacking may mean add to group. In Lightroom and Adobe Bridge you can pick several photos and the options  Stacking -> Group into Stack. Or pick several photos and either Photo Merge to HDR or Panorama with the “Create Stack” option checked. In this context, Stacking and Stack just means group.  Unfortunately a photo can only appear in one stack, and you cannot stack photos from different folders together.

Why would you want a photo to appear in two (or more) stacks groups? Here is an example where I used a single top shot and created two different panoramas.

Panoramas 1 and 2 were both created using image 3 (608095.NEF) but when panorama 2 was created, image 3 was removed from the stack (group) for 1 and added to the stack (group) with 2. Furthermore, you can see that the panorama and the two photos used to create it were all added into the group (notice the last image says 3 of 3).

Blend Layers using Lighten Mode

Stacking may mean blend photos in lighten or darken blend mode – examples are star trails and timestacks. In this usage, the lightest (or darkest) of all the pixels in each image is selected. This is the kind of stacking that AdvancedStacker Plus does. Below is an example of taking several images that we collected over time with long delays between each exposure causing the “dotted” appearance of the star trail.

Several layers of images taken at intervals all set to blend mode “Lighten”

Align and Blend Stacking

Stacking can ALSO mean ALIGN and blend images with median, mean (aka average) or more sophisticated algorithms. Indeed astroimagers have been doing this style of blending for years using techniques that involve “star registration” (aligning stars with stars) and some pretty fancy stacking algorithms like Alpha-Kappa Median Clipping and Entropy Weighted Average. The key point here is the alignment. Indeed, here at StarCircleAcademy, we’ve explained how you can brighten and reduce noise in your foreground using simple astrophotography processing techniques.  See below for how to accomplish Align and Blend Stacking in Photoshop, and plenty of warnings about why this method is very likely to FAIL using Photoshop as the tool.

You may also see references to tracked, stacked images. These are the same as “align and blend” just described, except that to capture the image, the camera is guided by an external device (or by some fancy internal hardware), to allow longer exposures of the stars without getting unintentional trailing (smears) of stars.

The takeaway is that not all stacking is created equal. You need to know the context to understand what is meant by the word: stacking.

Focus Stacking / Auto Blend Layers

In Photoshop there is Edit -> Auto-Blend Layers -> Stack Images this is yet another kind of stacking (focus stacking) and despite the wording is NOT the kind of operation needed to ALIGN and Blend astro images. If you don’t believe us, give it a try and you’ll see it will do very weird things with your layers. Below are the same images as earlier. Note the bizarre masks it created to do the blending.

Edit -> Auto-Blend Layers -> Stack Images makes a mess. We told you so! Click to see a bigger image.

Aligned, Stacked Starry Landscape Images

While it would probably be better to make this a separate article in itself, we found it painful enough that we don’t recommend bothering – and yet we proceed to explain HOW to do it anyway!

If you want the cleanest possible images, you’ll – of course – want to reduce the overall noise  and bring out details by using many images instead of one. This approach is not all puppies and kittens. Here are some of the pitfalls:

1. The direction of sky movement relative to the ground has a significant influence on the quality of the result (as well as the order chosen for alignment). In general, setting constellations are better than rising ones.
2. Most of the existing tutorials will assume that you have a recent (CC) version of Photoshop with statistics and an an “Auto Align” that properly manages masked regions.
3. Some of the tutorials we’ve observed are more cumbersome than they need be. There are plenty of hotkeys and mouse shortcuts to make the process go pretty quickly.
4. More than 10 or so images can become quite demanding on machine resources.
5. The complexity of your foreground will also affect the outcome. A clean, crisp separation between sky and land is preferable. Trees, poles, wires, and other things that extend through the sky are problematic.
6. Lens distortion can also adversely affect the outcome.

Aligned Stacking Procedure

1. Load all the photos as layers in Photoshop.
2. Heal out airplane and satellite trails from each layer.
3. Select all the layers and add to a group named “Sky“
4. Right click the Sky Group and duplicate the whole group as “Foreground”
5. Select all the layers in Foreground.  Use Layer -> Smart Object -> Convert to Smart Object.
6. Select Layer -> Smart Object -> Stack Mode -> Mean
7. Duplicate Mean using Ctl-Alt-Shift-E (Command-Option-Shift-E on MAC). Label the newly created layer “Mean” and turn it off.
8. Select all layers in Sky. Set blend mode to “Lighten” and observe the direction of star movement against the ground.
9. Be sure the image with stars nearest the ground is at the BOTTOM of the stack. The bottom layer will be your base for alignment. You can drag layers around, or Layer -> Arrange -> Reverse may do the trick.
10. Create a mask keeping as much of the sky as is easy to do but that DOESN’T include any ground  or fixed location objects. IMPORTANT: Be sure the mask doesn’t have holes in it, including at the bottom corners. Click the layer mask, hold down the Alt (Option) key and drag the mask to the next sky layer. Repeat until all sky images are masked with the same mask.
11. Select the bottom layer and lock it  (Layers -> Lock Layers -> check Position -> Ok)
12. Select all the sky layers.
13. Chose Edit -> Auto Align Layers -> Auto
14. When alignment is done, set blend mode for all sky layers to Darken. If stars are disappearing in the result image, that’s bad.
    1. If alignment is great everywhere, that is you have plenty of stars, you’re done. But it probably won’t be. So…
    2. Duplicate the current layers to a NEW document – call it whatever you want, but perhaps “Left looks good” makes sense.
    3. Open the history palette and click just above the “Align Layers” item (to restore to before the alignment was done). Lock the TOP layer (see item 11) and repeat steps 12-14.
    4. If a large portion of the image still has streaks in some quadrant, try undoing align, undoing the lock and re-aligning.
    5. If you’re still getting a significant amount of streaking you can also try Auto Align -> Reposition rather than auto.
       

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       Q: Why do I have disappearing stars?
       A: The reason they are disappearing is because they are not aligned. In Darken mode, the darker sky “wins” out over the several stars. This COULD be a good thing in other situations, but not here!

       Q: If I went through the trouble of doing all this alignment, why is it still “off”?
       A: Photoshop isn’t optimized to align stars. Secondly, lens distortion makes a star move non-uniformly across the sensor. And third: stars at different declinations (celestial latitudes) travel at different speeds across the field. To eliminate streaks, the best solution is to track the sky.

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15. Take the aligned sky, delete all the layer masks. With all the aligned sky layers selected, create a smart Object.
16. Do the same Stack Mode “Mean” trick for the sky smart object that you previously did for the foreground.
17. The rest is pretty straight forward. Turn the foreground (mean) back on. Use a selection to reveal only the foreground and apply that to the Foreground Group.
18. Adjust contrast, color balance, vibrance, etc. to your satisfaction.
19. Save the kit and caboodle.

Does all this seem too complicated? Well, then perhaps you might consider using these tools instead. They do most of the hard work for you and they KNOW the difference between stars and foreground (usually because you help them know).

• On a Mac: Starry Landscape Stacker – from the Mac App Store
• On a PC: Sequator – do a Google Search to download it.

By the way there are many astro processing tools, like Deep Sky Stacker – but most/all of them expect that your images will have NO foreground or non-moving objects like wires in them.