A sequence created using the Comet stacking mode. Click the image to see the timelapse.

We didn’t want to put too many exclamation points here, but hundreds of hours of work writing , testing, documenting and creating instructional videos for the new Advanced Stacker PLUS have reached fruition so we have to use at least a few exclamation marks!!!

The changes and additions here are largely based on the way I use the Advanced Stacker PLUS plus the patient, persistent requests of several of my most engaged clients (yes, including you, Marsha!).

Here is an example of what the Advanced Stacker PLUS Version 14 can do. Watch it in HD.

12 Minute Star Trail using Advanced Stacker PLUS version14 from Steven Christenson on Vimeo.

I demonstrated this live during a Creating Star Trails Webinar. Here I am going through all of the steps including some advanced masking techniques which will be covered in detail in the next Night Photography 150 Webinar.

Here is an example of the six of the different stacking modes. Notice how the “flash” of the tree light painting and the passage of the airplane show differently in each mode. Watch in FULL SCREEN and HD for best viewing.

The beast is now released and available in our store.  Here is PARTIAL list of what we’ve spiffed up.

New Features

• New stacking modes: Elastic Stars and “Fat Heads” (aka Blobulous)
• New Stacking mode: Average – continuously averages the last 8 frames and can be used by itself, or in conjunction with other stacking to reduce noise
• Foreground Masking mode: Got one frame with the perfect foreground and want all of your results to feature it? You can do that. See this timelapse where the foreground mask was a lightened version of the sum of several frames.
  
• Dark Frame Subtraction – and even better, you can run your dark frames through the lighten mode (or averager) and use the result to remove hot pixels from all of your frames.
• Really cool Watermarking options. Helps you create and apply your own Watermarks to images with a single click.
• More resizing options including sizes targeted for Facebook, Google and 500px.  You can also add your own custom cropping and sizing too, and apply as a batch.
• Use the Foreground Mask group to add additional curves and corrections to bring pop to your timelapse.
• Allow the automatic averaging to flow through any of your stacking modes to reduce noise.
• The stacking actions now keep track of the NAMES of the first and last files loaded. And there is a new option to create a file based on those first and last names so you can keep your stacks organized.
• Installation Check action: make sure everything is installed properly.
• Installer batch script for Windows (Mac installer is under development).
• Even more usage videos (http://starcircleacademy.com/advancedstacker)

Improvements

• Watermarks can be done once up front for the whole stack. You can then restyle or move them if the nine automatic placement options aren’t enough!
• Even more video help (see here), and more documentation.

Bug Fixes

We found a few issues that affected operation.

• Under some circumstances, Advanced Stacker PLUS would not properly handle stacking of complicated files like other .PSD documents.  We may have been the only people doing that!
• Introduced a bug that caused some operations to fail on PS CS2 and CS3.