NEW: August 17, 2011 Version 5 of the Stacking Action is released.
Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of 30 second or 300 second night exposures and now you want to make a star trail out of them. You already have Photoshop CS5 Standard (or Extended) and you’d rather not monkey around with Image Stacker by Tawbaware or Startrails.exe or StarStax (StarStax runs on Windows, Linux and Macs).
Let’s even assume that you may even already know how to combine those images manually, but are not relishing doing manual steps 20, 50 or 500 times. I’m with you! Chris and Dawn Schur long ago provided an Adobe Action to stack images in Photoshop. As Photoshop has changed, the method for using the Schur action has changed slightly, as have the details available in the action.
Photoshop presents a potentially bewildering array of choices and while creating your own action may not be difficult, figuring out how to get over that obstacle may take a bigger investment than you want to make. No problem. We have built an up-to-date super spiffy action for you with hopefully copious easy to follow instructions! Once you load our action and kick the tires you may work up the courage to create your own action(s).
In our Star Circle Academy workshops, Harold Davis, Eric Harness and I teach various ways to stack star trails and many other tips and tricks. What I’d like to do for you here, however, is to provide enough detail that you can have success using our newly released action to create a stack with Photoshop CS5 Standard Edition. The action is provided for free. If it breaks in half, you can keep both halves!
First you need to download and install the action. What worked for me was simply to click the link in Firefox and when the file download dialog comes up, the option to “Open with Adobe Photoshop CS5 (default)” was the first choice:
Open Dialog box for Firefox on Windows 7. Your mileage may vary.
Opening it directly into Photoshop is certainly the easiest if you can convince your browser to let you do that. Internet Explorer also allowed me to open the action with Photoshop – it just took two extra dialogs. Even if you can open the action with your browser you might not see anything happen. To verify that the action actually loaded you have to open the Photoshop Actions window. The shortcut to get to open the Actions window is Alt-F9 if you’re using Windows. It might be daisy-leprechaun-fourleafclover on your machine. Since you probably haven’t memorized the shortcut try this: Get to the main Photoshop Window. On the title bar you will find File…Edit…Image… and eventually Window Yeah, click on Window. Actions is near the top of the list of options.
Click Actions and it will launch an ACTIONS window that may look something like this:
If you notice two or more folders named StarCircleAcademy Stack Action it’s because you loaded it more than once on the same machine. One time is all you need, so use the trash can at the lower right of the ACTIONS dialog to delete the older versions. See below for the latest version and a bit about what has changed.
Our Star Circle Academy stack action is different from the Schur action. The Schur action will be called “Set 1″ with “Action 1″ and it lacks an important open operation. Ours is also shinier and newer and stuff.
The StarCircleAcademy Stack Action also contains three other actions:
- DO THIS FIRST! Create Result Frame,
- Instructions,
- Load and Stack in LIGHTEN Mode, and
- Load and Stack in SCREEN mode.
The Instructions action does surprisingly little other than telling you how to find this web page. Starting with version 4 there is also a “LIGHTEN Droplet” for you to play with when you get really bold.
The first thing you should do – especially if you want to make the magic work – is to use the DO THIS FIRST! Create Result Frame. Once you get the knack of what is going on, you may not need to use that step.
DO THIS FIRST automatically does the following:
- load the first image from the folder containing all the images you will be stacking,
- copy the image to the clipboard,
- close the file it just opened and then
- create a new black image called Results using the clipboard content to determine the proper size and bit depth and filling that image with black.
Now let’s go over the whole stacking process from beginning to end, step by step.
- Close any files you may have open in Photoshop.
- Use Alt-F9 (Or Window -> Action) to make the ACTIONS window visible.
- Make sure the ACTIONS window somewhere contains StarCircleAcademy Stack Action v.5 – if not you may not have loaded the action properly.
- Use File -> Automate -> Batch
- Change the Set: to StarCircleAcademy Stacker v.5
- Change the Action to Do this FIRST! (Create Result Frame)
- Set the source to Folder
- Use “Choose” to select the folder containing your shots
- Check the options:
- Override Action “Open” Commands,
- Suppress File Open Options Dialogs, and
- Suppress Color Profile Warnings.
Your settings should look like this (the latest version is v.5, though):
- Press OK.
- The DO THIS FIRST action will load the first file in the folder and display a message with a button marked “Stop”.
Press stop. - Next a message will show a warning like this…
Click Stop. (If you don’t, it will just keep loading images and renaming them to Results and after a while you’ll get bored). - Again Click File -> Automate -> Batch
- Change the Action to Load and Stack in LIGHTEN Mode (Recommended) or if you’re adventurous, try the SCREEN mode.
- Press OK and watch it run! The action will load each image, add it to the Results, change the blending mode and flatten back to a single image all in front of your very eyes.
- If you have the ACTIONS window open, it will point to each step as it is doing it.
- When it’s done, all your images have been stacked in Lighten mode.
- Save your image where and how you like.
I tried this stacking thing with JPGs and CR2 (raw) images and I was really surprised to see that both worked well. I suspect you could try it out on your TIFFs and BMPs and whatever else you have.
Enjoy.
If you would like more hands on experience and an opportunity to shoot amazing night skies in amazing locations join us at one of our workshops.
If you’re curious HOW the action is doing its magic, you can poke around in the ACTIONS window. Expanding the “Set current layer” in the “Load and Stack in LIGHTEN” mode you’ll notice the following:
What the Action is doing is Opening an image in your folder, selecting it all, copying the selection, closing the file it just opened and pasting it onto the Results image – which by default creates a new layer. The action then adjusts the blending mode of this new layer from “Normal” to “lighten”. *That* is the magic. The final step is to Flatten the image which eliminates the layers.
Want to go even further? You might be interested in this blog which describes how you can create a “droplet” out of the action. The droplet is even simpler. You drag files onto the droplet and it automatically stacks them in Photoshop using the StarCircleAcademy Stacking Action.
Stacking Action Change History
v.5 - Fixes a problem discovered by Todd Ross where files below a certain size failed on the “Do this first” action with a “could not complete command because area is empty” message. If you try to stack files that are about 2×2 pixels square you may still encounter this problem, but we know you will not do that, right? Oh, and there is a new option: “Stack in LIGHTEN creating intermediates”. What is THAT for? See here!
v.4 - Fixes a problem where the Result frame was white for some people (the behavior depended on your default settings). Illustrations in this BLOG have not been updated. Wording has been changed slightly. Also added a LIGHTEN Droplet action which will be described in another BLOG.
v.3 – Removed the fixed path name and the “save” action when creating the Results frame. Added a SCREEN mode stacking option. Illustrations in this BLOG have not been updated.
v.2 - Early release which unfortunately had a hard coded path in the “Do this First” which made it incompatible for everyone but me. “Instructions” action was also added.
(none) – Early attempts at a stacking solution.
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Really appreciate the time and effort you all have put into providing us amateur photo enthusiasts with instructions on how to produce star trail images. But I am having a problem: with the DO This First action I get a message that reads “could not complete the command because of a problem using the Adobe Color Engine.” I tried converting my NEF images to jpegs, changing my workspace color from Prophoto to Adobe 1998, and changing the color settings from Prophoto convert to North American General settings, but I keep getting the same error message. Any idea about what is happening and how can I fix this? Thanks.
Drew
Drew, thanks for your praise. I don’t have an answer for you, but this might help. You don’t say what version of Photoshop you have, but similar problems were reported with CS2 and CS3 as well. More Google searching should help.
Would like to give your action a go but I see no way of opening it on a Mac. I clicked on the link and it simply opened the action in a Safari window. Tried double clicking on the text, of course to no avail. Went to Photoshop CS5 and, as you said looked under the Window Tab and clicked actions. Apparently, my browser isn’t as user-friendly as your Windows machine. (Psst, don’t tell my wife. She said that I should get a Windows unit like hers. I said Macs are different honey, guess so). Anyway, that opened a list of 10 or so actions but none of them were listed as StarCircleAcademy Stack Action v.4. So, until I can get some enlightment as to how to install, I will be digging around and asking my more tech-savvy friends. Thanks for the action though, and I look forward to using it at some point in the not too distant future.
Well, I use a real computer so can’t help you with Mac issues.
Seriously, though, I don’t use a Mac, but I have friends who do, I’ll ask one of them to give it a try and see what I come up with. Meanwhile if you find a solution, please let us know!
Oh, so here is what you can do… right click this link and do save as. After it downloads you should be able to execute (double click) the saved file and have Photoshop load it.
There are a number of options with a Mac. You need to save the file under the link, not open it. One of these should work, depending on OS version and config of your browser.
Option-Click may save it to your desktop or Downloads Folder.
Or….Command-Click will give you a dialog box. Choose “Save Linked File to Desktop.”
Or… Command-Click will give you a dialog box. Choose “Save Linked File As…” and choose the Desktop as the location.
Once you have the .atn file saved, locate it, double click it, and Photoshop should open with the action in the correct location.
Thanks, Rick!
The math on this makes perfect sense for stacked star trails except for one important thing – noise. This will seamlessly blend all your star trails together no problem, noise and all. In fact, it will give you the brightest instance of a stuck pixel throughout your entire image sequence. So, while you will get your hours-long trails, you will also get the maximum amount of noise possible. What do you do to counteract this? It’s pretty impossible to paint it out pixel by pixel when every 4th pixel has noise. I have a 5D2 which isn’t supposed to be that noisy of a camera, though a 6 minute exposure will make a profound level.
Kurt: The whole point of shooting shorter exposures is that there is a LOT less noise – give it a try and you’ll see that 10 1-minute shots will be less noisy than one 10-minute shot and fortunately since noise is random the location of the noisy pixels is not constant. You are correct that the brightest pixel of all of the shots may be noise, but with less noise to start with you’re already ahead. However there are two more tricks in the arsenal:
Include some moonlight/twilight or average the brightest sky shots and then restack those with lighten mode. The slightly brighter from moonlight or twilight will overwhelm the usually less glaringly bright noise.
For hot pixels – there is no solution short of recalibrating your camera (via manual cleaning) and/or cloning those stuck pixels out. If I get a great image with two dozen hot pixels I’m ecstatic. Not much work to clone out hot pixels – nothing harder or more sinister than cloning out dust.
Oh, almost forgot to point out that I have articles on reducing noise and in selecting exposure settings for shooting stars.
Hmm. Well my first attempt at stacking was using 6-minute exposures at ISO 400, which on my 5D2 results in a completely unacceptable amount of noise it seems. I’ll have to figure out a better technique. Thanks for the info.
I’ve never gotten a bad result on my 5DII at so low an ISO (knock wood). The questions that come to my mind are: 1. What are you doing to your shots besides stacking them? [trying to lighten them before stacking will amplify noise] 2. What is the ambient air temperature (hot = more noise). 3. What (if any) noise processing are you doing before stacking? I took a look at your star trails on Flickr and it appears many were done with film (quite lovely). Your 5 minute self portrait looks fine, though, and that was a 5DII.
I’m in the middle of processing 230 90sec shots, and I have a run of 6 or 7 shots where the cloud cover overhead came through lightening up a good part of the frame for those shots – should i do 2 seperate stacks and try to blend just the trails so I don’t blend in all this cloud “noise”? I have a fairly beefy setup and running them now through statistics w/ the maximum setting on CS5 is taking the better side of an hour…. wondering how to avoid blending in the light of the clouds….
mike
Mike: I’m afraid I can’t help you there except to encourage you to try different methods. The brightness of the clouds, how much of the frame they cover, the length of the frames and the goal you’re trying to achieve will likely lead you to a solution or a compromise. Clouds that move often create “stuttering” which I find unattractive. On the other hand… why are you using statistics when you’ve got a lighter weight stacking action (or is the stacking action no faster?)
Your scenario is why I sometimes shoot raw + small JPG. I then play with the smaller JPG files to decide if I want to tackle the larger images – and by what methods.
I’ve noticed that you haven’t included any dark frame subtraction in this action. Isn’t this something that would improve the image quality by reducing the noise, especially at high ISOs? Or is there some reason not to go down that path?
Excellent question. The short answer is dark frame subtraction does not reduce what is usually the strongest component of noise: *random* noise. An average of many dark frames could be used to reduce the background glow and to eliminate “stuck” (hot) pixels – provided the hot pixels are also in the dark frame – my experience is that they seldom are. But the real answer is that actions are clumsy things in Photoshop and the pre-setup needed to identify dark frames would make the action very difficult to use. And finally, I’ve found that with my current gear it is more effective to do noise reduction before I create JPGs which I stack (e.g. using Digital Photo Professional) or by doing noise reduction on the resultant stack. Perhaps I’m lucky, but I’m finding I use my dark frames less and less because the images are pretty clean to start with.
I was wondering if you guys can help me out with a problem. I have run the software succefully once but on my second try I keep getting an error saying “could not complete command because area is empty”. I was using CR2 files and I have also converted them to JPG and I still get the same responce. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Todd, please be more specific. Describe the steps you took and which action you were running when you see the problem.
It would also be helpful to know which version of Photoshop you’re using and on which platform.
Ok, I will try to be as detaied as possible. First let me say I know the software works because I have had success with it on another set of files. My version of PS is CS5 version 12.0.4 X 32. I have all of the files I want to stack in one folder and the files are CR2. I follow all of your instructions to the letter but once I press OK (instruction 10) the message box (instruction 11) does not appear. What happens is it looks like the first fill is loaded and as it starts to run down the actions, do this first,Open, Set selection and so on it stops at Fill and a Photoshop message pops up over a totaly empty picture file that says ( could not complete the command because the selected area is empty). I click the “ok” button on the message and thats it, Im left with a blank picture file on my screen. I could take a snaggit picture of the screen but I wasn’t sure how to load it on here. I hope this helps. If not please let me know what other information you mat require
I think I am able to duplicate the problem. When I have CR2 files that are”SRAW2″ format files (Small RAW) it behaves the same way you describe. I think I know how to fix it, but the good news is that there is an easy work-around:
Load the last image into Photoshop and then run the “Load and Stack in LIGHTEN Mode” without the “do this first”. This works for me with the SRAW2 format files (and any other, for that matter). You may get a warning which you can ignore.
PS I have fixed this problem in the v.5 version of the stacking action.
Wow you are good. You were correct, I went back and looked and they were SRAW2 files. I have downloaded the new version and it is running as I write. Your help is greatly appreciated!!!!!!
Hey – I came across this while searching for an easier way to run this in CS5. It worked fantastically. I will definitely be using it again. You can see the results of my first venture here: http://jeffejensen.blogspot.com/2011/09/stacked-star-trails.html
Thanks!
Hello there,
I have 800 photos that i took a few night ago of the star and i was wondering if anyone knows how to make the star move in trails using photoshop cs5. I’m on a mac laptop. I used to know how to but i reckon i forgot. Please help.
Ollie
Olman: Our most recent article is on that subject exactly. Picasa runs on a Mac. Good luck!
Hi Steven,
This is really very very useful. Thanks a lot.
Yest i took 20 pics to make a star trails. I made a mistake while capturing. i took sme 8 photos in Jpeg… n suddenly i realized tht .. so i changed it to raw… How can i merge both jpeg and raw in 1 pic.??
Thanks in Advance
Dhanraj..
Dhanraj… this is very simple. Put all file types in the same directory. If they are all the same size, the Stacking Action will do the trick. Raw, JPG, TIFF, doesn’t matter. If they are NOT the same size you’re going to have to scale the JPGs properly. Good luck!
thanks for the action, works great on my Mac
Always glad to hear! Cheers.
It´s a really nice job, thanks for sharing. But I´m having problems creating intermediates because the action just create 2 images, the first one and the last one, but don´t create the intermadiates ones.
Everything else is working perfectly, do you know what is going on?
Thanks again!
To save intermediates, you also have to select the option to “Override Action ‘Save As’ Commands”, choose a folder where files will go and probably have to make sure the files being created have a serial number in them so they don’t keep saving one over another. I think by default the “Save Intermediates” action will try to save in folder C:\tmp\MP_Project_a\Intermediates.
Thanks Steven, working just fine now!
I have just installed V.5 in CS5 using Windows 7. The action installed OK but when I go to run the “Do this first” action I get the message “could not complete command because area is empty” . I have 11 files jpg all size 1812 x 1000. If I load one first, then run the Load and Stack action, it does work.
Any advice?
Not sure. I’ll look into it when I get a skinny minute. Glad you found a good workaround, however.
By the way, this sounds suspiciously like the “Small RAW” problem earlier. The problem was not because of the format, but because of the file size. Somewhere in the action it was selecting a pixel that doesn’t exist in smaller images. Please try upgrading to v.5 of the Stacking Action and see if that solves your problem.
I love the action and am recommending it to others. One minor question, does it work with previous versions of Photoshop? I have friends that haven’t updated yet, and I want to make sure that it will work for them before I recommend it.
Thanks
Definitely MAYBE on that one, Steve. I don’t have earlier versions to try with, so I don’t know. Be glad for people to tell me, however! It’s free to try.
Thanks.
BTW here is my latest…as in last night. ;-D :
http://www.sjlarue.com/Landscapes/Scenic/16471834_BdDhVc#!i=1662478615&k=GksDrdz
And the one that I am most psyched about.:
Wow, Steve. I see why you’re psyched about that second one. Looks like you got a brilliant green Quadrantid Meteor to go along with your exquisite Star Trail. Bravo! I hope you don’t mind, but I edited your post to add a thumbnail.
Sure, no problem.;-D
I wish it was from the Quad shower, but it was was like near the last week of October or into November when I took it. I really need a solar event calender.:-D
I wasn’t even around when it took, wife wanted to drive around. Later when I chimped the reults, I actually made chimp noises.
Hey Steven, every time I try to get a star trail I keep getting results like those found here: . They all have very noticeable gaps in between the stars. Is there any way to fix this? By the way, I am using your automatic stacking tool in Photoshop, it works way better than any other software I have tried to use, thanks!
A few other details:
-Camera and other equipment:
*Canon EOS 450D/Xsi (mid-2009 model)
*Targus tripod
*Canon intervalometer
-Camera/intervalometer settings for all the photos:
Camera=
*BULB mode
*f/5.3
*WB==Daytime mode
*ISO==100
Intervalometer=
*30 sec exposure
*33 sec intervals
You didn’t specify one important detail: what is the focal length of your lens? If you’re using an intervalometer and you have your camera in BULB mode I recommend reducing your interval to 1 second and see if it works. If it skips frames, bump it up to 2 seconds. And if that skips frames, bump up to 3 seconds. However, if you’re using a medium or telephoto lens, then even those short gaps are going to be noticeable.
You can also employ the method Andy gives to eliminate those gaps.
PS I doubt Targus makes a tripod worth trusting a camera and long exposures to. Be sure if you use one you’ve got it well weighted down and tightened up.
Well if I reduce my intervals to 1 second, then how can I give time for the picture to come out? Whenever I take a 30 second exposure it takes about another 31-33 seconds before it’s saved on the memory card.
Robert, It sounds like you have Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR) turned on. Turn that off.
So if I turn that setting off, it won’t take another 33 seconds before it’s ready to take a picture again?
@Robert: I can’t tell you exactly what will happen as I don’t have that camera. Best way to get an answer to your question is to try it. See these BLOG entries for more background: and
Another little tidbit. if the gaps are irregular, check and make sure your card reader downloaded all the files. My card reader is doing that to me and it is driving me bananas. Every time I do a star trail, 2 or 3 shots will be left on the card, and I have to figure out which ones they are.
Just a quick note to thank you for an amazing ATN routine! Took my first ever star trail images at the Grand Canyon and between the Stacker Checklist and your Photoshop stacker action, everything went perfectly! I was even able to use the action from within Photoshop CS3, and it worked exactly the as in CS5. My workflow is to import the RAW images into Lightroom; select the set I want to stack and Export as PSD 8-bit into a new folder; process using the Star Circle Stacking Action in Photoshop. Thanks again!
You’re welcome, Christopher. Glad to know it works for you and in CS3. Happy Photons.
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