Quote Dreeamer: Quote AustinMN:
I expect a deep stack (15-20 images) to run for hours, even all night.
I’m struggling to reconcile this with the process i use which takes a few minutes. Is the time taken due to the Registax program, to computing power, or have i got the wrong end of the stick again and am not processing the data in the correct way.
The times and process i use
30 seconds to automatically load 33 photo’s into a stack.
10 minutes to manually set the opaque slider on each of the photos to the calculated values.
20 seconds to merge then save an image.
Registax does a lot more than average the images together. Averaging them may be all you want or need.
Assuming 30 images, here's what I would expect:
* Converting each image to the Registax internal format (a minute or two).
* Choosing alignment points (anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes, depending on more and complexity)
* Making sure each image is aligned (registered) with all of the others. Sometimes, this requires several passes (anywhere from 15 mninutes to 2 hours).
* Performing a statistical analyisis on each pixel, so that transient items and excess noise can be ignored (30 minutes to 5-6 hours).
* Averaing together, on a pixel-by-pixel basis, the results of the statistical analysis (1 to 30 minutes).
The machine I am using is powerful, but is a little short on RAM. I can tell that much of the time is spent swapping things in and out of the swapfile, so I would not be surprised if more RAM improved the performance by a magnitude, and I would expect the time to drop by at elast half.
If you don't need all those steps (and your results so far tell me you probably don't), then there's no reason to try Registax.
Austin