Starry Landscape Stacker App Reviews
This is the best solution for Milky Way Landscape photography on the Mac; very easy to use, yet still powerful. It fits perfectly in my workflow: I pre-process my RAW files in Aperture, I stack them with Starry Landscape Stacker, and then I can give the final touch to my shots in Pixelmator. This app saves the final composite, but also a version with the mask for the landscape, so you can edit the sky and the landscape separetely in your favourite photo editing software. Highly recommended!
Nice tutorials
I just went through the tutorials. Very complete! Im looking forward to taking some photos and trying it out.
I just took a series of 4 night shots during a new moon at ISO 3200. Starry Landscape Stacker took the noise right out of the sky, leaving me with great-looking stars.
This program is excellent! It is easy to use and makes stacking, aligning, and blending multiple star shots a breeze. The result is far less noise and pinpoint stars if you take short exposures of the sky. I use a Nikon D800E and if I take 10 exposures each at ISO 6400, f/2.8, 14mm, for 10 seconds each, the result is pinpoint stars and much lower noise then I would have seen with a single ISO 3200 exposure of 25 or 30 seconds. This program respects your input images’ color space and bit depth, so you can import 16-bit TIFFs in the ProPhoto RGB color space and the result will be a 16-bit TIFF in ProPhoto RGB.
This works exceptionally well! I tried for hours to get photoshop to align 11 images and did it with this app in minutes. My only complaint is that I can’t seem to find a way to modify the sky or ground after save WITHOUT redoing it all. For feature request, it would be cool if I could save the settings for the mask. This way I can go back and fix something later without re-doing it all.
I’ve used many different pieces of software for astrophotography for stacking planetary and deep sky images. The one area that has always suffered for the astrophotographer has been nightscapes. Like another reviewer, I tried with mixed, usually poor, results in Photoshop using smart objects and stacking trying to achieve what Mr. Hill’s software does in just several clicks. This is an excellent piece of software for anyone who points their camera upwards into the starry sky!!
Useless and Horrible
Cannot handle a decently sized project. Runs your system storage out of space and crashes. I cannot find where it dumped its temporary files to clean up my drive and I’m very frustrated. No way I can tell to configure an external drive. Not worth any money. Avoid this app!
Solid app - wish it were updated more
This is a solid app for landscape astrophotography. It mostly automates the mask and saves both the stacked image and masked portion as separate files if needed. There are a number of stacking modes to choose from and it’s pretty quick to process the image. At this point it’s outdated though. The masks aren’t as precise as they should be and competing products (for windows unfortunately) do a much better job in this regard. If the masks were tighter it would be a lot less noticeable along the edges of the foreground. Overall good and reliable but really hoping there’s some updates soon.
Does not work with m3 chip systems
Upgraded to a MacBook Pro M3 and Starry Landscape Stacker and Starry Sky Stacker just crash after files are loaded and you try to stack.
Good, but could be great
I'm giving this 4 stars because it is so useful. 1) could do a better job of picking star paths - red dots. I've spent hours picking missed star paths. Maybe provide a threshhold for edge contrast. 2) should stack the ground and the stars 3) should be able to stack low light images that are not stars and ground to remove noise. 4) Has Min and Max and average. Shouuld have a slider to weigh Min and Max when doing average. 5) Does a great job of removing jet trails, but also removes meteor trails. 6) I have to se the temp and Tint for input without a preview? 7) there are only two zoom options Actual Pixels and Fit to Frame - why is this not variable? 8) I don't see a way to save a file in the middle of working on it. After hours of picking stars and carefully outlining the ground, I a) save all optiosn because I don't want to spend hours re-creating the masks and stars b) I am in constant fear of my system crashing or (not likely) the app crashing. 9) I Pick Dots then Find Sky. I do not see any way of going back to pick or erase more dots once I Find Sky without starting all over.
The go to!
This app has been invaluable in creating my Landscape Astrophotos. It's incredibly easy to use, making what would be an otherwise cumbersome process simple and fun. I'm starting to do a lot of tracked expoures as well and I find sometimes it can have difficulty aligning properly if the total exposure time is too long (if the sky or foreground moves too much). Moments ago i purchased Starry Sky Staker as well. I will try using this on some of my images with longer integration time to see if it handles it differently. I can't recommend this app enough for anybody getting into Nightscape photography.. I mention it to anybody asking about how I make my photos. As far as I'm aware, this is the only software for Mac users specifically designed for this purpose.. You can do the same processes in Photoshop, but it's a PITA. You can also use Pixinsight, but that is a fairly advanced (and expensive) software. SLS is a fantastic value and works excellently. Thanks Ralph Hill!
Updated review
So my last review was August 10th and since then the app has had a few updates and it keeps getting better. There's now the option of doing noise and color noise reduction directly in the app and I've tested it by doing that and then not doing it and doing the noise reduction in photoshop and it looks like the noise correction in SLS is better! It seems the masking has gotten better too. Most of my shots have trees and it used to be a pain but it does a mighty fine job. I also love how it will automatically reorient images becuase often after I shoot light frames I will set my camera to take 30 dark frames and then pack it up in my bag as I walk back to the car and if the camera turns it will think I'm taking portrait shots. So it's a huge help that I don't have to go in and manually reorient the shots before using the stacker.
Awesome results
I'm an amateur astrophotographer, before this app, I would use a number of different noise reduction techniques to clean up my astro landscapes. This system with dark frames takes a little bit longer to capture and process, but the result is worth it. The images it spits out are so low noise and clean it is unbelivable. I'll be doing this from now on instead, rather than noise reduction plugins. Thank you!
VERY Restrictive
Does not work with long focal length lenses, does not work with any exposure longer than 30 seconds. How can this app call itself an astrophotography stacking app if it cannot do those two simple operations without rashing!? PLEASE CREAT A FIX FOR THESE TWO ITEMS!!!!!!!
Latest Update Broke It
The latest update to this app broke it. I had been using it for a few years with great results, but the latest version is garbage. The images are washed out and ultra-noisy. Completely unusable. An email was sent to the developer, but no response yet. Complete garbage.
App Crash Every Time
I recently started Astro photography and and wanted to stack pictures I took over the weekend. I was trying to stack 7 pictures to create one and it crash mutliple time. Thereafter, I tried stacking 2 pictures and same thing. I am not sure if this is due to Sony A7r4 large raw file size or app but would be nice if it worked.
Sublime
I got excellent results from a 5-image stack of the NEOWISE comet. Much easier to use than Sequator.
Very happy so far
Easy to use app that does a great job for stacking. Saves me loads of time compared to photoshop, so worth every penny. the website is well written and concise too, so all my questions on how to use it properly were answered in just a few minutes of reading.
Star Trails
I shot 4 raw photos to create a star trail at 14mm. I converted the 4 photos to tiff. files and uploaded them to the app. each photo was a 15 min exposure and the app gave me a message saying the exposures needed to be 30 seconds or less. Also, I was receiving a message that I was shooting at too narrow of a focal length but 14mm is pretty much as wide as it gets. I attempted to email the developer but the email did not go through and was receiving a message saying address not found. not happy at all so far with the app wish I could get my money back.
Works for me!
It’s not like there are many star stacking options on Mac, but fortunately, this software has worked great for me! I’ve always found the software to be easy to use. The few questions that I had in the beginning were readily addressed by the developer’s FAQs and support page. The developer continues to provide updates, including much appreciated performance tweaks.
Awesome
This app does exactly what it's supposed to and makes a huge improvement in the overall quality in an image vs just 1 frame. Also vastly easier and more reliable than doing everything manually in Photoshop. Only request would be adding RAW support directly in the app so I didn't have to convert everything (even if just limited to DNG), but just a minor detail.
Excellent app
I have used this app a few times and it works great, as advertised. Used this to stack several frames of Milky Way shots and I highly recommend this software. It will elevate the quality of your photos.
A Brilliant Solution
I greatly admire Starry Landscape Stacker. It is an efficient, elegant solution to the problem of stacking landscape images. Thanks to Ralph Hill for his hard work in writing and maintaining this software.
Very happy
I have used this only 2 times and it works flawlessly. My first attempt was with the Milky Way and mountains in the foreground. My second usage was with the Orion Nebula. I had phenomenal success with the Milky Way shot and am struggling with my Orion shot. I am quite sure my struggle with Orion is the pictures I’m dealing with, not this software. The difference in dark areas between a raw shot and using this software to combine 10 images is amazing. Snow fields are quite grainy in the individual shots, smooth as silk in the final output. Does exactly what I wanted it to do.
Does okay but...
I like the application and it does do a really good job at stacking my astrophotography, however, I really dislike the fact that it takes the liberty to make changes to the exif information for advertising. If I was using a test version, okay, but paying 40 bucks and having it advetise isnt what I would expect from „paid“ vesion of software.
Great app!
How can you feather the paint brush when masking? The paint brush is set to the hardest edge possible and that makes masking a very time consuming and tedeous process. I saw in Ian Norman’s tutorial video that his brush was feathered and there is no obvious way to achieve that in the app. Other than the paint brush feather issue this is a great app and very user friendly! I’ve achieved my best astro shots with the help of this app. Thank you
it’s okay
It does the job but as far as masking it’s tedious if you attempt to create an external mask and load to the platform it’s a crap shoot if the program will recognize it.
Works well and as advertised
I’ve used this program primarily for stacking astrophotography images taken with a telescope and it works very well. It’s rejection of satellites and airplane trails is particularly useful . The only limitation is it rejects image sets that are taken too many minutes apart but that can be worked around. The program improves with each update. Support is also useful and responsive the one time I asked for it.
It really works!
This software is easy to use and produces very good results, better than other noise cancelling programs I’ve tried. It produces a composite image stacked from a series individual images. In my case, it also removed unwanted light trails from aircraft and satellites to leave a stars only image. Highly recommended for Mac OS astrophotographers.
Indispensible Tool for Landscape Astrophotography
I’ve used Starry Landscape Stacker since its earliest iterations and it has been continuously improved. The latest version is excellent. The developer has added many requested features, improved processing and accuracy to the point that SLS has become indispensible for my landscape astrophotography workflow. I have tried and used many other programs built for astrophotography exposure stacking and nothing comes close to the results (and speed) of SLS, particularly for photographers using wide angle lenses where rectilinear distortion can hinder many other programs from successful re-alignment and stacking of exposures. For wide angle landscapes of the night sky, it’s perfect. SLS has a very simple and nearly self-explanatory interface. There are three steps: 'Find Stars', 'Find Sky' and 'Align and Save'. It’s setup to accept 16-bit tiffs exported straight from RAW files. It automatically recognizes light, dark, flat and custom mask frames and allows re-assignment if miscategorized. Automatic star recognition is generally pretty good and it’s simple to manually edit the tolerance for recognizing stars and to edit the auto-mask creation with the simple brush tools provided. Some basic keyboard shortcuts mimick photoshop for ease of use (spacebar for hand tool, square brackets for brush size, etc.). I’d like to see more of these shortcuts added in the future (Maybe command+/command- for zoom in/zoom out or command+spacebar for magnifying tool. I wish I could double click the brightness/contrast/overlay opacity sliders to “reset” them back to default. “E” for eraser and “B” for brush would be helpful too.) As of this writing, there is absolutely nothing that matches SLS in speed and ease of use on any platform.
Starry Landscape Stacker
This application is a must for anyone serious about generating high quality digital files of the night sky with stars. After a few second of capture time, files will show star movement; this motion is more apparant as the focal length increases (more zoom). One can shorten the capture time by increasing the ISO, but at some point too much ISO noise is generated. Starry Landscape Stacker eliminated the problem of blurring stars, assuming they are shot in focus, using software that stacks multiple images taken at short shutter speeds (around 10 seconds) and very high ISO (up to 12,800). WIth a little practice you create terrific star files in under a minute, assuming you have 8-10 high quality files to work with. This software is worth every penny. On top of that, support by the developer in the form of tutorials and email response to questions is first rate.
The Best. Period.
I shoot astrolandscapes around the New Moon without light painting. Noise is always a problem. On a recent trip to Zion I did many 6 to 12 shot stacks. I tested every stacker program that had free trials. Starry Landscape Stacker does not have a free trial program. So I went to YouTube to see about it. The results shown and the ease with which they were achieved was amazing. Enough said. I purchased the app and am over the moon about it. Make sure you view the accompanying videos. Follow the directions and you will get incredible results. Masking is a breeze and incredibly accurate. I have a late 2013 iMac with 24g ram and a 12 shot stack took less than a minute to process. I like you have spent thousands on computers, cameras and lenses all to get the best possible images. Well this $34.99 is the best money I have spent in persuit of night outstanding photos. Highly recommended.
Must have for night photography
I was seeking solutions to reduce noise for my Milky Way shots, and the search lead me to this application. I was amazed at how much noise was reduced by simpily taking multiple shots and stacking them. This is a must have application if you’re into Milky Way photography. The program is simple to use and gets the job done. The newer version can also load a mask created from photoshop. Since I have to create a mask in photoshop anyways, this feature saves me from having to create a mask in Starry Landscape, and it simplifies my workflow even more.
Slow Memory Hog
This app is extremely slow while consuming mass quantities of memory. It took nearly 5 minutes to align 2 TIF files from my FF camera—i7 iMac with 24GB RAM. Trying to align 5 files, it stopped because it ran out of memory—no other apps running. There are many more efficient stacking programs.
Once it finished…
Once the program finished stacking 3 tif files (5568x3712) — took almost 45 minutes — the results were very poor. Its automatic detection of stars was incomplete (roughly 66%) and depended on manual identification for completeness. Hand-identifying dozens of stars might be worth the effort if the results were decent. There was odd blotchy block-shaped regions in the sky. The result was unusable and provided no value-add other than doing post-processing in Lightroom. Bottom line: save your money.
Wonderful addition to any astrophotographers toolbox
I’ve used many different pieces of software for astrophotography for stacking planetary and deep sky images. The one area that has always suffered for the astrophotographer has been nightscapes. Like another reviewer, I tried with mixed, usually poor, results in Photoshop using smart objects and stacking trying to achieve what Mr. Hill’s software does in just several clicks. This is an excellent piece of software for anyone who points their camera upwards into the starry sky!!
Super awesome
This works exceptionally well! I tried for hours to get photoshop to align 11 images and did it with this app in minutes. My only complaint is that I can’t seem to find a way to modify the sky or ground after save WITHOUT redoing it all. For feature request, it would be cool if I could save the settings for the mask. This way I can go back and fix something later without re-doing it all.
Amazing tool!
This program is excellent! It is easy to use and makes stacking, aligning, and blending multiple star shots a breeze. The result is far less noise and pinpoint stars if you take short exposures of the sky. I use a Nikon D800E and if I take 10 exposures each at ISO 6400, f/2.8, 14mm, for 10 seconds each, the result is pinpoint stars and much lower noise then I would have seen with a single ISO 3200 exposure of 25 or 30 seconds. This program respects your input images’ color space and bit depth, so you can import 16-bit TIFFs in the ProPhoto RGB color space and the result will be a 16-bit TIFF in ProPhoto RGB.
Easy to use with great results
I just took a series of 4 night shots during a new moon at ISO 3200. Starry Landscape Stacker took the noise right out of the sky, leaving me with great-looking stars.
Nice tutorials
I just went through the tutorials. Very complete! I'm looking forward to taking some photos and trying it out.