UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred  after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
Hi All,Â
I am new to this and just started the 7 day trial to see if this is something I have done. I have read guides and watched multiple tutorials videos but something seems to be going wrong. I am not sure if this is just out of my skillset and I should give up or if I am doing something wrong. I only have a few days left of my trial and dont want to pay if this is beyond me but all the tutorials say it is so simple and automated for basic edits.
High level summary, I did 64 frames of 30 seconds using a dsl. each frame looks good and is pretty sharp. There are no bad frames, no blemishes, no significant vignetting and as a stand alone frame can actually be edited to be a reasonably decent shot. When I stack though I get the below which has added a massive amount of vignette, blurred the stars, added random colours and whilst the MW is more visible the overall picture (ignoring enhancements, contrast etc) is far worse. Where and I going wrong or should I walk away?
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Hi Ross @roscodav78,
Thank you very much for your question and welcome to the APP forum.
The amount of vignetting becomes clearer when you stack so many images. The noise is reduced from stacking and thus the image can be stretched more strongly giving you an impression that there is more vignetting, but there is not, the data is only more strongly stretched giving you the impression that you have more vignetting all of a sudden.
To counter vignetting, you will need to add flats, then the vignetting will go away completely. Did you ever shoot flats before?
This is data shot with a DSLR and a short focal length lens, right? The short focal length lens will have clear optical problems, like non-circulair stars in the sensor corners and it will also have optical distortion. The non-circulair stars are no problem really to get a good result. The optical distortion can be a big problem here, but APP can dynamically correct it with a setting in 4) Register, try to enable use dynamic distortion correction and then re-integrate the data. I think the stars will look much better.
The random color that you refer to is the same issue as the vignetting. You just see more color because you have not applied flats and the data is more stretched in the integration view when compared to the view of a single image. Finally, in each image there will be sky gradients form light-pollution. These gradients build up in your integration, they become more complex, giving more colors... since flats are missing, it will look bad to start with, that is quite normal, really.
APP has a tool to correct this as well. Go to the Tools tab and select the Remove Light Pollution tool, that can correct a lot of these problem like the vignetting and sky gradients. An old and extensive video tutorial with this tool can be seen here:
Finally, to be honest, for a first try, the result looks quite good actually as well 🙂 the initial single images must be quit good and sharp like you indicate.
Let me know if this helps.
Mabula
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Thank you so much that helped. I still have a lot to learn and I had to spend a lot of time tweaking the light pollution and vignetting but doing some flats made a bit difference. This is my final output!
