During a recent exchange of ideas with @gadolf it came out a good subject for a new thread.
It’s about night landscapes in which you’d take multiple shots for the sky, and one (or many) different ones for the foreground (especially when the foreground is feature-rich, not just defined by an horizon line).
First of all, please note I’m new about this process, I’m a little bit more than curious, let’s say.
Anyhow, I’ve uploaded an archive with 6 RAW files and 2 JPGs:
- RAWs:
- IMG_0433 to IMG_0437 have been used for stacking to get a noce sky
- IMG_0431 has been used for the foreground
- In the jpg folder:
- 01_… is the result of the stacking for the sky with Siril, plus some basic adjustment in GIMP
- 02_… addition of the foreground, with some rough masking in GIMP (unfinished)
You find the archive here.
The author of these pics is @flick87, who recently joined the forum. The RAW files are posted with permission with license CC-BY-SA 4.0 .
I am the author of the JPGs processed images, they’re also released with the same CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.
Speaking with him especially looking for FOSS in this topic, I became curious about this type of photography and started fiddling a bit with Siril. Even being totally inexpert, I was immediately struck by the quality I could get for the sky without a huge learning effort, by stacking the 5 RAW files in Siril. It is indeed a very nice tool.
However, what I found then difficult (or rather, tedious) is the long process of masking and stitching the foreground and the sky. When the foreground is rich and interleaved with the sky, as in the example shot above, the process may become extremely time consuming.
The question that came out discussing with @gandolf was: does it exist in the FOSS universe (either a software, a plugin, a sorcerer,…) something similar to Sequator, that performs the stacking and also offers tools to take care of the foreground extraction and masking?
I’ve never used Sequator, mostly because it’s Win-only and closed source, but @flick87 is familiar with it and confirms it’s working nicely for the foreground as well.
So, I’m wondering, out of curiosity, if it exist some open-source implementation for stacking, together with foreground extraction/processing.