Hello Luca,
Thanks a lot. Now I get the hang of its inner working.
As usual, screenshots are extremely useful 
Hello Luca!
I am back, once again, testing Shine Stacker version 1.2.1
As usual with:
Operating System: Windows 11 Home 64-bit
CPU Processor: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-12700H (20 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
RAM Memory: 32768MB
GPU Card name: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU
Samsung SSD
Today’s trial is through a stack of 170 RAWs images (wasp insect)
Nikon Z6-III
Venus Laowa 25mm f/2.8 2.5-5x Ultra Macro lens
4X magnification
Iso 200 - F4
Manfrotto Plateau Micrometrique 454 (it took me 30 minutes to manually finish this whole stack…)
“Natural light” from the nearby window
As a comparison, here is the final JPEG image before any touching up (usually by way of GIMP) I get with Helicon Focus (my usually preferred software so far):
This image is obtained using the corrisponding stack of 16 TIFF bit images.
In short, I batch converted the 170 NEF - RAWs (Nikon Z6-III) to Tiff thanks to RawTherapee
At present, I still need to retouch it to remove all the many flaws and increase a bit its sharpness.
In addition, Its colours (e.g. yellows ) are also a bit off (at work, I have got an Eizo calibrated monitor but now I am on my laptop).
With Shine stacker the whole process is still excrutiating slow (just joking)
As a consequence, I have tried the stack of 170 Jpeg images since the abovementioned 16 bit Tiff (142 mb each) were too overwhelming for it to handle…
Unfortunately, in the end, the process with these jpeg aborted (out of Ram).
Here is the screenshot:
Strangely enough, with another different PC (Windows 10 - “only” 16 gb RAM)
This same process finished fine but the final stack was wrong.
Here is its screenshot:
To sum up, as you suggested, I still need to study the “expert” options in order to significantly improve my final results
Just in case you are curious and whenever you have same spare time here is the Dropbox link with the 170 jpeg images (ZIP folder - 300 MB); the corresponding 170 - 16 bit TIFF images are too big to share (23,6 gb). Even Helicon Focus took a lot of time to finish their stack…:
I am giving a look and planning sone optimiziations using more parallel processing. Stay tuned, but I need a bit of time…
Sure!
Luca, take your time !
With small stacks your software is already quite powerful!
The icing on the cake is that it is even open source
You may want to give a look at 1.3.0:
There is still something to impeove, but should be better than 1.2.1.
My question:
Is someone who is not a programmer, that is, a so-called "programmer. ordinary bread eater in possession of Windows 11 can install the program and as it should be
proceed ?
Zbyma72age, you can:
- download the zip of windows version from this link
- unzip the archive where you prefer, possibly in a disk area where you don’t need administrator privileges
- double-click the Shine Stacker icon, and it should run
In several cases, you have to convince your antivirus that this is not malware, since I am not a certified programmer (which means: spend a few hundred $$ a year).
Silvio,
your fly in 3:18 on 8 cores, just default options:
I hope it wil get better an better with next versions.
Hello Luca,
Just tested the new version as usual with my Windows 11 setup.
Now, Shine Stacker is fast and the final results are great as well.
I hugely appreciate the new options to visualize, in real-time, the use of CPU-RAM, while running the whole stack.
I have also tested the retouch options (sharpening, white-balance) etc.
Here is the screenshot:
THANKS a lot indeed for your magnificent work on Shine Stacker!
It is incredible it is also open source…
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The problem is that I have already downloaded twice unzipped and can’t find the Shine Stacker icon
Zbyma72age, Have you tried inside one of the subfolder? In the macOS version the app is in the main folder, under Windows I think is one level down. Sorry, I don’t have a Windows machine close to me right now…
Silvio, thank you very much for your time and testing Shine Stacker. It really helped a lot to improve the application.
I still have several things to improve, including the documentation!
Hello @Zbyma72age
The problem is that I have already downloaded twice unzipped and can’t find the Shine Stacker icon
Just checked on Windows 11 for the current version 1.3.0:
After downloading the ZIP (226 Mb, in total) if you double-click on it you can already check the presence of the exe folder into the sub-folder:
When I unzip it the shinestacker.EXE (to start the software) is located into the sub-folder shinestacker. Here are the various paths on my computer:
Hello @Zbyma72age
Very strange indeed.
Just tried to unzip into the OneDrive folder (the same as you) on Windows 11
The .exe is visible.
Just out of curiosity I have googled a bit to look for a solution (assumng it helps to solve the problem):
Hello Luca,
I finally tested Shine Stacker with big stack of 16 bit TIFF (this one: 23,6 gb, 170 images in total).
For instance the stack with the wasp of my previous messages.
Everything works fine in that on my usual laptop Pc (Windows 11) the memory (32 gb) remains around 40-50% of use and the process is pretty fast (considering the size of this stack…).
In short with a Z6-III I shot all pictures as RAWs.
Afterwards, I batch converted them with RawTherapee (JPEG 100% quality plus Tiff 16 bit)
Here is the comparison (small details, such as hairs etc are much better on the Tiff, as should be expected…):
BTW, a big advantage of Shine Stacker, compared to Picolay (freeware on Windows) is that Picoaly can not save the final image, resulting from the stack, as Tiff. Therefore you are forced to save it is as Jpeg (Picolay can read Tiff stacks, though).
Thanks again for releasing your software
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Bingo!
That was it, thank you for your patience and detailed advice.
I’m not a programmer, I’m 91 years old, and in order not to get rusty I keep trying something, for my own pleasure, and sometimes I share the results with others.
Greetings
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Zbyma72age, thank you for trying Shine Stacker!
Let me know if you find any issue.
The core software is now rather stable.
I am fixing a number of minor issues now, next releases will be hopefully more and more stable.
Stay tuned for updates!
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