When stacking images of the moon, routinely people’s first comment is “the stacked image is less well defined than a single frame”. The advice then comes to use wavelets. I have done this myself and had good results but my question is, does wavelets only really work on a stacked image or could you simple import a single frame and use wavelets on that?
If you do need to use wavelets on a stacked image, would I have to stack in siril to use wavelets optimally or could I stack in DSS and then import the autosave.tiff in to Siril to perform wavelets?
Wavelets and other detail reconstruction tools will work much better on stacked images because there is more information to use in stacked images. You cannot see it because of the 8 bit rendering of the screen, but in 16 or 32 bits of stacked result, there is a lot of data to use for wavelets.
You can use siril wavelets on images from other software, many people do that.
For moon/sun/planetary images, the focal length is in general very high and atmospheric turbulence makes the image incoherent: it is warped differently on each frame. In that case, not in the case of a full moon shot, it is better to process the images with multi-point stacking, something that siril does not currently do. The most praised software for this are AutoStakkert! 3 for the non-free world and PlanetarySystemStacker for the free world.
The image I was trying to sharpen was actually the Orion Nebula. I’ve managed to stack once in siril but the results were odd so I felt more comfortable continuing in DSS. I just didn’t know if there was metadata that was used or something to aid in the sharpening process that would be lost during the transition from one program to another.
I think I’ll try and practice stacking in siril a bit more now.