Registax tips

Having some free time in my hands I decided to remaster some old stacks originally stacked in Photoshop. At the time when the new RegiStax is out, stacking has become the easiest part of the whole process.

Some RegiStax tips:

1. Always shoot RAW ! Shooting jpeg's instead raw's makes your files 8bit and it shows later. Lower bith depth is prone to artefacts which can be largely avoided with 12bit raw images.
2. To save time don't try to load your raw files directly to RegiStax, convert them into 16bit tiffs. In RAW conversion keep the original colour space and bit depth.
3. Sometimes it's good to process your files in raw-converter before send them to stacking. This might add that extra tip it needs, but either way it all depends on the image. Adjust temperature, tone curve and exposure settings. Usually the latter two are hard to fix later.
   Basically you can change all the basic settings (blacks, brightness, contrast) but don't touch the saturation part - you might screw up the fine colour detail in halos. Don't over-do your images !
4. After loading your images into RegiStax choose a desired (1)alignbox size and (2)place it. The size of the alignment box depends on many things: the blocker's size, lens zoom etc. Sometimes you have to play with it to get the best results.
5. Hit (3)Align and then (4)Limit button, this will automatically take you to the next action, the Optimizer-page. After pressing Limit button you cannot start alignment again ! In case you haven't pushed the Limit it's possible to start alignment again if you are not happy with the results of alignment.
6. Before completing the final stack you can decide how many frames will be used by (5)clicking the upper arrow on Frames/Alignpoint parameter. For an example if your original frame count is 50 but you have selected 40 frames then this means that RegiStax would use 40 best frames out of total 50 for the alignbox. I recommend to use all available frames because only one alignpoint is used. The story might be different when several hundred frames are used.
7. Choose the frame count and hit (6)Create.
8. After optimization, RegiStax automatically stacks all the frames. After completing this task, it ends up on Wavelet-page. At this point it's possible to save your stack. Go back to Stack-page and hit Save image button.
9. Note: all the settings in RegiStax has been left to default, except the ones above.

19.2.2009 (12 frames)

08.5.2008 (11 frames)