How to Get Rid of.......

[leej6]

....airplane lights/tracks. I took a bunch of startrail images last evening and there was a lot more airplane activity than I expected. Is it advisable to try to clone out the light trails before using ImageStacker? I have about 60 images and something like 18 have airplane trails showing; some pretty small/short, others pretty long.

[maxlyons]

....airplane lights/tracks. I took a bunch of startrail images last evening and there was a lot more airplane activity than I expected. Is it advisable to try to clone out the light trails before using ImageStacker? I have about 60 images and something like 18 have airplane trails showing; some pretty small/short, others pretty long.

You can do it before or after stacking. After-stacking is less work, but before-stacking may produce better results, particularly if you "erase" the airplane trails (i.e. overwrite with black pixels) and use the "brighten" blending mode.

Max

[leej6]

Thanks...I choose to remove the airplane 'tracks' prior to stacking. I got a nice result in Image Stacker after a few tries. I saved the stacked image as a TIFF, then tried to clean things up in Star Tracer. I notice that the TIFF image doesn't display properly in Windows...sort of greyed out with lots of vertical lines, and that is what I get when I try to open the stacked image in Star Tracer. The image opens OK in Photoshop. I can convert the image to a JPEG and things work fine in Star Tracer. Any idea what I did wrong with the TIFF?
Thanks

[dsjtecserv]

That sounds like what I get with a TuFuse image viewed in FastStone. It is related to the presence of an alpha channel, which apparently FastStone can't handle. Open the image in Photoshop, delete the alpha channel, and resave; see if that works.

I don't have that problem in Windows Explorer, probably because I downloaded some codecs from the FastPictureViewer website.

Dave

[leej6]

Thanks - that did it for me.