Stephen Bay's Photography Blog

Star Stacking With Kandao Raw+

I recently tried out a new software program for star stacking called Kandao Raw+. Up to this point I had been using Starry Landscape Stacker which has worked very well so I was a bit skeptical as to whether Kandao Raw+ could actually bring anything new to the table. But I was pleasantly surprised and the short summary is that Kandao Raw+ works extremely well and even handles problematic cases which cause difficulty for programs like Starry Landscape Stacker and Sequator.

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Adobe Super Resolution and Topaz Gigapixel Ai

Adobe just released a new update to Camera Raw with a feature they call Super Resolution (this should be available in Lightroom soon). The main point of this update is to use AI and machine learning techniques to learn how to upscale an image to a higher resolution. In traditional upscaling methods, one basically stretches the image to cover more pixels and it works much like curve fitting in algebra (i.e. interpolation). The difference with AI methods is that they can actually manufacture details and textures and not just scale what exists.

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How to Avoid Halos in Lightroom

Lightroom has a great set of tools for editing your images. However, if you are not careful while processing many of the adjustments can create halos in your images. These halos can occur in any image but are more likely to be an issue in pictures which have hard edges set against an area of smooth tones. For example, a mountain or a building set against a bright sky is an ideal situation for generating halos.

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Blend If vs Luminosity Masks

Blend if and luminosity masks are two different methods in Photoshop for determining how a layer is combined with those beneath it. They are both similar in that they use the brightness values of the image pixels to perform a weighted average between the current and underlying layers. Blend if and luminosity masks are almost interchangeable and can often be used to obtain the same end result. For example, you could use both methods to limit a warming color adjustment to the highlights of an image.

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Some Experiments With Topaz Sharpen AI

Recently I’ve been trying programs like Topaz AI to correct some issues in photos that I that I messed up technically. Topaz and the other AI based filters (E.g. Luminar AI, Photoshop Neural filters) essentially work by artificially generating textures and image detail so in theory there’s no limit to how much they can sharpen, remove noise, or magnify the existing detail in a photo. But in practice, I find that sometimes it’s like magic and other times it produces garbage.

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