Frame averaging is available in some cameras such as Olympus and Pentax. However, having this feature in PhotoLab would be much better, as you could have unlimited frames.
This feature is mostly used in astrophotography but is also useful for scientific, forensic, commercial, and still life photography.
Hello @Biosyn guess you are asking for something this:
Stacking for macro or astro is not simple matter for software to calculate. In general you won’t even use the same software for both although you theoretically could. Meaning there’s software better used to stack macros and other software better for astro.
I would like to see it integrated too, but then done properly. But that is a lot to do so I will not vote for this request - DxO has smaller more fundamental things to fix.
I use Helicon Focus for macro. Haven’t tried astro but I read there are better solutions than Helicon for that. A good integration would mean additionally offering features from all these different stacking tools inside PhotoLab.
What I am saying is: I think it’s too specialised and complex to be integrated.
I’m more interested in frame averaging, not focus stacking. As you said, there are dedicated applications for focus stacking.
Affinity Photo can handle astro stacks. Mind you, the only serious astro photo person I know uses dedicated astro photo software.
Yes, I understand - it’s about the approach of using multiple photos in multiple layers, which is required for both. I think it is more likely, that we will see simple layer blending and masking first - if at all.
It also does focus stacking, but not well enough for me to use with all images. For panorama stitching on the other hand, Affinity has not let me down so far.
When you have a Mac, you may try the app Burst Photo: https://burst.photo . You can find it also on the App Store.
It is an open-source and free app that offers motion-robust frame averaging of a burst of images in the RAW domain. It has implemented a simplified version of the Computational Photography pipeline of Google Pixel phones. The resulting RAW DNG should be compatible with PhotoLab, e.g. you can apply Deep Prime and lens corrections to the file and follow your typical workflow.
This is an example of an HDR scene captured with my Panasonic MFT camera. No additional denoising applied, only very strong lifting of shadows:
It can also be applied to a series of astro images (e.g. 12 x 10 s exposure) and deal with the motion of stars.
I will give that a try. Thank you very much for the suggestion!
