Darks and Deepskystacker

[markmac99]

I mostly use DSS to stack my images.
I used the darks and flats feature of Sharpcap Pro to create averaged dark and flat files.
However they're not properly compensating for amp glow when used in DSS.
In fact, the more images i add to my stack ,the worse the amp glow gets.

If i manually create darks "the old way" and let DSS create a "master dark" from them, all is fine.

Am I misusing the darks and flats capability of Sharpcap?
thanks

[admin]

Hi,

My suggestion would always be to perform all of the processing in the same application – that is if you are going to processing DSS, capture individual dark and flat frames and let it handle creating the master dark, the master flat and correcting. If you are going to live stack in SharpCap then use the capture dark/capture flat functionality in SharpCap to create your master darks and flats.

The reason for this advice is to ensure that all of the components of the final image are processed in a consistent manner. For instance SharpCap creates master dark and master flat files that can have a higher bit depth and the image files (16 versus 12 is typical). SharpCap is set up to deal with this, but potentially it could confuse DSS. Similarly DSS pays attention to the exposure times recorded in the image files it processes – if the exposure time in the master dark is longer than the image files, DSS may incorrectly try to compensate for this.

Note that I am not saying that it's impossible to make it work the other way – I'm sure plenty of people have found the right combinations of settings to make it all work properly, it's just that an inconsistent approach gives you extra opportunities for the process to go wrong.

Cheers, Robin

[markmac99]

Makes sense, thanks Robin