Different colour space in saved images from stack

[PEM1]

I have an ZWO ASI294MC Pro colour camera and have been saving stacked images with the aim restacking them later, while playing with different parameters. The colour space was set to RAW16 during capture, and the saved live stack (as a 16 bit TIF) was in colour. However, when I open the rawframe TIF images with the Folder Monitor Camera, the only option is MONO16. When I opened an individual image in Photoshop, it is greyscale. I have also been using an L-Enhance Optolong filter.

Any suggestions of where I am going wrong?

Paul

[admin]

Hi Paul,

that sounds right - the raw frames are still exactly as they come from the camera sensor, which means the colour information is encoded in the different values for adjacent red, green and blue pixels. However, as part of the stacking process it is necessary to convert that RAW data to full colour inside SharpCap (to allow alignment), so the stacked images are saved in full colour.

See this thread for info on how to 'debayer' the RAW images to see the colour : viewtopic.php?t=254

cheers,

Robin

[PEM1]

Thanks! The stacking worked fine when I used PIPP to debayer. But I also redid the stack using the original RAW frames with "Debayer Preview" set to RGGB and the saved stack was in colour. The results for the two methods looked similar - is there an advantage of one way or the other?

Paul

[admin]

Hi Paul,

in PIPP you can choose a more sophisticated debayer algorithm (may well be slower, but may give marginally better results). SharpCap uses a bilinear debayer algorithm, which is reasonable quality and nice and quick. Other than that, not much.

cheers,

Robin