Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: Brian Hirschfeld on January 26, 2012, 09:41:54 pm

Title: StarTracer software, is there anything like it for mac?
Post by: Brian Hirschfeld on January 26, 2012, 09:41:54 pm
I was reading about this program http://www.tawbaware.com/startracer.htm from a Flickr image post http://www.flickr.com/photos/fortphoto/6647761413/in/photostream and it seems to be a very interesting software technology, especially if you are shooting with medium format, where long exposure times (upwards of I believe, 2 minutes on my IQ180) will start to show significant image degradation because of sensor heat etc etc, this software seems to get the job done, but I am working on Mac's. Does anyone know of a similar tool that can do this on mac? thanks,
Title: Re: StarTracer software, is there anything like it for mac?
Post by: bill t. on January 27, 2012, 07:08:23 pm
Since nobody is answering I'll just mention that there are at least a few "PC Emulator" packages that let you run PC software on Macs.  I'll let others recommend a good one.

Max writes some very cool software.  I have used his Tufuse and Image Stacker and PTAssembler programs with great results.
Title: Re: StarTracer software, is there anything like it for mac?
Post by: Brian Hirschfeld on January 27, 2012, 07:18:45 pm
Quote from: bill t. on January 27, 2012, 07:08:23 pm
Since nobody is answering I'll just mention that there are at least a few "PC Emulator" packages that let you run PC software on Macs.  I'll let others recommend a good one.

Max writes some very cool software.  I have used his Tufuse and Image Stacker and PTAssembler programs with great results.

Way to make me jealous, would love to see some examples...
Title: Re: StarTracer software, is there anything like it for mac?
Post by: bill t. on January 27, 2012, 07:41:48 pm
For instance Max's PTAssembler is a typical panoramic stitching program that also uniquely offers simply amazing local geometry corrections to solve a lot of perspective problems that can come out panoramic stitching...

http://www.tawbaware.com/projections.htm (http://www.tawbaware.com/projections.htm)

And back in the days of noisy, noisy sensors I made a lot of use of Image Stacker to smack down noise by averaging a lot of exposures of the same scene.  Here's a gallery of star trails that Max shot that way, note that with wide lenses the inter exposure star gaps don't show up.  Click on the green squares to see more images.  I've gotten away from that kind of stuff, but now all of sudden I'm thinking about it again.

http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/cgi-bin/image.pl?showFileName=ST_IMG_4979-IMG_4978b-IMG_4991-IMG_4990b_canal_star_trails.jpg&gallery=8 (http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/cgi-bin/image.pl?showFileName=ST_IMG_4979-IMG_4978b-IMG_4991-IMG_4990b_canal_star_trails.jpg&gallery=8)

Would love to try some panos and star shots with that IQ 180!  Post if you get something interesting.