Keith's Image Stacker

Legal Stuff: The images used in the tutorials, in this documentation, and in the About Box of the program are the property of Keith Wiley. I reserve all rights on these images and they may not be reproduced or manipulated except as part of this tutorial or as part of a distribution of this entire software package. Thank you for respecting the hard work I have put into capturing these images.

Keith's Image Stacker is an image processing utility that provides you with many sophisticated image enhancement tools, including:

Averaging and/or summing (collectively known as "stacking")
Unsharp-masking
Laplacian sharpening (which is also known by the more general term wavelet sharpening, although there are actually many wavelet-based image-sharpening algorithms, of which Laplacian sharpening is only one)
Level adjustment
Gaussian blur
Wavelet shrinkage denoising
Fourier Transform editing (for removal of cyclic or periodic artifacts such as electrical interference patterns)
Star deringing and debloating

The primary purpose of this program is to stack images however. This program is primarily oriented toward astrophotographers, who often take numerous shots of an object and then want to stack the shots to get a single final image that is superior to the original shots. In recent years webcams and video cameras have become popular tools for astrophotography, and as such, are capable of capturing hundreds of individual images of an object in a given night. The basic approach to processing this data is to average the set of images on a per-pixel basis. By doing so, the signal-to-noise ratio of the stacked image is greater than each of the individual images by a factor of the square root of the number of images stacked.

This documentation assumes you are an astrophotographer and is written as such. If you are not and you wish to use the program to stack nonastrophotos (or to use the various other tools for image processing), that's fine. Simply follow the documentation along and figure out how to use the program. There are sample images provided in the documentation directory which you can use as a tutorial if you wish. I offer instructions on each of the two common methods of astrophotography, as well as a command reference page. Take your pick:

Dynamic Range and 32-bit to 8-bit Image Projection (it is strongly recommended that you read this first)
Planetary Imaging
Deep Sky Imaging
Command Reference

This program highly affordable shareware. For the endless hours of work I have put into creating this utility I ask that you please pay me $10.00, which automatically registers you for all future versions. In return I will place you on an extremely infrequent mailing list to be directly notified of version updates when they occur. I can be paid in two ways. One, by paypal to the account kwiley@cs.unm.edu (I cannot accept paypal credit card payments however, only bank transfers, which are free incidently), or two, by personal check or cash. Since my mailing address may change from time to time, I will not put it here. Instead, email me if you are interested in paying by that method.

Thank you very much.

Keith Wiley
040401
kwiley@cs.unm.edu
http://www.unm.edu/~kwiley