Unusual tasks with images – stacking pictures

2 Comments

stack_rStacking images always has been a favorite topic for astro or timelapse photographers. In most cases computational photography opens complete new dimension to taking pictures and acquiring awesome results. There are countless commercial software packages with some advantages or limitations. My mind about simple tasks has always been on DIY side – I think it is not worth purchasing one when you can make it by yourself. Also besides building working tool you have a chance of learning something new.

Blending modes

There are two mostly used modes of stacking:

  • Averaging – is good for getting rid of sensor noise and taking simulated long exposure photos
  • Brighten – is used to get persistent view of moving bright object (for example star trails)
  • Stack – sum all pixels (good to make picture lighter)

Others are not so popular, but also worth mentioning:

  • Darken – opposite to brighten
  • Stack / Average mix

Examples

Different image set’s require different stacking modes. Result will probably require additional post processing. Below are few sample pictures made with Python script(s) provided below. To illustrate some examples I will be using images captured by stationary time-lapse cameras.

Brighten

Brighten picture is perfect algorithm to make  star trails visible.

Tip: by capturing individual frames don’t not to leave gaps between frames and use long exposure. Image on the right was combined from about 2500 frames.

star_r

Brightest pixel averaging example of star trails

Average

Usually this mode is used to reduce image random noise. Naturally it averages everything, so there are rare cases when it is being used as noise reduction algorithm. But if light conditions are bad and ISO is boosted there are some scenes (landscape, forensic, etc) when it might be helpful.

noise2

Image noise cleaning by averaging frames

Also averaging feature comes handy when you wish to clean picture from random objects like pedestrians or cars.

Making empty city by averaging frames

Sum

You wound not believe how much information can be revealed from dark areas.

sum_r

Summing pixels to reveal black areas

This example is received from 43 DSLR frames. Animation is made by altering  ration for each frame and stacking them into animated gif.

2015-07-05-21-20-07.768482

Original frame from camera

stack4

brighness_divide effect on final result. Distorted sky is due to limitation of GIF file format – it can’t provide enough halftones.

Code

Python scripts use standard modules (fnmatch, numpy, PIL, tqdm) that can be installed with pip – for example:

pip install tqdm
screenshot

Script provides nice progress bar with remaining time estimation

Comments ( 2 )

  1. grosseruser
    Hi, in img_sum.py change clipping the color. Better is scaling like this: [code] # brute force clipping - slow height, width, colors = arr.shape for w in trange(width, desc = "Scaling "): for h in range(height): a, b, c = arr[h, w] # .max() is slow!!! f = a if b > f: f = b if c > f: f = c if f > 255: f = 255.0 / f arr[h, w] = a * f, b * f, c * f # arr[h, w] *= f is slow!!! [/code]
    • saulius
      Thank you for suggestion!

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