Stacking is crazy!

morepix wrote:

I'm glad to see that you're so excited about this technique. I'm having a bit of trouble getting excited about it myself.

I understand the excitement is about noise reduction. I just did a comparative test in low light with elevated ISO (1600, 1/50 sec), and compared it with the same scene photographed at lower ISO (200, 1/6 sec). Both were hand-held. Here are my conclusions so far:

1. Despite the pretty good job of auto alignment that Photoshop does, you have to hold the camera pretty steady during the burst of exposures
2. The image stacking in Photoshop, though some of it might be accomplished with an Action, is pretty tedious
3. You end up with a lot of trash images to clean up (11 raw, 11 JPG)
   
4. The ISO 200 result is both cleaner and sharper

For these reasons, I don't expect so far to find use for this technique. But I'm interested to learn what I'm missing: in what situations do you think you might use it?

--
David
www.pbase.com/morepix