Noise reduction using image stacking

[erotavlas]

Hello,
I take a lot of landscape shots at night, and am into astrophotography. To reduce noise I'm trying to stack multiple images. I know this can be done in Photoshop, but I wanted to know if it can be done in the latest version of Pantshop pro.

Basically I need to take multiple images, the images contain stars, so they move in the sky. I need to align the images somehow and then blend them according to this instruction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rydg7JGTAbw

Is this possible? The key is the alignment, and I could not get a definitive answer as to whether or not Painshop can auto align layers.

[LeviFiction]

PaintShop Pro cannot auto-align layers. There are "alignment" options but they refer to aligning edges not content.

PaintShop Pro includes a separate tool called PhotoBlend that does include layer alignment functionality, but it does not export the individual layers it only exports a merged copy of all of the layers. So it's not useful for what you're wanting to do.

There are free tools, though I don't know what they are off hand, that can do this. And I believe the GIMP may have a plugin for image alignment (called Image Registration).

But in PSP you have to do it manually.

[photodrawken]

I started watching that video and quickly bailed out of it.

Good grief! If you shoot RAW images, make things easy on yourself by simply using the free HDRMerge utility:
https://github.com/jcelaya/hdrmerge

PaintShopPro cannot open the resulting HDR DNG image, so you'll have to open the image in RawTherapee and export it as a TIF image.

[erotavlas]

PaintShop Pro cannot auto-align layers. There are "alignment" options but they refer to aligning edges not content.

PaintShop Pro includes a separate tool called PhotoBlend that does include layer alignment functionality, but it does not export the individual layers it only exports a merged copy of all of the layers. So it's not useful for what you're wanting to do.

There are free tools, though I don't know what they are off hand, that can do this. And I believe the GIMP may have a plugin for image alignment (called Image Registration).

But in PSP you have to do it manually.

Ok that's fine I'll probably stick with the free tool I'm already using called Deep Sky Stacker, I was curious to compare the result of the stacking using various programs.

However assuming you pre-aligned the images already, once imported as layers in Paint Shop, can you do the same blending to reduce noise?

[LeviFiction]

I had not watched the video before now, but the answer is no. PaintShop Pro can do a lot but the more specialized tools, we don't have.