Star trails, do you keep the source images

maninsuitcase

maninsuitcase

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Chris
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I have just done my first star trail. Happily enough this wasn't a complete disaster. Now it's done I have a tiff of the final output from PS and I am wondering if there's much point keeping the 139 source images? I highly doubt I will do much more PP wise, all I did was use an action to stack then threw down some curves.

This was the final shot:

Star trail by themaninthesuitcase, on Flickr

Not hugely interesting but the start of the learning curve.
 
I do and it's not about the PP, you can sort that from the tif. For me it's about flexibility- keep the original files and you can recreate your image with startrails of different lengths, or create a stop motion of the stars moving through the sky
 
I save every shot I ever take, even the duff ones. I archive everything on two external hard drives, with copies of the RAW and JPEG's on each drive. Memory is so cheap nowadays, why not?
 
The thing is memory isn't cheap. To you it may be but to me I can probably think of a few dozen things I should spend ~£50 on before a bigger hard disc!

I had a look and it was about 400MB for the 139 jpg images, normally I use RAW but the idea of converting 100-150 images to jpg and the 6MB per file size increase didn't appeal. While not a big deal for 1 trail if I do a few it will add up PDQ.

I'm currently OK for space so will keep them but once I start running low I guess it's a prime candidate for that 1st cut.
 
If at some future point you decide that image would look better without the aeroplane / satellite trails, then it's trivial so fix with the original images or horrendous to fix with the stacked image.
Simply edit the images with the unwanted streaks (a few for each aeroplane trail) and paint black over the trail. Don't have to be too careful as it won't show when re-stacked.

I do delete my originals - but only after I've lived with the final image for a while in case I want to go back and have another go.
And as mentioned earlier - making a movie from the images is pretty cool!
 
DuncanDisorderly said:
If at some future point you decide that image would look better without the aeroplane / satellite trails, then it's trivial so fix with the original images or horrendous to fix with the stacked image.
Simply edit the images with the unwanted streaks (a few for each aeroplane trail) and paint black over the trail. Don't have to be too careful as it won't show when re-stacked.

I do delete my originals - but only after I've lived with the final image for a while in case I want to go back and have another go.
And as mentioned earlier - making a movie from the images is pretty cool!
Click to expand...

I didn't think about removing planes, not an issue really on this as it was a 1st experiment so I don't have to learn in a hurry when I want to do one in a nicer location than my garden. Is this something I can do in Lightroom or am I better doing it in PS before I stack? I am guessing PS will be far easier?

I did like the idea of doing a video when I have seen them before but I haven't a clue how to do it, and my google-fu is failing only finding videos of how to make a star trail, not a video of a trail.

The site I used for the trail tutorial has a video and a very vague "I used quicktime pro" in the comments but not much more than that.
 
Ah Ha! That's my favourite star trails tutorial and the one I always point people at.
If you are a Windows Users then the tutorial recommends using some free software to do the stacking - one of the things this software also does is produce a movie file from your stacked images.
Works a treat!
 
I keep all mine too, you never know when you might need them again.
 
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