# Image alignment (registration) software



## Stosh (Nov 23, 2009)

I've been experimenting in time lapse photography, and my latest raw product is a sequence where I shot 1 pic at the same time every day for about 3/4 of a year.  My camera box is "fixed" to my house, but after looking at my images, there is considerable seemingly random movement that can happen as quickly as a few days.  I was hoping to assemble my images into a video, but the registration is so bad it gives you a major headache to watch it.

Is there any reasonably priced image registration software that anyone's familiar with?  Yes, my photo editing program can align them manually, but we're talking about 260+ pics here.  I was hoping to avoid that.

Alternatively, does anyone know if either of the 2 free astronomy programs (Registax or Iris) is capable of aligning only, then saving the sequence of images.  With my little Registax experience, I think it can only align to stack, not align to re-save.  I have zero experience with Iris.


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## Stosh (Nov 24, 2009)

Nobody has any experience with this?????


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## Garbz (Nov 25, 2009)

I have been pondering about this, but really the only time people expect something to move is with star trails. Everything else is an engineering problem (lack of tripod  )

I had a look around a few of my image stacking programs but none of them seem to let me export before the merge. Similarly I know photoshop has alignment algorithms since it uses them for panoramas and HDRs, but it doesn't look like that feature is available anywhere in the interface. If it is, your best option may be to write an action to automate it.


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## Stosh (Nov 25, 2009)

Yeah, I thought about writing some kind of script to do it, but my photo editor isn't good enough at finding the alignment unless you're within 10-15 pixels.  I don't know why, but some of my images are off by 100 pixels.  The camera box is bolted to my house!  99% of the movement is vertical.  I wonder if ground water has something to do it.

Anyway, I remember a ways back that people were making movies of astronomy related stuff like comets moving through the sky, or variable stars changing brightness.  I wonder how all of that was aligned without stacking?  Anyway, thanks for looking in to what you have.  I figured most of the stacking programs would have no reason to export before stacking.  I did think I had a chance with HDR software.  It would also need to align images before combining and I just thought maybe I had a chance with that.


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