How to Get Noise-free Star Photos with Starry Landscape Stacker

After doing an astrophotography shoot and zooming in on the stars, and you may find digital noise spoiling the scene. Removal in Lightroom can result in less color in the cosmos, but using a piece of software called Starry Landscape Stacker software can make the final output much better.

In this 23-minute video tutorial by Lonely Speck, Starry Landscape Stacker is put to the test.

By taking multiple exposures of the night sky, it is possible for the software to track the stars (accounting for the rotation of the Earth) and determine what is and isn’t digital noise. This makes for much cleaner and higher quality star shots after removal.

The software will select every star it can find, creating a mask of them. It’s possible to adjust this mask by clicking on any stars that have been missed (or hot pixels that have been misinterpreted).

It’ll also select the entire area of sky. You can, once more, fine-tune this to ensure the foreground and sky are entirely separated.

Then just click to continue, and Starry Landscape Stacker will output a TIFF file of glorious stars, without drastically reduced noise. You can see a comparison here – the software’s output is on the left, compared with one of the original frames on the right: