Looks great, doesn’t it? You don’t even need to make the picture full-size to see the differences. Like a completely different camera. And here’s the clue: I just used the JPG-files to improve the image quality. No raw-files, no darktable. So it could be improved even further.
But there is a downside. The technique required 32 pictures of the same object and the quality improves via square root → that means further improvements need much larger amounts of pictures. So I thought the other way around: what is the minimum amount of pictures where I don’t see any improvement when just adding one single further image? The answer was 7, so I took 8 pictures to create this:
You still see a quality difference to 32 images, but you don’t see difference between 8 or 9 images. You need many more to make the improvements visible.
If you want to do it by yourself:
Take all the images (amount depending on your quality needs), put them all into GIMP or similar software and blend them together. The best quality I got with GIMP doing it this way: Opacity of the images, start from bottom is 100%/n. It looks like this:
Image 4 = 25%
Image 3 = 33.3%
Image 2 = 50%
Image 1 = 100%
I also could use the sharpen-filter since my focus was not perfect on these photos.
This technique also works with little movements. It could even improve the de-noising, but it also would require some adjustments work on image manipulators, because we want to de-noise, not to blur images. An automatic tool in Millipixels (or similar) in future would be awesome.
Since nobody else answered:
I’m no expert on photography (not even close) and do not know much about, except that there is a huge amount of knowledge required to make professional-like photos. My knowledge is more about computer graphics (also no expert). Many professional photographers should have great tools for all kind of things, not just astro-photography.
I read about that there is an iOS-app in development that does de-noising with up to 32 images without AI-stuff and at this point I had the idea to try it out without reading further. So the method here is my own idea and maybe not even the most efficient, but still good enough I guess. There was just a comparison photo from that other project where the quality improved a bit better than mine. I think it’s partly because they moved the camera with their hands, which reduces the artefacts that come from dirt on protection glass and maybe some other algorithms to improve the image. We could use dos GlowUp for example to do similar things and who know what else.
But still, it’s great to know that we can have the ability to make better photos in the dark without the need for better cameras.
Nokia 9 did that in hardware to great effect. The problem here is that your scene must be static and thus the technique is next to useless most of the time. You could also try to experiment with lower ISO and longer exposure time.
I cannot since there is no such function in Millipixels yet (and I’m no coder). And longer exposure-time also requires static scenes. Our camera is just not made for dark parties where you want to make a photo of your friends while they’re dancing etc. So better plus one use-case than none.
I mean, you also can buy additional tools like in the Sony QX10 Thread or USB-Cameras or a fully dedicated camera, but than we also can ask “why not removing the camera entirely, you can buy additional equipment”?!
