Zerene Alignment Troubles

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Neottia_bifolia
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2022 6:41 am
Location: Fairfax county, Virginia.
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Zerene Alignment Troubles

Post by Neottia_bifolia »

Hello all,

First post here! I'm getting into stacking and loving this world. Excited to be on this cool forum talking and connecting with y'all.

So here is what I'm having trouble with at the moment. I have a deeper stack of about 200 photos and I was retouching and it was going all great. Then I got a new computer (mac with new M1 chip, using Rosetta to run Zerene) and transferred all the files over. I brought in the slabs, stacks, and individual photo TIFs (didn't save project, but just individual files as I'm not sure how saving a project works- another question!) I used a trick I believe Rik had written online to make a retouched input file into an output file by making the brush huge and just retouching the whole retouched photo over another random stack I made.

I aligned all and have re-clicked align all a few times and it seems like the program doesn't do anything and everything is already aligned. But when I go to use a source image or slab (which is often significantly more zoomed out because of the depth of the stack), it's aligned way off from the retouched DMAP because it is more zoomed out. So when I go to retouch it's grabbing from a different part of the photo. Even the slabs that I was using before are a tiny bit off (like a few pixels) which I may just not have noticed before, but it messes with the retouching on the re-loaded project on the new computer. I'm guessing 'align' doesn't mean what I thought it meant and maybe the images are centered on the same point but some are still more zoomed out? I tried to include a screenshot but it's telling me the image is too big even though it's less than 1 MB?

rjlittlefield
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Location: Richland, Washington State, USA
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Re: Zerene Alignment Troubles

Post by rjlittlefield »

Neottia_bifolia, welcome aboard!

I'm the fellow who wrote Zerene Stacker.

Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that you re-loaded all your original source files, plus the slabs, plus the saved retouched image, then after all that, did the Stack > Align All Frames. In general that will not do what you want, because it results in changing the alignment of the slabs and retouched image from how they were in the original project.

The proper way to handle this situation is to load your various images in several steps:
1. Start a new project.
2. Load all your original source images.
3. Be sure that all Options > Alignment settings are the same as when you originally processed the stack.
4. Do a Stack > Align All Frames. (After this is done, the source frames are now adjusted the same as they were the first time.)
5. At Options > Preferences > Preprocessing, place a checkmark on "Add files to existing project as already aligned".
6. Load your slab outputs and previously retouched image. Because of the checkmark on "already aligned", these will get loaded with the same adjustments they had when they got created.

After loading the images in this way, all the images should be aligned the same way they were in the old project.

About saving a project, I suggest to read the descriptions at https://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacker/docs/howtouseit#saving_work_in_a_project and https://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacker/docs/faqlist#what_exactly_is_a_project . If you still have questions, then ask again.

About uploading images to the forum, the limits are 1024 pixels on the longest side, and file size no bigger than 300 KB (kilobytes). In Photoshop, a good approach is to use File > Export > "Save for Web (Legacy)". That method provides a good estimate of file size based on compression level, and it also automatically omits some metadata that could otherwise increase the file length without adding value.

I hope this helps!

--Rik

Neottia_bifolia
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2022 6:41 am
Location: Fairfax county, Virginia.
Contact:

Re: Zerene Alignment Troubles

Post by Neottia_bifolia »

Hey Rik!

Thanks so much for your detailed response. And sorry for my very late one, I will probably be a somewhat intermittent user and when your instructions worked I got sucked into getting back to the project! So yes your instructions did the trick and now I think I understand how alignment works a little more and why what I did messed things up. The photo is a beautiful little Bulbophyllum lindleyanum orchid flower so I look forward to posting it when I'm all finished!

Speaking of which, for photos- is there a way to link to a higher quality image or is that how everyone uploads their photography? I just feel like the little details of the photo are so important! Maybe I'm overestimating the quality effects of that compression.

Thanks!

rjlittlefield
Site Admin
Posts: 23564
Joined: Tue Aug 01, 2006 8:34 am
Location: Richland, Washington State, USA
Contact:

Re: Zerene Alignment Troubles

Post by rjlittlefield »

Excellent -- I'm glad to hear you have the alignment problem solved.

About image size for posting...

The size limits for posting are enforced only for images that are uploaded to the forum itself.

Images that are hosted other places, typically on Flickr, can be displayed inside forum posts by putting the URL of a JPEG file between [img] and [/img] tags. With this style, size limits are encouraged to minimize page load times, but are not enforced. Large images used to mess up the page format, but that no longer happens since we upgraded the forum to phpBB 3.

One common approach is to display a smaller version of an image inline, either within [img] tags or as an attachment, and link to a larger version at some other site such as Flickr.

--Rik

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