Why does nobody talk about how stacked JPEGs ruin deep space nebula shots

I spent 6 months stacking my Orion Nebula photos as JPEGs because that's what every tutorial on YouTube shows. Saved them as TIFFs one night on a whim after reading some old forum post from like 2007. The difference is insane. All that extra data in the dark areas just appears. My stacked TIFF showed way more of the Horsehead Nebula's dust lanes than any JPEG stack ever did. Took me 30 minutes to reprocess one night and the result was way better than all those months of JPEG work. Has anyone else noticed how much detail you lose with compressed formats in stacking?

3 comments

3 Comments

lisaf382d ago

Were you saving the JPEGs at maximum quality or letting compression eat the detail?

oliver_morgan2d ago

Did you save it as a PNG instead? I learned that one the hard way too.

lewis.troy2d ago

Exactly, @lisaf38 mentioned the quality setting thing too, and thats where a lot of people mess up. You can save a JPEG at 100% quality and it'll look fine, but most programs default to like 80-90% and it chews up all the fine lines. PNG is definitely the safer bet if you want zero loss, even if the file is huge.