A simple set of controls on the right of the screen opens up options for changing the blending mode and adjusting the gap-filling threshold and intensity amount.
After dragging across your photos press the ‘Start Processing’ button and StarStaX will do its thing. After launching the program there’s a window for dragging and dropping photos on the left-hand side of the screen labeled ‘Drop Images Here’. StarStaX’s interface couldn’t be simpler. It’s also useful for blending together light painting photography, reducing noise in images (especially useful for astrophotography where image noise is an issue), and can be used to artificially boost exposure in images by stacking several images together. However, it also has a comet mode to blend images together and make stars look like shooting comets with fading tails. It has an automatic gap-filling mode (for those times the camera delays between exposures) which works well for consecutive shots that only have a small gap between star positions, but we found that if there’s any significant delay StarStaX couldn’t fill the gap adequately. It gives users the option to change the blending modes of images including options like lighten, darken, average and more, so that photographs can be more precisely controlled. Sure, StarStaX will composite several photos together into one image, but it does so much more than that as well. (Image credit: Jason Parnell-Brookes) (opens in new tab) StarStaX offers a range of blending modes for making composite images and even has a gap-filling feature for star trails.