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Photo Stacking - Improve Astrophotography for ANY PHONE or CAMERA // K&F Clear Night Review
Learn how to get better astrophotography images with any phone, DSLR or mirrorless camera using photo stacking and the K&F Clear Night Sky Filter. We will see how to capture the RAW images using Google Pixel 4a and my DSLR, how to edit the images and how to stack them. I will finally explain why the Google Pixel phones use this technique to get better images.
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
01:46 - First Test Shot
02:01 - What a Clear Night Filters?
04:11 - Capturing a photo stack with my DSLR
06:41 - Why Google Pixel phones use photo stacking?
07:30 - Capturing a photo stack with my Phone (Google Pixel 4a)
09:30 - Review Clear Night Filter images
12:30 - Stacking the images
17:05 - Review Photo Stacked images
20:13 - More examples!
20:40 - Conclusion
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 1:46 First Test Shot
- 2:01 What a Clear Night Filters?
- 4:11 Capturing a photo stack with my DSLR
- 6:41 Why Google Pixel phones use photo stacking?
- 7:30 Capturing a photo stack with my Phone (Google Pixel 4a)
- 9:30 Review Clear Night Filter images
- 12:30 Stacking the images
- 17:05 Review Photo Stacked images
- 20:13 More examples!
- 20:40 Conclusion
good evening everyone so for people that have been following the channel for a while you might recognize that i'm back at my cottage i'm actually here only for two nights and then going back home and then heading back to seattle but while i'm here i have a super nice starry night and i've been waiting for this moment for a few months so there's two things i want to test out so if you ever took a picture using the google pixel 4a or another phone from google using the astrophotography mode you probably realize that they take 15 shots of 16 seconds or 16 slots of 15 seconds i'm always mixed up but the point is that i use a technique which is called photo stacking so i wanted to test out if we could use the same technique and take some raw pictures using the google pixel 4 or even do it using the dslr and see if we can get some better results because this would mean that anybody would be able to use it and take some shots using their phones and they wouldn't have to have nestor photography mode to get these type of results the second i wanted to test that is actually that knf reached out a few weeks ago and asked me if i was interested to review anything on their website and i found these clear night filters so i want to test them out and see if they're any good and if they actually cut out the light pollution so let's get started with this right away for those of you who are new to this channel i'm luke brown alford and i'm photographing filmmaker on a journey to become better at this site so i'm gonna go take some test shots right away before there's any clouds or things like that that start coming in because i've been waiting for this night for so long it's been months i've been looking for a perfect night to take some pictures and then i'm going to talk about everything so how to take these shots using your phone or the dslr also what is a clear nice filter and why it is important what is photo stacking and how you can do it and how you can edit your shots so all of this is coming inside the video so this one is actually a pretty exciting one that i'm going to be sharing with you okay so let's get ready for the test first test shot here so i have my tripod right here and we're going to start with the dslr right here so we can test out the clear night filter in our first test shot so i'm just gonna put this on okay so now let's open up this box so okay so if we bring it right here we should have right inside of here okay that's actually pretty nice what's the brown protection case we have the protection case right on here i'm not sure if you can see but it's kind of a little bit purple so that's how it's gonna be blocking out the light coming from the cities so we're just going to screw it on right here and now we're ready to test it out so i'm going to take my first test shot [Music] okay so just got a few results of the clear knight filter and it seems to be working pretty well so if you look at the pictures we have right here so i have the one here without a clean silk filter and you can see that there's a lot of light in the top of the file of the picture but then if you look at the picture taken with the klingons filter you can see the dark parts of the top of the image are looking much better so i'm just gonna have to take much more shots my hands are starting to freeze so i'm gonna have to start filming this video and really concentrate on taking more shots to get a better idea but the idea with a cleanliness filter if you haven't understood up to now is actually just to make sure that you remove the light pollution inside of the sky it's not going to be a magic solution i already tested this out on my dji pocket too so i have a video where i talk about that one uh there was a filter from freewell but any of these filters is not actually to remove other light pollution it's not possible but it's to reduce it and make sure that the stars inside of the sky are a little bit crisper in these parts of the image usually where you lose some definition and not make the yellows and things like that inside of the picture as bright and as intense when you have a light dome on top of a city so this is actually really useful filter i think for people that are taking pictures not too far from a city because it can really actually help making the picture look a little better and a little cleaner it's around 100 so it's still a pretty expensive filter and also if you're wondering if it could work with your phone it probably can i think you could get the smaller version so i can have a 62 or 67 millimeter version and you could buy a clip-on filter for your phone and use it on your phone and i'll have that with me right now so you cannot test it out and let you know if it's good or not uh but it's definitely something possible if you wanted to take some even better pictures using your phone of the stars and then you're not too far from a city center or something like that or you have some light pollution okay so i finally have my settings that i like in a composition that i like using my dslr so for this we have our settings at 15 seconds f 2.8 aperture and we have the focus on manual so if you want to know all about these settings and why i chose them i have another video that goes in depth so definitely go check the link down down below or click one of the links that it's going to appear at the top here and then what is very important to be able to do photo stack is that we need to take multiple pictures of the exactly the same composition so for this you want to be using an intervalometer again if you're not sure how to enable it go see other of my videos because i have one that talks about how to do it using a dslr and i also have another one that talks about to do it with any cell phones so go check those out it's the same thing as if you're taking a time-lapse or something like that at night so it's the same idea but for this i'm actually gonna be going inside of my menu here and i have an option built into my camera so i'm gonna go enable that and start taking the pictures and we should see in a few minutes uh the results we're not gonna have the full photo stack but at least we're gonna have our 16 shots of 15 seconds each okay so i finished taking the 16 shots using my dslr so now we're gonna replace it with my google pixel 4 on the tripod and we're going to talk about why photo stacking is so important and why does google do that inside of desktop photography mode on the google pixel 4 and the other pixel phones so that's gonna be pretty interesting and also then i'm gonna also take some pictures using the raw files on my google pixel 4e so you can really see if that's gonna help it or not [Music] i started taking the shot on my google pixel 4 and if you ever wondered why you had to wait four minutes when taking a shot on the google pixel 4 using the astrophotography mode the reason is that they're doing photo stacking in the end so like the name says it's actually that we're going to be taking multiple pictures and then stacking them up one on top of the other it might not be fully intuitive while we're doing that but it's actually because when we're gonna align the star so the stars are actually moving around that's really important to understand in astrophotography and then when we're going to align them together we'll actually get some brighter stars because putting the stars on one on top the other because they're white it's going to make them brighter we're then also going to be able to reduce the noise because everything that is not a star so if it's not a white dot that is perfectly aligned with the other ones it's going to be actually completely disappeared what is very impressive actually with the google pixel 4 is not that they invented this technique they didn't invent this technique it's a technique that's been using for a super long time instead of astrophotographing what is very impressive is actually that the phone does everything for use it's actually a technique that is pretty hard to do if you do it manually because you have to align all the stars perfectly well then you have to remove the foreground and just represent once so the whole process is actually pretty complex using ai you're actually able to do it all on a device automatically for you so they detect what are the stars what is the foreground align the stars for you and all of this but we're going to see afterwards it's actually possible to do it by yourself so either using some raw images of the google pixel 4 or your phone any phone you're using or also using the pictures that we took with dslr so i'm really excited to see how this is going to turn out and if it's really worth the trouble of doing it by yourself or if it's just better to use the google pixel 4 because it's much easier using it okay so google pixel 4 finished taking the shot right here so we have it right nicely here so it's actually looking pretty good we can see the milky way we can see the stars and everything and it's looking good but now what i want to do is actually go in manual mode and take some raw pictures so for this we're going to go back inside of the menu we're going to open my favorite manual app for taking some pictures of the stars and this is going to be pro cam x right here so i have other videos that go more in depth about why i use profile mix so definitely go check those out if you want to know more about that so we're just going to come here we're going to make sure that our shutter speed is 15 seconds so uh 10 seconds actually so that's the longest we can go inside of this app the iso we're going to bring it up to 1600 i know we need to be pretty high here we're going to make sure right here oh so i guess that's the shooting mode right here that might be the reason we're not able to go over five seconds so we're just going to come out of here we're going to go inside of interval shots we're going to make repeat infinite so um we're just going to put go here actually unlimited so we're going to leave this on unlimited then we'll go back on the shutter speed hope we can go up to 10 seconds so yeah now we can go up to 10 seconds right here so we're good to go with this we're also just going to make sure here that we don't so we have a few second timer that's okay we're just going to make sure that we're focused to infinity so we're just gonna come on this side right here and focus is actually on auto so we're gonna make sure that here we're on the mountain which is for infinity and finally we come here in our settings just make sure that we have ra enable so raw is enabled right here so we're all good to go so now i'm simply going to press the button come back in four minutes so we have the count and started taking the first pictures right here so i'm just gonna watch come back in four minutes so that should be 16 shots one of us were back so but now we're gonna see if taking raw pictures is gonna make it any better when we stack them together afterwards manually i just realized it's over four minutes now it's actually already five minutes so i'm gonna go down stop taking some pictures using the phone then i'm gonna move around take a few other shots because clouds are already coming in that's so annoying the clouds are always around during fall we're back inside and i already edited all the shots but i want to start by talking about the results that we got using the natural night filter this is the one that only worked on my dslr but the results are pretty impressive and i'm definitely going to be wanting to buy an adapter to be able to put it on my google six pro to be able to take some even better shots at night so if you come inside of lightning here i've edited all the shots most of the edits are very simple here so if you look at this right here we're gonna see that i just do a few tweaks inside of the exposure and then i go on the mask and i've used a new option here to select the sky automatically and that's all i did instead of dated and i punched in and added some clarity so these are the edits and i've pasted the edits between the two images here so the one right here where we do not have the filter and then the picture here where we have the filter so when we look at the two results right here so i'm going to go in full screen so i can have a better view right here of the images we're going to see that without the filter we get a lot of light pollution in the background right here but then we look at the second picture here with the filter we see we get rid of a lot of that light pollution in the background so if you look at the second example right here we're gonna see that in the background here there's a lot of light pollution again and if we look at the picture with the filter we're gonna see that again it's much cleaner and i get rid of a lot of that light pollution in the background so i have a few more examples afterwards so again this is the one i think without the filter and then if we put the filter on again everything disappears all the light pollution and the bottom of the image here really disappears so if we toggle between the two here we can really see the difference between the two one thing that's gonna happen is that because it's blocking all of the yellow light inside of the sky it's actually going to add a little bit more pink and it's going to change the color temperature a little bit but it's not a huge deal here so i actually did a test a little bit later on that night by setting manually the color temperature to be sure that it stays the same and you can see here that again it does the same effect so it really helps even when we have the color temperature set manually it really helps and we can get pretty much the same colors in the end but it's gonna be a bit more blue a little bit darker in the overall because it's cutting all that yellow light inside of the image now if you look at other pictures here if you don't believe me and you think i've edited something or something like that to trick the results or actually look at two images here these are the raw original pictures i didn't do anything to them here we can look at the editing there's nothing applied inside of my edit and when we toggle between the two we're going to see again there's a pretty huge difference between the two so if you look at the second image here this is without the filter we're going to see that inside of the sky there's a lot of colors and just a little bit lighter and there's not as much separation between the stars but when we toggle on the filter and we have the filter here we can actually see that we see much better all the stars inside of the sky so overall it's really a filter i can recommend if you're using a dslr and you want to get some better pictures and i really want to get a smaller version so i can put it on my google pixel 6 and get some even better pictures using this so now that we've finished talking about this filter i want to talk about photo stacking and i think the results here again are very interesting interesting word that i got so if you go inside of my folder right here i'm going to select my pictures from the google pixel 4a and we're going to select the raw images here and we're going to see that in raw images i did it again it's fairly similar it did nothing too special inside of here but when we look at the raw pictures that are coming from the phone so these are the pictures i took using the pro cam x app they really don't look good i actually didn't take these uh using the google pixel 6 pro they were taken using my google pixel 4 but we can see that the picture really doesn't look good and normally i would never post a picture like this but i went here i did all the pictures using the same edit and then i went and exported them all right here in a tiff format so tip format it's going to actually get allowed to keep a little bit more of the quality inside of the image when we're going to stack them together you could export them as jpeg 2 it's not a big deal for this edit i'm using an app that is called here starry landscape stacker so if we go on the app store see here you're gonna see it's a paid app i'm using this it's a bit pricey i think it's forty dollars on the app store here so if we search for starring landscape stacker um it's a 40 app that's available on the app store on windows there's some free versions i'm going to put the links down in the description if you want to do it manually you can also have other apps you can do it instead of photoshop and things like that but it's a bit more complex and i'm not going to go all in all of these details inside of this video because it's much harder to be able to do it manually inside of photoshop or game or something like that but it's still possible so you can just search online on how to align your pictures manually and things like that and the same ideas are going to apply but if you come inside of here we're going to go here and select the images so it asks us right away which pictures we want to select so we're going to go inside of pixel here and i'm going to take my folder right here so i think i have pixel one i think i have 14 image so it's not quite 16 images but we're going to have this in idea and we're going to click on open right here and we're going to leave it processing here so first step here they're going to detect automatically all of our stars and we can see them moving in the background then we're going to click on the button right here that says find sky so we're going to find the sky and it's very important now to make just make sure that we have the right mask so everything that's blue is our sky so i'm simply going to come here and paint the top here to add more of the sky that's missing on the sides right here i'm also going to come at the bottom here make sure that i have quite a lot of the sky inside of here but overall it did a pretty good job at getting the sky it doesn't need to be perfect and then we're going to come on the side right here we're going to make sure that we have the ground so i'm just going to make it a little bit bigger here and i'm just going to remove some of the sky here because this is not this guy can then come back here make the brush a little bit smaller a little bit more of the sky right here and that's pretty good the next step and this is why this software is really worth the 40 dollars is you can simply click one button here and align and create a composite so this is going to analyze all our images align everything because when the stars were moving we were actually getting some different uh images in the end and they have to align all the stars and then also align the bottom part of the image right here so now we have our final result here so all we have to do is come and save our image i already saved the image a little bit earlier so i'm not gonna do it right now now if you wanted to do the same thing for our dslr images because i also took these images using my dslr we can simply come inside a file here click on open we're gonna load new images okay so we're gonna select all of these images right here we're gonna click open again same thing here they're gonna automatically detect the stars that are moving we're gonna click on find sky so here we see there's a little bit more of a problem detecting the sky right here so i'm actually going to go here make the brush much bigger and i'm simply going to paint in all the sky right here so this is really important to make sure that we have all the sky well define and then i'm going to simply come down here and make sure that in the ground here i remove what they thought it was the sky again we can simply click on align and compose it we're going to leave it do its thing and finally we're gonna be able to save the results right here okay so now i have the results of the images right here so i'm ready to compare them between the astrophotography mode from the pixel phone and our own version where we stacked our raw images from the phone ourselves so on the left right here we have our picture from the google pixel 4 using the astrophotography mode so overall it looks pretty good and you can see that the sky is actually a much brighter than ours our photo on the left is a photo stacked version of our image and we can see here that when we zoom inside of the google pixel phone one of the problems at the bottom of the image here there's a lot details that are lost inside of the trees where if we zoom inside about our image we're retaining all of these details inside of the bottom here it's a bit the same story if we go up here and you look at the stars so if i'm just going to zoom in a little bit more to the pixel image so this is about the same size of the stars we're going to see that the stars on our versions are much more detailed we might have a little bit more noise on our side but overall i don't think it's a huge problem and we're getting a much sharper image overall now you might think that you could only use one raw image uh without doing doing this photo stack technique but if you look at the original raw image here from the side we had to stack actually 16 of these fixtures or 14 of these image actually in our case to get the final result on the left here so photo stacking your images really helps remove all the noise and also make the full image much sharper in the end if you look at another example here we have the same thing so again the google pixel 4 a astrophotography mode did a pretty good job of getting the detail inside of the stars and also keeping some detail inside of the trees but again if you look at the trees here we're going to see that our version has much more detail inside of the trees and again if we look at the star same story here we're having more detail inside of the version that we photo stacked ourselves so if you were wondering if it's worth going through all this trouble of photo stacking your images and doing the whole process manually if you want to get a little bit better results and have a little bit more control on your pictures definitely it's also worth doing it on your dslr so here i have two pictures so on the left that's a single raw image from the dslr and on the right it's a photo stack i think of 10 pictures using the dslr and here we can really see when you look at the bottom of the image here so when we look at the water here we can see that there's a huge difference between the two so the photostack photo really shows here that stacking multiple pictures together allows to remove a lot of the noise and also get a better sharper and better looking image overall on the photo stack version again on both pictures here we have very a lot of detail inside of the stars but because there's less noise it just makes the whole stars look a little bit sharper in this version that we stacked so i think that this is a very cool experiment i did right here and i didn't really expect to see such a difference either using a clear nuts filter or photo stacking the images but i'm definitely going to be using both of these techniques in the future to get some better pictures of the stars because again both really help to get some better pictures and sharper and better looking stars inside of your images so i'm really looking forward to using this technique pretty soon in another video [Music] [Music] [Music] if you enjoyed this video please let me know by hitting the like button below and i've been getting a lot of questions about if i'm gonna be making a video on the astrophotography mode in the google 6 pro and the answer is yes so definitely subscribe to the channel if you want to learn more about that see you in the next one you
Video Links
- 🔗 Hi-Resolution Photos
- 🔗 K&F Clear Night Filter
- 🔗 Best Photo Stacking Software
- Night Timelapses
- Capturing the stars with the DJI Pocket 2
- Astrophotography basics
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- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
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What is this video about?
I've been wanting to test photo stacking for a while now, and I finally got the chance during a perfect starry night at my cottage. The technique is actually how Google's Pixel phones create those impressive astrophotography shots—and it turns out, you can do it yourself with any camera or phone.
In this video, I test two things: the K&F Clear Night Sky Filter and photo stacking with both my Google Pixel 4a and my Canon 6D Mark II. The Clear Night Filter is designed to cut through light pollution by blocking the yellowish glow from cities. It's not a magic cure, but the difference is noticeable. When I compare shots with and without the filter, the filtered images show a much darker, cleaner sky with the stars standing out more crisply. The downside is the cost—around $100—but if you're shooting astrophotography near a city, it's a real option to consider.
The more interesting part, though, is photo stacking. Here's why Google does it: when you take multiple 15-second exposures of the night sky, the stars naturally shift slightly across your images. When you stack and align these images, the stars (which are white points) get brighter when layered on top of each other, while noise and other artifacts tend to cancel out. The result is a sharper, cleaner final image.
I took 16 raw images with both my DSLR and my Pixel phone using an app called Pro Cam X. Then I used Starry Landscape Stacker ($40 on the App Store) to align and composite them. The software automatically detects stars, aligns them perfectly, and masks the sky from the foreground. The difference between a single raw image and a stacked version is dramatic—especially in reducing noise while retaining detail in both the stars and the landscape below.
When I compare my manually stacked Pixel images to Google's automatic astrophotography mode, both are impressive, but my stacked version actually retained more detail in the trees and landscape. It's surprising how much control and quality you can achieve by doing it yourself, even though Google's AI-powered approach is definitely faster and easier.
The takeaway: photo stacking is worth the effort if you want sharper, cleaner astrophotography. It works on any camera—phone or DSLR—and the software does the heavy lifting for you.