Better Photos Using Image Stacking With GIMP (Updated Tutorial) - Reduce Image Noise - Jody Bruchon
Channel: Jody Bruchon
Date: 22/04/2024

Part of my GIMP Tutorial Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7RxkOabi7GxfVowPXxdOyhtdiYW-pVlL

Image stacking tutorials for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom have been around for years, but they cost money! Gimp is a free image editor and with the help of a free plugin you can do the same image stacking technique without buying Photoshop.

Even a really cheap camera can take good photos if you can stick it on a tripod and combine several shots into one. In this video, I'll show you how to take a bunch of noisy videos with weak detail and use Gimp with G'Mic-Qt to stack them into one high-quality photo. Get G'Mic-Qt here: https://gmic.eu/download.shtml

Update: this works with Gimp 2.10 as well; make sure you download the correct version of G'Mic for Gimp 2.10! You can also "cheaply" stack images (though the quality will be somewhat lower) by loading all the photos as layers and changing all of the layers to 50 percent opacity except for the bottom layer. This will have the effect of averaging the pixels rather than taking a median which is an inferior method of stacking but works in any image editor with layers and per-layer opacity.

A step list was requested by kelsi6273, so here it is:

0. (Prerequisite) Take several identical photos of the exact same thing with the camera on a tripod using full manual settings.
1. Install Gimp 2.8 and G'Mic-Qt and open Gimp.
2. Open the first image in Gimp from a file explorer window.
3. Select all other identical images (excluding the one you opened) and drag and drop them all into the Layers Panel. If it's difficult for you to select them all, drag them one by one.
4. Go to the Filters menu - G'Mic-Qt...
5. In the list of filters, expand the "Layers" category and select the "Blend [median]" filter.
6. Make sure "Input/Output" drop-down boxes are set to "all visible" and "new active layer(s)" (the other two don't matter much.)
7. A new layer will be created with the stacked result of all the images you've loaded combined. You're done!
8. If you get an out-of-memory error, try stacking less layers at once, then stacking the resulting stacked layers into a final stacked layer.

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