Camera RAW Work-Around and Registax Access Violation Fix

Whew! Who would have thought my workflow would have to totally change just to take moon photos with my T5i instead of the Rebel XT. I started doing everything normally, opening the RAW files in Adobe Camera RAW to crop them into smaller TIF files before loading them into Registax to align, stack, and wavelet into beautiful moon images.

My first road block was that Adobe Camera RAW for CS5 did not recognize my T5i (I guess the T5i came out after they stopped writing updates for CS5 maybe?). Anyway, I still haven't found a patch but I found a work-around...

1. Using iPhoto, I export the RAW files as TIF files
2. Using File > Scripts in Photoshop I load the TIF files as layers
3. Then I crop all the files at once because they're all layers on top of each other
4. Then I use Photoshop scripts again to save layers as files

I end up with some funky file names (moon_sm_0001_IMG_1672.tif.tif) because it names the files from the layers, and the layers have names that end in .tif, so I have a redundant .tif.tif. Not end of the world, I thought, and I saved copies with one less .tif as well.

When I try to load these files into Registax I get an access violation error:

Access violation at address 005F0AE3 in module 'RegiStax6.exe'. Read of address 5ED80010.

What the heck does that mean?? I tried looking it up and some forums suggest that perhaps the files are too big (with 18MP even my cropped TIF files are 5+ MB). One solution is to save them as BMP instead of TIF, but I didn't want to lose any image quality... I want my TIFs back!

I tried one more thing, I opened the files in Photoshop and saved each individually as TIF files again. This brought up some save options and I clicked on IBM PC instead of Mac. I have no idea what this does, but it was worth a try.

Save As > TIF > Byte Order: IBM PC

It worked! Registax now opens my 5+MB TIF files no problem, just like before! Now if I could just figure out why I'm getting some alignment shifts toward the edges, I'll be all set. Or maybe I just need to wait for a truly clear night so I'm not fighting clouds AND software at the same time.

Waning Gibbous: 15 frames stacked in Registax each at ISO 200, 300mm, f/11, 1/50 sec

The end result, with wavelets in Registax and a quick High Pass in Photoshop, I'd say it was worth it!