Auto-align fails to detect frame overlap with stars

I've moved this thread from 'Bugs' to 'Ideas' so that it can be upvoted.
Dave

Remember that Photoshop was very early with this and it's an old algorithm, way before AI became the buzzword. At that time it was necessary to eliminate random sensor noise, which stars for all practical purposes are.

But yes, I agree it's time to update the algorithm. Among all the, pardon me, silly and dumbing-down things AI is used for, this is one of the more sensible purposes. It's just that things which basically work, tend to get lower priority.

Hi, I need this feature. It is absolutelly inacceptable that Ps is not able to align images based on start. That's quite poor. As always, really disappointed with Adobe! Please implement this asap. I know it costs too much, so Adobe does not care at all about us astrophotographers. What is Adobe doing with all the money I have to pay every month???????

Hi Ian,

Photoshop is not good at aligning sky images. You should use Sequator (Windows, free) or Starry Landscape Stacker (MacOS, but pay). You could also use Siril (free, multiplatforms). 

If you have a terrestrian landscape in your image, StarryLandscapeStacker will do a very proper job to align the sky while preserving the landscape : Starry Landscape Stacker on the Mac App Store

If you only have a sky image, Siril will be the best option : Siril

For those who are using Windows, Sequator is equivalent to StarryLandscapeStacker, however it sometimes makes crap with the landscape, so I prefer to use Sequator just to align the sky part of the nightscape, then Photoshop to align the landscape, and work the two layers in Photoshop. For example :

Clear sky

Fred

Yes, this would be a feature request rather than a bug. I would assume that some sort of AI is needed to "see through" the sensor noise.

That said, this would absolutely be among the more sensible and useful implementations of AI. And I suspect the basic technology is already there. The Denoise function already recognizes and separates camera sensor noise from other types of noise like film grain which it doesn't touch.

Perhaps then an update to auto-align is best classified as a feature request, then. Bright stars should be obvious registration marks. If the alignment algorithm truly hasn't been updated since 2008 I for one would like to know what Adobe is doing with all our money. 

The algorithm doesn't work on pixel-level noise, which is what stars really are. It's larger scale pattern recognition, not pixel recognition. I assume it had to be made that way to work at all.

Today the expectation is that anything can be done with AI. It mostly can, but this isn't AI, it's an old algorithm that was introduced in 2008 or so.