Howdy from The Natural State

[Dave Rachow]

Hi everyone. I'm an amateur to say the least. I've been using GIMP for a year or so and thought I could learn some more about the program in here.

We live in north central Arkansas. I shoot mostly sunrises, wildlife, and landscapes.

Here is a link to my Flicker Account if you would like to check out some of my photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpproductions/

I've been wanting to get into astrophotography, but need some pointers. I tried using multiple shots and aligning them with Deep Space Stacker when I found GIMP wouldn't handle the 16bit TIF files. I'm loosing too much data when it converts to 8bit.

I was wondering if shooting RAW and duplicating the layers would help any.