[Gimp-user] image alignment/registration

[Casey Connor <gimp-user-list caseyconnor org>]

Hi - I was curious what the best overall image alignment plugin/method 
in GIMP (or out of GIMP) was these days?

"Best" for me means "most powerful/flexible/option-rich".

I've come across the hugin align_image_stack, the G'MIC plugin's "Align 
layers" option, and the image registration plugin 
<http://gimp-image-reg.sourceforge.net/>. (I've also used the "Exact 
Aligner" script, but it's two layers only.)

The goal is to align and then use mean/median for noise reduction 
stacking. I'll probably be working in 16bit.

Do all three methods do sub-pixel alignment? I read someone on pixls.us 
suggesting that the user upscale the source images by up to 1.33x before 
aligning for the sake of effectively achieving sub-pixel alignment, but 
if the current alignment methods do that anyway, seems like I should 
skip it... ?

Thanks!

-c