Anyone into #astrophotography, you're in for a treat with Photo! Here’s the announcement:ġ.9 versions are out. The two new features I’ve used (and liked) so far are the ability to do stacking right in Affinity Photo (rather than having to use another tool like Deep Sky Stacker) and a killer astrophotography filter for reducing backgrounds and gradients. While I felt pretty good about using earlier versions of Affinity Photo for astro image processing, the release of version 1.9 really brought Affinity Photo into the spotlight for the astrophotography world. They can be a bit pricey but Topaz Labs frequently offers discounts, so keep an eye out. The Topaz Labs tools are pretty heavily advertised, and DeNoise AI seems to have a pretty good reputation among astro imagers. I don’t find myself using this as often as DeNoise, but it does come in handy when an image could use a little help. This one does exactly what its name says–it sharpens images. I posted a quick before-and-after example a few weeks ago. I’ve been pretty impressed with how well DeNoise AI works. Noise is a perpetual challenge for anyone shooting images in low light conditions, and it can be especially challenging for astro imaging. DeNoise AI is a powerful tool for removing noise from images.Both of these tools purport to use artificial intelligence to accomplish their jobs, and they can be launched as stand-alone applications as well as be accessed as plug-ins from within Affinity Photo: Topaz Labs also produces some image processing plug-ins that can be valuable for improving astro images as well as regular photographs. I have personally found AstroFlat Pro to be particularly useful. GradientXTerminator, by Russell Crowman, also addresses unwanted gradients in astro images.īoth of these are known as “8BF” plug-ins, and Affinity Photo is able to directly use both of these as well as other 8BF plug-ins.AstroFlat Pro, by ProDigital Software, is an effective tool for removing background gradients and sky glow from your images.One thing I learned from Dave Eagle’s book was that Affinity Photo is capable of using some of the available astro image processing plug-ins that had been created for Photoshop. At the time, there wasn’t a whole lot else to be found. It was worth the modest cost to me because it helped me get started. Dave Eagle’s book is fairly brief but provides a few concrete easy-to-follow examples of how to process images. Here’s an example from my gallery of some of my recent work, stacked and processed using Affinity Photo. I’m not even sure I’m competent at this point, but I’m at least gaining ground. Second, I am by no means an expert in either the use of Affinity Photo or in astro image processing in general. First, my interest in Affinity Photo is only as a happy customer–I have no relation to nor affiliation with Affinity. In the rest of this article, I’ll share with you some resources and information I’ve come across that will help you get started with using Affinity Photo for astro image processing.īefore I go any further, two disclaimers. If you’re in the market for an image processing tool (or getting sick of paying by the month for Photoshop), you really can’t go wrong with Affinity Photo. Right now (February 2021) Affinity is selling Affinity Photo for half price–only $25! Additionally, Affinity is currently offering a 90-day free trial. I purchased it directly from the Affinity website for $50 early in 2020. If that doesn’t make it attractive enough, the latest version (1.9) has added some astrophotography-specific capabilities, including the ability to stack astro exposures–a very important task in astro image processing.Īffinity Photo is a general-purpose image editor, very much like Photoshop in its layout and features. Affinity Photo is just as capable as Photoshop for a fraction of the price. But a new tool is gaining a foothold in the astrophotography world– Affinity Photo. That’s where tools like Photoshop, PixInsight, Astro Pixel Processor, Siril, and even the Gimp would traditionally be put to work. Equally important is the task of combining and processing the captured images to produce your final astrophotograph. In astrophotography, using thousands of dollars of equipment to capture images of deep sky objects as you carefully track them across the sky is only part of the imaging process.
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