To call it feature-packed would be an understatement, and we must surely be approaching some sort of limit in the number of ways an image file can be poked, prodded, warped, and generally messed around with. There are a lot of tools in PhotoDirector 13. It’s a complicated situation entirely of Skylum’s making, so be sure to read up on exactly what you’re buying before you dive in. Luminar AI is a simpler, faster app built around the company’s AI tools, while Neo will take centre stage as the company’s flagship product, bringing a new editing engine and the ability to create more refined images. So which version you get depends on what you want.
The company has since ‘retired’ Luminar 4, but insisted in an online briefing that Neo is somehow not its replacement. It also suffers from a bit of fragmentation, with Luminar 4 and Luminar AI being joined by the recently announced but not yet available Luminar Neo. Traditional image-editing tools are there, but aren’t the application’s focus. This makes it easy to apply changes to the entire image, or just the sky, and there are AI tools that can alter your pictures in ways you may not have thought of.
Astro photo tool series#
It prefers to provide a series of pre-set ‘looks’ that you can apply to your image, then fade back and even apply selectively.
Astro photo tool software#
Skylum, the developer of Luminar, has taken a slightly different line on image-editing than Adobe and many of the other software houses in the sector. Advanced users can delve much deeper into the options, to the extent of manually choosing the Bayer pattern used during raw decode, or using frame analysis to reject those with star trailing or other flaws.Īnother astro-specific feature is the dedicated Remove Background filter for astrophotography, which can help if a background color cast has crept into your images, returning the sky between the stars to black. Serif Software’s rival to Photoshop takes Adobe’s selection and layer method of photo editing and applies it directly to night-sky images through its Astrophotography Stack persona (the personas are Photo’s way of reconfiguring its user interface for specific tasks, it has one for exporting images, another for decoding raw files, and so on).Īt its simplest, this means you can import light and calibration frames into Affinity Photo, then click a button and have them automatically stacked, ready to be moved to the app’s main Photo persona to have color-boosting and sharpening edits applied. Affinity Photo: Best budget option for astro enthusiastsĬan be tricky if you're already used to Photoshop Layers can be moved around, blended together, painted on, completely hidden, or have holes cut in them, and for something like a star trail image that merges hundreds of slightly different photos, or revealing the soft light of a nebula from many stacked frames of the same thing, are absolutely essential. Think of them as a vertical stack of acetate sheets ready to go on an overhead projector and you won’t go far wrong. Layers are what allow you to build up complex effects. Selections can be automatically applied - the new Adobe Sensei cloud AI tech that allows the subject of a photo to be perfectly identified and selected just by choosing a menu option is phenomenal - or can be painstakingly manually created. Photoshop’s method of editing is based on selections and layers, meaning you can edit the sky in the image separately from the land by making a selection.
Photoshop CC is the industry standard photo editing app, and as such a great tool for the astrophotographer. Lightroom’s brother, and the app most copied by other image-editing software. Adobe Lightroom: Best photo editing app overall This is off-the-shelf software that can be bent to the needs of the astrophotographer, and some handle this better than others. It’s worth noting that none of these is a dedicated astro-processing app. Tweaks to brightness, color, and contrast are editing too, as is a simple crop to more closely centre your intended target in the frame.Īs a result of image editing software’s popularity with the digital photography community, there are a lot of different applications on the market, each with their varying pros and cons, especially where astrophotography is concerned. The only way you can align and stack a large number of digital files to combine their captured light and reveal the deep-sky object you’re trying to image is through editing software. Whether they try to do as much in-camera as is possible, or lean more heavily on their editing software to extract the unseen beauty from their images, there's always an element of editing involved. Astrophotographers rely, therefore, on editing – especially since photography went digital.
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