

Click-drag this and reposition it over an area of the background-try and avoid any star detail as this may interfere with the colour sampling. You will see a sampler in the middle of your document.With this layer selected, go to Filters>Astrophotography>Remove Background.Once you have performed tone stretching and any additional tonal work that reveals the gradient, go to Layer>Merge Visible to create a merged Pixel layer of your work so far.In addition to the stacking functionality, version 1.9 also introduces a dedicated Remove Background filter for astrophotography, which can be used to tackle difficult background gradients or simply neutralise a background colour. Let me run through a few common workflows and how you can use Affinity Photo’s tools to achieve them: Removing difficult background tones The Orion Nebula, processed from a one shot colour setup using various adjustments and live filters.Īffinity Photo includes a variety of tools that work well with astrophotography retouching techniques. Retouching tools, selection tools and blending options
#Free photo stacking software astrophotography Offline#
If you’re completely new to astrophotography post production, Affinity Photo is definitely not a bad choice for keeping things straightforward and manageable whilst you learn the stacking process.Īdditionally, the whole process is documented in the Help-available offline through the app and online at. Save and load bad pixel map presets so you can easily re-use them for future data.

Highlight brilliance (High Pass with a Hard Light blend mode).Mesh distortion and liquify effects (Liquify).Luminance and colour noise reduction (Denoise).

Live star and background masking (Procedural Texture).Structure enhancement masked to just specific areas (Clarity).Star glow (Gaussian blur with Overlay blend mode and blend ranges/opacity).

If you wanted to have a completely non-destructive layer stack where no layer merging is required, here are just a few techniques you could apply: Live Filters being used to apply star reduction and structure enhancement non-destructively.
