Vojtech Kohout

Hi James, thank you very much for all the effort you put into your macros, they are excellent. I share a shot of 12P/Pons-Brooks (taken with a Nikon D750 and Samyang 135 mm lens) that was stacked, stretched and further processed in Affinity. Your macros were very helpful. I only have two questions. They're not particularly related to the macros, but I hope you don't mind... 1) There is a bug in the HSL adjustment tool that doesn't allow you to adjust hue ranges when working with a 32-bit document. The bug is known, but unfortunately not fixed yet: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/177023-hsl-adjustment-layer-hue-target-range-selection-not-working/. Is there any workaround? 2) I like the background removal tool in Affinity and use it a lot. What I'd love to have would be a non-destructive variant of that tool. Sometimes setting of the background points takes some effort, and once confirmed, when I realize I made a mistake somewhere, I have to go through the whole process again. Is there a way how to reuse the background points placement? A non-destructive variant of the tool would probably be the best solution, but maybe you can give me some advice? Thank you very much, Vojtěch

@James Ritson Hello James, at first, let me thank you for all the effort you put into your macros, tutorials and educational videos. It's an amazing work and I really appreciate it! I think we all are very lucky that we have such a keen astrophotographer as a product expert in Serif. 🙂 Let me attach one my recent shot which I processed using some of your macros. They did a really good job. But I have a question anyway… I find tone stretching to be a crucial part of processing and I had some success with your Colour Preserving Tone Stretch. But since the macro "as it is" left me with some artifacts in the brightest parts of the image, I decided to dig into a copy of it, tweak it little bit and figure out what's going on. It was just a matter of adjusting how the tone stretched layer is blended with the original one… So far so good. But here is the question: is it top secret what formulae you use in the Procedural Texture step? I have some experience with arcsinh-inspired stretching with multiplying and dividing to preserve RGB ratios, based on this excellent article: http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/Processing/Colour_Preserving_Stretch/colour_preserving_stretch.html, but when I compare results it seems like you follow a little bit different approach. I'd love to have some deeper insight into it but the edit macro view doesn't allow me that… Thank you very much for your reply!