James Ritson

Hello all, It's been a while, but I've just released V17 of the macros with some interesting new features. As usual, you can grab the macros for free here: https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html Here is the full change list: Live Tone Stretch for a non-destructive approach to tone stretching (no layer merging required), with configurable stretch and black point parameters, and additional shadow and mid-tone contrast layers to further control tones Generate Weighted Luminosity Layer, which creates a merged top layer of your image so far that maintains the current luminosity (brightness). You can then add all manner of adjustments and filters beneath this layer to manipulate colour detail without affecting brightness. Great for images with tricky dynamic range (e.g. lots of stars, or bright nebula areas) Live Denoise, which performs non-destructive moderate denoising (to be applied after tone stretching and general editing), and also blends in procedural soft noise to help reduce the loss of textural detail Rename Stacked Layers, to speed up the layer renaming process which is required for the various composition setup macros to work (e.g. L-RGB, SHO, HSO). Please see video snippet and readme PDF for more information on these macros Dynamic Narrowband Mix: An implementation of the idea to dynamically mix Ha, SII and OIII colour data (based on a blog post from The Coldest Nights). This option tends to work best with SHO mapped data Post-Stretch Gamma Mixing: a simple live gamma transform filter that can be applied after tone stretching to further alter the balance of each colour channel. The blending is restricted to a specific tonal range, however, allowing you to raise the brightness of nebula detail without affecting dark or bright areas Channel Swap: quick presets you can apply to completely swap channel data, allowing you to audition different narrowband colour combinations Greyscale Solar to False Colour Setup, intended specifically for greyscale solar imagery of the sun. This macro will take a greyscale document, convert it to full colour (RGB 16-bit), and apply various operations including highlight recovery, colour mapping, brightness boost, yellow colour enhancement, contrast softening and structure enhancement Moon Processing Workflow, designed for stacked imagery of the moon using Affinity Photo’s File>New Stack functionality, which lets you align, stack and average pixel content using Median and Mean operators. It performs a number of steps including colour and luminosity separation, HSL layers to saturate colour detail, non-destructive defringing for colour fringing around edge detail, structure and highlight detail enhancement, and final band-pass and fine detail sharpening The downloads page also contains some new video snippets that show how the new features work. As always, I hope people find these macros useful!

Hey all, hope you're doing well! You may have seen that the Affinity apps received a free 2.1 update on Thursday. It's not mentioned in the release notes, but we stealthily added a Linear Fit filter which is a huge help when balancing out the intensity of different monochrome data layers. I did a quick tutorial on using it: Additionally, although the feature has been present since version 1.10, there was no tutorial on using the File Groups functionality. This is a big time saver when stacking multiple data sets, so I've also done a tutorial on it: No new macro updates as of yet, but I have some ideas moving forward!

Hi, apologies, I didn't see this reply until just recently. I think what you're seeing is that in V2, we finally made layer Z-order rendering consistent between all three platforms (macOS, iPadOS, Windows). macOS was lagging behind as it was the first iteration of the UI, and it always had some teething issues. Essentially, a mask/enclosure layer stack now renders in the same order as a parent layer, so bottom to top. What you also need to take into account, however, is the difference between a child and mask layer (or what the developers call an 'enclosure layer'). Child layers are when you drag a layer over the text/label of the parent layer—the child layer's contents or effect then becomes clipped to the parent layer. This is also what happens when you use Arrange>Move Inside to put a layer inside another layer (you can shortcut this to speed up compositing workflows). Mask/enclosure layers are when you drag a layer over the thumbnail of the parent layer—these are treated as a separate stack and will always render above the child layer stack. You will notice that whenever you create a mask or live filter into a layer, it will be a mask/enclosure layer. I did a Groups video tutorial recently, and at the end of the video I clarify this difference in behaviour (3m23s): The main takeaway is that V2 is actually correct now—enclosure/mask layer Z-order was always broken in V1 and was quite frustrating to deal with. Because the UI was being overhauled for V2, it was then addressed. In your screenshots above, you've used a mask and live gaussian blur: by default, these will both insert inside the currently selected layer as mask/enclosure layers (not regular child layers), which is why the Z-order is reversed when opening the document in V2. Apologies, it's a bit of a faff, but the rendering order is now the same as it would be for parent layers, so hopefully it's just a case of understanding this change...

Hey all, I forgot to post here earlier this week when I released it, but I put out a workflow video on editing some of Telescope Live's data using the macros: I do see a lot of comments about how the macros/videos don't cater to OSC data workflows (in particular data shot with SLR/mirrorless setups)—the macros actually work just as well for those, so I'll endeavour to do a workflow video using some of my older mirrorless camera data next...

Hi @Vojtech Kohout, thank you and glad you are finding the macros and other content useful! The formula is not top secret but I use the destructive version of the procedural texture filter because I also use auto levels and some blending to avoid clipping the highlight detail (this is achieved by blending a layer with more aggressive stretching into another beneath it, discarding the highlight detail from the top image). This might be the artefacting that you are referring to, where perhaps the highlight preservation is actually too much? If you download the legacy macros zip file, which contain V13 of the macros, you can actually run the ND (non-destructive) version of colour preserving tone stretch and it will present a live procedural texture layer. I scrapped this non-destructive version of the macro because I didn't think it was very user friendly. You can however save the equation as a preset. What you would then want to do is run this CPTS equation on a merged copy of your work (Layer>Merge Visible), then duplicate this layer and run Auto Levels on the top toolbar. This will give you some really nice tone stretching but the highlights will be blown out. You can now blend this layer into the layer beneath using blend ranges or a luminosity mask until you get the highlight preservation just right. Hope that helps! James

Hi Peter, Yes, live stacking aligns and holds all bitmap data in volatile memory (or swap, if required), which means you'll need a fair amount of RAM if you intend to stack hundreds of images—especially in 16-bit precision, which would be necessary for astronomical imaging. If you are using OpenCL acceleration, you'll also be at the mercy of your graphics card's available VRAM, so you may actually want to disable it for this purpose: most 4-8GB cards can easily be saturated! This is a great edge-case purpose for Apple's ARM hardware: having unified memory means the GPU can access a huge pool of memory (e.g. M1 Max with 64GB), so you can easily stack a huge number of images without slowing down by eating into swap memory. Glad to hear the macros are putting in work! By the way, over the weekend I got round to producing a couple of videos that might be of interest to people. One focuses on using StarXTerminator to extract stars onto a separate layer (exploring the benefits of doing so), and the other is very niche: it goes through how Affinity Photo does work in a linear colour space throughout the whole post production process, and explains why the data looks non-linear to the end user. Quite geeky, but might be worth a watch if you're unsure of how Photo processes astronomical data. Here they are: Thanks again, James

Hey Peter, FIle>New Astrophotography Stack will use star alignment exclusively so is only intended for DSO style stacking. You can try File>New Stack to create an aligned live stack instead (it aligns based on image features), although you may want to pre-process your files first if possible (e.g. to 16-bit TIFFs). I haven't actually tried FIT files directly with New Stack so am not sure if it would work. RAW files are fine, but I would still advise pre-processing so you have more control over tones and any corrections. Once you've created the new stack, you can change the operator quickly on the Layers panel (e.g. Mean, Median, Maximum etc). I've used it in the past to increase SNR for moon shots, but nothing planetary so far. Thanks, James

Hi Peter, this is likely because V2 of the apps install as "Windows Apps" with the new MSIX installer system. It's caused a bit of consternation as it's not easy to access the .EXE files. Seems Microsoft didn't think their new "app" format through very well, because if an app isn't listed in the immediate Open With menu, you have to go searching for the .exe which is contained in a sandboxed directory. There are a few things you can do here: You can try pointing to the app alias which is located at C:\Users\(Your username)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\AffinityPhoto2.exe If that doesn't work, we've provided an AFLaunch executable which can be found attached to a post in this thread: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/171826-why-are-we-using-msix-for-windows-installers/ Alternatively, the solution that would be better long term is to re-install Affinity Photo using the MSI installer which we launched in January. You can download them from the V2 downloads page on the Serif website, this thread explains where to look: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/180014-affinity-v2-windows-installers-are-available-as-unsandboxed-msiexe-as-well-as-sandboxed-msix/#comment-1039132\ If you use the MSI installer, the apps get installed as you would expect to C:\Program Files\Affinity\ As much as I like the benefits that MSIX brings, I've uninstalled the app versions and gone with the traditional MSI versions as well... Hope that helps!

Hi all, as I mentioned in my previous post, I've done a quick snippet video on reducing star intensity with the macros—it goes through a couple of quick options and explains masking procedures. Hope you find it interesting! I'll try and produce some more of these in the coming weeks.

Hi Peter, yes, Photo can do both live stacking (for statistical operations to achieve object removal, increase SNR and so on) and the full blown astro stacking with the facility for calibration frames, sigma clipping pixel rejection etc. No comet stacking yet but I live in hope we might be able to implement it at some point—I keep adding data for the developer to work with! Glad you find the macros useful. I would recommend giving the update video a watch: it is a bit dry (as usual from me) but I go through the new tone stretching options and explore some of the other macros to build upon the editing process, it may give you some ideas. Moving forward, I’m planning to do short snippet videos detailing one or two of the macros and show some use cases—I think that will be more interesting for people rather than a long form video. The macros can be really powerful but it’s hard to communicate the most effective way to use them (the readme PDF tries, but it’s not the same as actually seeing it in practice). Thanks, James

Hi Steve, V2 only I’m afraid, they take advantage of new functionality that isn’t present in V1. I’ve clarified this on the website and download page but must confess I keep forgetting to mention it in forum posts, apologies. You can almost guarantee there will be a sale at some point this coming year if that appeals. An alternative way to look at it would be that getting V2 entitles you to free 2.x updates until V3 (so basically the same model as V1 which ran for about seven years)…

Hello again everyone, I wanted to inform you that I've just released V15 of the astrophotography macros. As always, you can download them from my website (https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html) or directly from Gumroad (https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_macros) and just put '0' into the input field to get them for free. This version comes with a big change list, and also a huge improvement in tone stretching. The older methods have been revised, with vastly better highlight protection, but you'll also find some new mono data stretching macros (regular and log). These enable you to pull much more detail out of mono data. Additionally, there's a macro to convert an OSC data layer to separate mono RGB layers, which means you can easily use this new tone stretching method with one shot colour camera data as well. It's a pretty big update, and I'm also conscious that the macros should be used a certain way to get the most out of them, so I've produced a video to go along with this update which you can watch here: Here's the full change list: Mono Data Stretching This is a completely new approach to tone stretching for monochrome data. Rather than tone stretching the composited, colour-mapped result, these macros will instead tone stretch each mono layer individually. You can colour map using the data setup macros after this process. I have found that this approach can yield some much better results for complex nebulae, and it’s easier to pull the colours apart and create a final image with more depth. There are two methods available for RGB, L-RGB and SHO data sets: Mono Stretch, and Mono Log Stretch. The log stretch may work better for clean, high quality data. If the data is not optimal, I would advise trying the standard stretch. Do try both, however, and see which works better for you. Note that this should be considered as an alternative to the existing tone stretching methods, not a replacement! As always, experiment and see which methods work best for your data: indeed, you may find that one method may be exceptional for one set of data, but not another. Stretch Selected Layer The mono data stretching macros also require masking to avoid overexposing bright detail: the masks for this process are based off an average of several different data sets. You may find however that you need more manual control over this process: you can use these macros to stretch an individual layer that you have selected. A Stretched (Merge Down) layer will be created, with a Protect Highlights mask inside it. Configure this mask until the highlight detail looks suitable for that data, then select the parent layer and use Layer>Merge Down to merge it into the initial data layer underneath. You can then repeat this process for all of your data layers until you are ready to colour map them. Redesigned Tone Stretching macros The original tone stretching methods—Normalised, Logarithmic and Colour Preserving—have also received a revamp, and they now protect highlight detail much more effectively. Enhance Mono Layers To aid the mono data stretching process, there are also macros to enhance specific mono layers (e.g. SII, Ha, OIII, R, G, B etc). You can use these to bring out more detail for a specific data layer, e.g. if the SII detail was a bit faint and you wanted to enhance it. Boost Mono Layers These are designed to be used after the tone stretching process and further on in the edit. You may want to simply bring out some more colour or detail in a particular data layer such as OIII, or the G layer. This will copy the specific data layer, move it to the top and enhance its structure whilst preserving highlight detail. Darken Mono Stretched Result When using the new mono data stretching macros, you will often find that the resulting composition is quite bright once all the layers are blended together. This will produce a pleasing brightness reduction, whilst also offering an optional non-linear brightness boost that will even out the contrast for trickier data. Highlight Recovery If you are compositing multiple mono layers together (e.g. RGB, SHO), this macro can be used to recover any blown out highlight detail. Post-Tone Stretch Log Transform I was finding with some imagery (especially L-RGB and RGB compositions) that I needed to pull more general tonal detail away from the background, and was struggling with conventional adjustments. I adapted the Logarithmic Tone Stretch so it could be applied after tone stretching to further bring out subtle detail, with configurable range and blend sliders. Masked Gamma Stretch Creates a structural mask that excludes star detail and applies it to a Levels adjustment, allowing you to perform a non-linear gamma boost. Especially useful when used with individual colour channels (e.g. raising gamma of a weaker colour channel without overexposing bright details). Masked Curves Stretch Performs a masked tone stretch that excludes bright star and nebula detail. Good for increasing brightness and contrast of darker areas. Masked Contrast Boost Applies a gentler curves adjustment that is masked to exclude bright detail. Useful for a general contrast enhancement without significantly brightening detail. Enhance Nebula Structure Enhances nebula structure whilst aggressively excluding bright star detail. The Star Exclusion Mask can be controlled with minimum, maximum and highlight threshold parameters. Masked Gamma Stretch Similar to the ‘masked stretch’ concept that is so popular for boosting fainter detail without overexposing stars, this is best used for subjects with tricky bright areas and star detail. It creates a structural mask and uses it when gamma stretching. Masked Curves Stretch Like the Masked Gamma Stretch, this creates a structural mask and uses it with a Curves adjustment to boost tones in the image without affecting bright detail. Masked Contrast Boost Creates a structural mask and uses it with a Brightness / Contrast adjustment to provide a decent contrast enhancement. Highlight Protected Tone Lift This has replaced the ‘Final Tone Lift’ macro and is more or less the same: it simply lifts the overall brightness and contrast of your composition without overexposing the highlights. Nonlinear Tone Boost A nice simple equation filter option for achieving a tonal boost that focuses on raising darker tones. This is generally useful if you are trying to brighten up your composition but Curves or other adjustment layers just aren’t working. Weighted Intensity Mixer Lets you mix together different weighted intensity calculations based on the RGB channel data. This could be useful if you are struggling to balance the luminosity of your different colours and want to quickly experiment with various blends. Weighted RGB Tonal Boost Lets you add a subtle brightness and tone boost with configurable RGB contribution, in addition to offset sliders which allow you to gradually raise the brightness of the colour channel information in a gentle, non-linear fashion. Dual Band Colour Mixer An experimental option: allows you to mix three different weighted intensity calculations for RGB channel data, producing a look similar to dual band compositions (e.g. HaOIII, HaSII). For further experimentation, try changing the layer’s blend mode to Saturation or Hue. Star Size Reducer This has replaced the Star Eater macro. This is a less surgical and cleaner application that can be controlled with a luminosity mask to protect shadow detail from ‘circular artefacting’. It generally dims and reduces the overall size of star detail. Reduce Star Intensity This macro has been updated and is now more effective. It also comes with a Protect Shadows mask that can be configured to prevent ‘circular artefacting’. Enhance Nebula Structure Similar to the existing Enhance Structure macros, this uses a different method to create a structural mask and may provide a subtle—yet useful—difference in rendering. Diffuse Glow This has been updated to avoid darkening the majority of the image, and instead brighten the diffuse areas. Brighten Star Centres Sometimes, with aggressive masked stretching or stretching that protects highlight detail, you will find that star centres are darker than their surrounding glow areas and the result looks odd. This macro will create a star mask using a convolution filter and enhance the brightness of the star centres to try and mitigate this. Thanks again! James

Have you got an example document I can look at? V2 if anything is faster here (some improvements to GPU compositing for export, for example), so that does sound odd. What are your specs? Thanks for letting me know, are you by any chance using Intel HD integrated graphics? We're still having issues with OpenCL there, it's all driver related. I think we've ironed out crashing on the majority of nVidia cards (mainly due to memory allocation and budgeting), but it's useful to hear about different users' experiences.

Sorry to hear you haven't been having a great experience with it—it's frustrating because the apps work absolutely fine here, and V2 on Windows has had a huge OpenCL stability upgrade, which is very useful for 32-bit compositing as that's very taxing on the CPU. @powerlord what issues are you having with masks? They behave the same as they did in V1 here. Also, if you're able to expand on the live filter issues that would be really helpful, as I haven't seen any major issues here—there may still be tile compositing issues with OpenCL that we need to iron out, so we're keen to know about any use cases and examples.

Hi, I take your point about the low contrast UI—thankfully, in Preferences>User Interface you can adjust text contrast and UI brightness, and there are Default and High preset buttons you can click to quickly increase the UI contrast. The export dialog was changed at this point in time, as a drop-down for the formats allows us to add more formats in the future easily (rather than add to the already long horizontal list of iconographic formats in V1). Given a bit of time it will hopefully make sense... All the best!

Hi all, just a quick post to say that after the huge task of getting V2 released (along with tons of new video tutorials), I've managed to sit down and update the astrophotography macros to take advantage of V2's new functionality. It's only the beginning, really, and as I experiment over time I'll likely find more uses for new V2 functionality, but for now I've released V14 of the macros. There are improvements to bandpass sharpening and some useful new retouching functions that use live masks and compound masks. You can download them from my website (https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html) or directly from Gumroad (https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_macros) and just put '0' into the input field to get them for free. Please note that V14 and future releases will only be compatible with V2 and higher of Affinity Photo (since they now use certain V2 functionality). I am however providing a 'Legacy Macros' ZIP file that contains V13 of the macros, which will remain compatible with 1.10 and 1.9 releases. Thanks again! James

Just a heads-up in case anyone is interested and is free at 4pm (BST) on Thursday: I'm doing an Affinity Photo live stream and it's an astrophotography special! I will go through the stacking and retouching process for at least two or three images, and I intend to demonstrate the most ideal non-destructive ways of doing things in Photo rather than porting over Photoshop techniques—things like false colour mapping for SHO data and so on. In all likelihood I'll use some of my macros as well! I'm really looking forward to it, and I'll try and pack in as much useful material as I can. Here's the YouTube Live link which allows you to set a reminder before the stream date: [Edit] Holy moly, the embedded YouTube player is huge. Apologies, I can't see a way to reduce its size like you can with attached images..

Yes, that statement is 99% true—the stacking functionality would potentially work on iPad, but we didn't create the iPad UI for it because we didn't envisage that anyone would want to actually use it. Getting files onto iPad is still not as smooth as it could be, and syncing potentially gigabytes of FITs/RAW data through cloud storage when the app requests it for stacking would be rather painful. Most people dump images directly onto their laptops/workstations—we have to consider the realistic proportion of people that would use it on iPad versus the development time needed to implement the UI and also thoroughly test it to ensure the majority of iPads (e.g. from older generations) are performant... The stacking feature that is present is live stacking: it aligns a series of images and performs operators on the range of pixel data such as Mean/Median etc. It's like Photoshop's Statistics except it renders live, so you can use it to remove outlier objects, increase SNR etc. From memory, it's just the astro stacking that isn't present. All live filters, adjustments, tools etc are all there and functional, so you can certainly do a full edit if starting with the stacked image data.

Hi @AstroMuni, yes, they will work on the iPad version too (just be aware there is no astro stacking functionality on the iPad version, but it will import 32-bit TIFFs or .afphoto files from the desktop version). Nice to hear! I'm doing a live stream this week dedicated to astrophotography editing, so that might give you some more ideas as well (I'll post a link soon)...

Hey all, just another post to let you know I've released v13 of the macros. As usual, you can get them for free directly on Gumroad or via my website. A few users were having issues with the automatic tone stretching macros when it came to objects with tricky dynamic range (e.g. M42's bright core, M5 etc), so I've introduced non-destructive variants of the Logarithmic and Colour Preserving tone stretch macros. These will require manual intervention in the form of additional Curves/Levels adjustments, but will be the best option for those who want total control over the tone stretching process. There are some other options, including a Repetitive Bandpass Sharpening macro, which is wonderful for fine detail sharpening. You can easily change the bandpass value to tailor it to your own imagery and taste. Finally, one important change is related to the composition setup macros: they now use a non-linear Screen blending mode instead of Add. For 99% of cases, this will make no difference, but when used in conjunction with the manual tone stretching options it will help better retain that important highlight detail. This shouldn't break anything, but if anyone notices issues with artefacting on their images please do let me know. Here's the change list: Repetitive Bandpass Sharpening: uses multiple bandpass filters all set to the same value, which gradually enhances detail and sharpness in a very subtle and refined way. The value can easily be changed to suit different imagery, as the filters are all linked. Re-introduced and improved live, non-destructive versions of Logarithmic Tone Stretch and Colour Preserving Tone Stretch. These are useful for images with difficult highlight areas that can clip quickly, but require more manual intervention from the user to determine the best settings that work well for each individual data set. Reduce Magenta Star Colour: creates a masked adjustment that selectively desaturates magenta star detail. Remove Salt and Pepper Noise (16-bit only): uses median filtering with a custom blending range to reduce the visibility of harsh salt and pepper noise. Structure Mask Star Inpainting (32-bit only): creates a structural mask and uses it to inpaint (content aware fill) bright star detail. This does not produce starless images but is good for removing the brighter stars if they are too overpowering and making it difficult to pull out nebula detail. Soft Rendering: creates an interesting and pleasing rendering effect that softens and reduces star detail as well as diminishing background noise. Changed all monochrome composition setup macros to use Screen blending rather than Add (linear addition). This results in a subtle but smooth highlight roll-off that is very helpful for objects that have a very high dynamic range (e.g. the Orion Nebula core). This is now especially useful when combined with the non-destructive tone stretching macros. Thanks again and all the best! James

Hi @woldsman, this sounds a bit odd—does your data appear to have colour when you first load the light frames into the Astrophotography Stack persona? Photo should infer the bayer pattern from the FIT (or RAW) metadata but if for some reason it doesn't you can change it manually by going to the RAW Options panel on the right and using the FITS Bayer Pattern dropdown to set the correct pattern manually. Also, once the result is stacked, are you sure it doesn't just look a bit washed out (perhaps sapping some/most of the colour detail)? Photo will do a gamma-corrected view transform in 32-bit so that your exported result looks consistent—so the data is linear, but you're seeing the gamma corrected view. On top of that, it adds a Levels adjustment which does a gamma transform for initial tone stretching, plus Curves. This might just be washing your data out, but once you actually start to tone stretch using additional adjustments (or other functions like macros) you may start to see the colour. What DSLR are you using? If you're happy to, I could take a look at the data to see if there's anything else I can suggest—I can set up a private Dropbox file request link for this, just let me know. All the best, James

Hello again, another bump to let you all know I've released version 12 of the macros. As before, you can download them for free directly on Gumroad or via my website. I've finally implemented the Absolute Point of Focus sharpening from Photoshop that has been frequently requested! In my macros, it's called Multi-Bandpass Sharpening and is applied non-destructively, so you can go in and change individual bandpass values, hide certain passes, change layer opacity etc to really fine tune the sharpening result. There's also a variant called Fine Bandpass Sharpening. This is for really fine sharpening if you don't want the contrast enhancement that is usually provided with this method. Additionally, there are some more really useful macros—I particularly like Enhance Depth & Colour and now use it as an alternative to Enhance Structure since it tends to avoid over-sharpening noise. Here's the change list for v12: Multi-Bandpass Sharpening with multiple options: normal, stronger, colour-preserving and stronger colour-preserving. These macros use the same decomposition and bandpass technique that is utilised with Absolute Point of Focus. Each bandpass is a non-destructive group, however, allowing you to fine tune each value to your own imagery. You can also disable each bandpass or change individual opacity values to further tailor the sharpening to your own requirements. Fine Bandpass Sharpening: an alternative to Multi-Bandpass Sharpening if that seems too aggressive or enhances contrast too much. This will provide a very fine enhancement of smaller detail. Enhance Depth & Colour: a very powerful alternative to Enhance Structure, this increases perceptual depth and detail non-destructively. Use Layer as Mask: takes your currently selected layer and allows it to be used non-destructively as a mask, rather than having to explicitly Rasterise to Mask (which is a destructive approach). Simply click-drag and drop it over the thumbnail of any other layer to use it as a mask. For example, you could duplicate a monochromatic data layer such as SII or OIII, run this macro, and drop it into an HSL adjustment to saturate certain detail selectively. Final Tone Lift: designed to be used at the end of the editing process. I have often found that once exporting my images, they almost always need a small boost in brightness and contrast. This macro adds such a boost but whilst preserving important highlight detail, so it is useful for enhancing the overall image without compromising bright detail. Highlight Preserving Brightness Boost: boosts overall brightness whilst preserving highlight detail using blend ranges. Reduce Mid-Tone Contrast: useful for flattening nebula detail if it has too much contrast. Uses blend ranges to avoid affecting the shadow and highlight tones. Added “NEW” labels to macros new to this version in the PDF readme. Thanks again, and hope you enjoy using the new macros!

Looks like v12 may be coming sooner than I anticipated 😁 I had a look at Absolute Point of Focus sharpening and managed to implement it as a non-destructive layer stack in Affinity Photo (and of course as a single-click macro). It doesn't work so well in 32-bit linear colour space however, due to panda eyes around high contrast stars. I have steps to mitigate it, but it's probably something that is best applied in 16-bit. If anyone has any other ideas as to what I can put into a v12 release do let me know...

Hello all, just a quick thread bump to inform you that I've released v11 of the astrophotography macros. There are a few interesting additions to this release, mostly based on email feedback about features people wanted to see recreated in Affinity Photo. As usual, you can download them for free directly on Gumroad or via my website. It seems that some kind of APF-S implementation would be very popular, but this will require a bit more tinkering to try and recreate it successfully in Affinity (and I want to try and achieve it non-destructively, if possible!). In the meantime, the Gaussian Subtractive Sharpening should provide a rough approximation. Here's the change list: Gaussian Kernel Sharpening: uses a gaussian kernel for edge detection, then applies a live Unsharp Mask filter based on this mask. Additionally, the mask strength is controllable. This is a great option for sharpening star detail without over sharpening the edges (which usually results in black halo artefacts). Gaussian Subtractive Sharpening: a non-destructive, subtractive sharpening model which gives separate control over small and large radius detail. Highlight Preserving Tone Boost: aggressively masks based on darker tones in the image, allowing you to push brightness and add contrast to the image without affecting the highlights (e.g. bright star detail, bright nebula areas etc). Green Channel Synthetic Substitution: interpolates the green channel from a blend of red and blue channel data—useful for bi-colour compositions, or broadband compositions where green channel information would be mostly noise rather than meaningful data. Green Channel Noise Reduction: performs aggressive noise reduction on isolated green channel data, leaving red and blue channel data alone. SCNR Green Max/Additive: an implementation of subtractive chromatic noise reduction used to reduce green channel noise, with the ability to blend non-destructively between maximum and additive methods. SCNR Green Neutral/Max Neutral: an implementation of subtractive chromatic noise reduction used to reduce green channel noise, with the ability to blend non-destructively between neutral and maximum neutral methods. Weighed Luminosity Enhancement: calculates a weighted greyscale intensity based on the RGB channel data, then uses it to enhance luminance. One shot colour data mapping options: based on OSC narrowband filter data provided by users, I have created some non-destructive channel mapping macros that help achieve false colour setups (SHO, HSO, OSH, HOO) by performing channel blending operations. These are considered work in progress and any feedback is appreciated. Moved all data setup macros to a separate category called “JR - Astrophotography Data Setups”. This helps reduce the bloat of the main 32-bit macro category. Improved PDF documentation: clearer sections, added uninstallation/upgrade instructions. Hope they prove useful! James

@jjosefsen, whilst I remember, I checked how light frame quality is evaluated. It is based on the quality of the 40 best stars within the frame. Star criteria: good brightness relative to the noise level, roundness, size (not too large) and peaks in the middle. Hope that helps!