Serif PhotoPlus - tutorials, hints and tips

[x6gas]

Serif PhotoPlus is a lower cost alternative to PhotoShop and PaintShop Pro. It is a reasonably capable graphics package that includes things like ‘layers’ (very useful when making adjustments to an image) and ‘levels’ and ‘curves’ – essential when stretching your image to bring out the hidden detail in stacked astro images.

I haven’t used PhotoShop in a very, very long time (and thus I was using a very old version) but I suspect that current versions of PhotoShop are better for astro imaging than PhotoPlus. PhotoShop is probably quicker; it certainly has a variety of astro ‘add-ins’ that (as far as I am aware) are not available for, or compatible with, PhotoPlus. Also, most of the online tutorials you will find are for PhotoShop – most of the functions are very, very similar, but some are a bit different so the lack of ‘how to’ guides is what I want to address in a series of tutorials.

However PhotoPlus scores on price. At the time of writing the current version of PhotoShop (CS6) retails at $699. That’s too much for me and I am vehemently opposed to software piracy (it’s theft, people, and therefore as bad as stealing someone’s telescope). You can get PhotoPlus 10 for free (for example it is sometimes given away with Sky at Night magazine) and PhotoPlus x4 – a more up-to-date version for £9.99.

Serif have a hard won reputation for very aggressive marketing so if you are getting a free version be very firm that you do not want to be sold anything, added to any mailing lists etc. My experience is that if you are clear on this from the outset then they do leave you alone. It is only fair to say that others have had bad experiences.

PhotoPlus 10 is great because you can usually get it for free. I won’t post a link because they change from time-to-time, but use your favourite search engine and you should be able to find it legally for free without too much of a problem. However, some of the processes and filters are really, really slow (the Dust and Scratch filter, for instance, which can be used to make a starless layer in DSO processing is mind blowingly slow and if you are using a number of iterations of the filter… let’s just say it gets frustrating!). It has the layers, levels, curves etc., etc., that you’ll need to process astro images. However, the major disadvantage is that this software only processes 8-bit images. For example it will load 16-bit TIFF images, but you’ll only be processing them in 8-bits. This severely limits the dynamic range of the image and, while I won’t go into details here, suffice it to say that this is not good for astro imaging. You can learn a lot using PhotoPlus 10 but it doesn’t really cut the mustard for astro image processing purely because of the 8-bit issue (GIMP – also free – suffers from the same limitation).

At 10 quid, though, PhotoPlus x4 does pretty well for astro imaging. It isn’t the most up-to-date version, but it does pretty much everything that PhotoShop does, it does it much more quickly than PhotoPlus 10, and – most importantly – it allows you to process in 16-bits. That’s the big deal. By all means practice astro imaging for free with PhotoPlus 10, but for quality astro imaging on a budget, spend a tenner and download PhotoPlus x4. That’s my recommendation so these tutorials are based around x4, but PhotoPlus 10 usually works in pretty much the same way.

My intention is to post a number of tutorials for PhotoPlus. I’m still learning the art of processing and I hope to post tutorials as I learn, but ONLY when the process differs in an important way from PhotoShop. For instance, Martin B has posted a bunch of excellent PhotoShop tutorials and in many cases PhotoPlus works in such a similar way that it would be a waste of time to post PhotoPlus versions; an obvious example is stretching images using curves and levels… I think this is so similar that you can follow the PhotoShop tutorials in PhotoPlus without too much of a problem.

Please use this thread to:

• comment on the tutorials
  
• request a tutorial for a particular function or process (or you can PM me)
  
• post any hints and tips for PhotoPlus
  

I am hoping to keep the tutorials themselves ‘pure’.

I should say that I am no processing expert and nor am I particularly knowledgable about PhotoPlus (yet!), but I am tenatious and enjoy solving problems so I am happy to try to find out if and how PhotoPlus can be used to do routines deployed by those using PhotoShop.

Please no posts about the superiority of one piece of software over another; that's not at issue and I just want to provide 'how to' guides that happen to want to use PhotoPlus for astro processing whatever their motivation.

By the way, I am posting this thread in the Imaging - Tips, Tricks and Techniques forum because that’s where MartinB’s PhotoShop tutorials reside (although I would have thought that both would be better placed in the Imaging - Image Processing, Help and Techniques forum).

[Sully]

Good to see I'm not the only serif user, I know what you mean about the hard sell, but I stuck to my guns and ended up getting The X5 version for £15. Not too bad.

Only used it for basic planetry processing and playing with general photos and it seems to do what i need, so will definetly be reading your tutorials as they come up.

Sully