Processing software

[Moonshed]

Having just taken delivery of my camera I am now looking ahead to doing the all important processing. I have Photoshop installed and have successfully used it for many years to process my film photos and tease out the fine detail. I am hoping it will prove to be up to the job to process future digital images. I appreciate that these days there are more astronomy dedicated software packages available. What do you think? Do I need to get better software or just stick with good old Photoshop? I have a limited budget and not much left for software, not if I wish to remain married that is!

[Stub Mandrel]

Here's a very personal perspective based on 18 months of learning and progressing.

As someone used to Corel Photopaint for many years Photoshop wasn't too bad to learn (I was even able top go back and use objects in PP properly after ,mastering layers in PS!). If you are used to Photoshop, you will have a big head start on using any other program. I have found dedicated astro programs hard to use especially as they seem all, to be afflicted by a failure to explain how things work so you can change a setting with a reasonable expectation of what will happen and why.

Consider buying three (affordable) plugins for Photoshop:

1. Gradient exterminator  (nukes vignetting and light pollution gradients).
2. Astra Image (or buy the stand alone version) for sharpening, elaborate contrast work and noise removal (also works on terrestrial images especially recovering slightly out of focus ones).
3. Noel Carboni's actions - a set of click and run actions that do several useful tasks.

 

Freebies worth getting are:

1. Steve's Astro Actions (available to purchasers of every photo counts)
2. HLVG - hasta la vista green to get rid of the green colour cast that plagues some images

 

Non-photoshop - get hold of the free and indispensable stacking program Deep Sky Stacker.

 

My big criticism of many programs including photoshop is that they either use sliders for adjustment that don't give you fine control or they give you too few steps if they let you enter a number.

[Alien 13]

Photoshop is fine, I am using Canon EOS utils for camera control Canon DPP for RAW processing and DSS for stacking images all free. The one other useful piece of software is APT which allows a few more options over the canon utils software not free but cheap.

Alan 

[tomato]

I started out with Deep Sky Stacker (free) and Photoshop CS2 and got some pleasing results. Most of the popular packages offer free trials of some sort with no save or degraded save facility or you can only use them for a limited period. The results obtained with Pixinsight look incredible but from what I have read you will need most of your 45 day trial period to get into it. For now I went for StarTools which at around £30 isn't too steep and IMHO allows a quick and easy route to a pleasing result but has some powerful in depth features when you are ready to use them.

If you already know your way around Photoshop you have a big head start compared to my level of knowledge when I first got into digital astrophotography.

Clear Skies

[Moonshed]

Thanks for all the advice guys, much appreciated. From what I have gathered it would seem  my Registax and Photoshop will be good enough to get the job done. After I have gained some experience and start producing some semi-decent images then I can start to think about getting better software. Until then I will just stick to the ones I know and are used to. Today I started reading the instructions that came with the digital timer remote control. My goodness, if I am struggling just to get to grips with the timer how on earth will I ever manage to take images? It all seems rather daunting venturing into the digital side of astrophotography. Oh well, I am committed to it now, the money has been spent, the goods have all arrived so all I have to do is figure out how to use it all. What could possibly go wrong?

Thanks again

Keith

[MattJenko]

Good luck. It is a real test of patience and determination, but it can be extremely rewarding and fun.

[Bizibilder]

Registrax for "movies" and Deep Sky Stacker (freeware) for DSLR stills are the stacking programmes of choice.  PS is about the best general image manipulation software out there.