Diffraction spike processing

[Datalord]

I've been struggling with processing my images for my stars and yesterday I wanted to do something about it. The trouble is the stars grow, but the diffraction spike on the medium large stars doesn't really get enhanced the way I would hope. The spike is there hidden in the data, but too faint.

So I made a Photoshop Action (see bottom) which adds a spike in the same color, in a separate layer, adds noise, blur and then the opacity can be set to how prominent you want the spike to be.

1. An example of a star with a stunted spike.

2. Select the star from the background layer.

3. Play the DiffractionSpike action

4. The spike is created. The size is relative to the size of your selection on the star and placed slightly off center.

5. The layer is selected, so Ctrl+A and Ctrl+T let's you transform and move the spike in position.

6. Blur the center of the spike.

7. Finally, set the opacity of the new layer to somewhere between 10 and 20.

End result

 

And here seen in full.

 

The Action:

Datalord PS Actions.atn

 

 

Edited May 12, 2020 by Datalord