Photoshop

[Simon Dunsmore]

Hi Folks,

Hoping you thechi types may be able to help. Can I ask which version of Photoshop would work best for processing astrophotography images? Would Photoshop 2021 elements work?

Thanks for your advice 

Simon 

[ollypenrice]

Elements is a very lightweight version of Ps and would not, in my view, suffice for proper AP processing. Anything from CS2 onwards will do fine.  I have CS3 and the up to date rental version on my PC but I often default to CS3 because my fingers are more familiar with the shortcuts etc.

Olly

[Alien 13]

Affinity Photo is a genuine competitor to PS and now has a suite of astrophotography tools included, the price is very reasonable with discounts offered on a regular basis.

Alan

[Simon Dunsmore]

23 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

Affinity Photo is a genuine competitor to PS and now has a suite of astrophotography tools included, the price is very reasonable with discounts offered on a regular basis.

Alan

Thanks Alan, Can I ask if there are any online tutorials that you would recommend for Affinity? As a total noob, it was the abundance of you tube tutorials that got me thinking about Photoshop.

Cheers 

Simon 

[Sabalias]

Hi Simon,

I was in a similar boat to you a little while ago but couldn't bring myself to spend the kind of money required for a PS license; instead I plumped for Affinity. Now, I'm still pretty new to Affinity Photo but I've been able to use it relatively successfully by following some YouTube tutorials done by James Ritson (their in-house product expert).

Cheers,

Stu

[Steve143]

Hi,

I've been toying with the idea of using Affinity - the reviews I've seen are very positive about it. So far I've been trying the free software packages, such as GIMP, StarTools and Siril. All of these have plenty of tutorials and suggested workflows on Youtube and I'm still trying to decide whether to stick with the free software or go for Affinity (I don't think paying a monthly subscription for PS would be beneficial for me at least). I just need to pick one software package and then put in the time to learn how to get the best out of it, especially for DSOs. 

Cheers,

Steve 

[Alien 13]

1 hour ago, Simon Dunsmore said:

Thanks Alan, Can I ask if there are any online tutorials that you would recommend for Affinity? As a total noob, it was the abundance of you tube tutorials that got me thinking about Photoshop.

Cheers 

Simon 

I have not realy looked too much at tutorials as for me moving from PS CS6 to Affinity was almost painless as they look very similar. There are however a lot of users on this site and plenty of you-tube vids.

The main reason I jumped ship was because the text and toolbars with my version of PS got progressively smaller with each iteration of a new laptops ever expanding screen resolution, it got so bad that I couldn't read anything on screen without a magnifying glass.

Alan

[teoria_del_big_bang]

7 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

The main reason I jumped ship was because the text and toolbars with my version of PS got progressively smaller with each iteration of a new laptops ever expanding screen resolution, it got so bad that I couldn't read anything on screen without a magnifying glass.

I know exactly where you are coming from Alan, my laptop screen is pretty redundant for me as I need a 2nd monitor connected to see anything these days even with my new perscription glasses.
Its a bit ironic really when I choose to look at things light years away and I can see the dammed thing sat on my lap 🙂 

Steve

[Alien 13]

8 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

I know exactly where you are coming from Alan, my laptop screen is pretty redundant for me as I need a 2nd monitor connected to see anything these days even with my new perscription glasses.
Its a bit ironic really when I choose to look at things light years away and I can see the dammed thing sat on my lap 🙂 

Steve

I did trawl through the Adobe user groups and it appears that the older versions of PS (all but the pay monthly) will default to run at the computers natural max resolution with no options to change that..

Alan 

[Tiny Clanger]

1 hour ago, Alien 13 said:

I did trawl through the Adobe user groups and it appears that the older versions of PS (all but the pay monthly) will default to run at the computers natural max resolution with no options to change that..

Alan 

Yep , PS2 (which can be found for free ) displays with daftly tiny tool bars/icons, on current 'puters,  the only hopeful work around I found turned the cursor/pointer into a weird character of some sort , which was a total waste of time, so my last resort was to use win10 's screen magnifier app thingy, which makes for an irritating session .

I'm not doing astro photo editing though, and for simple editing  the processor can cope with without falling over,  I often drag out an old win7 laptop instead of the whizzy newer one !

Heather

[Jerry Barnes]

I'm fairly new to all this and have Photoshop, Affinity and Pixinsight.  I use PS for ordinary photography and PI for Astro.  I'll probably not renew my PS subscription when the time comes as it quite expensive and Affinity can do all I need.  Before I got PI I found Affinity plus James Ritson's macros (after using DSS to stack) very good to see an image very quickly, then work on it either in Affinity of PS.  I think if you learn Affinity its better than Elements and for many folk just as useful as PS.  (I bought Affinity to do focus stacking for macro photography before they added astro support).  Sorry, probably too much advice...

[Simon Dunsmore]

Hi All, Huge thanks for all your replies and advice.  I think I'm going to take a look at Affinity, for the price it has to be worth a try and doesn't require to higher spec to operate it.

Thanks again 

Simon 

[Alien 13]

3 hours ago, Simon Dunsmore said:

Hi All, Huge thanks for all your replies and advice.  I think I'm going to take a look at Affinity, for the price it has to be worth a try and doesn't require to higher spec to operate it.

Thanks again 

Simon 

Its even better when its either 30% off or half price as it often is 😋

Alan

[Elp]

GIMP is free, a bit awkward to use however coming from PS background.

Regarding tiny icons/text in PS, lower the screen resolution in "display" settings.

[rickwayne]

I find PS a nearly indispensable tool for finishing touches for just about all my photography, astro included. But having done some soup-to-nuts processing with it, ugh, never again. Astro-specific packages such as Astro Pixel Processor, PixInsight, and SiRiL simply have the tools to streamline some of the specific problems we encounter. I dunno, maybe there's a plugin for doing mean stacking with winsorized rejection in PS.

It's not that it's impossible to get great results with Photoshop, it's just that achieving them requires a lot of time, or a lot of expertise, or both.

If you intend to do a lot of other photography, then your pixel editor matters a lot and you might want to put your limited budget there. If astro is a main goal, consider putting money into one of the dedicated packages, and use a cheap or free editor (The GIMP comes to mind).  SiRiL + GIMP are a completely free solution  providing advanced astro-specific processing and reasonably advanced tweaking of the result. I will probably have to go back to GIMP when I retire and can no longer use the University's PS license.