Affinity Photo: Astrophotography macros, video tutorials and other resources

[James Ritson]

Hello all, I hope it's OK to post this thread (and that I'm using the correct forum). I wanted to introduce myself: I'm the Affinity Photo product expert and I work for Serif who are responsible for the Affinity range of software. I've already seen a couple of threads and posts here about Affinity Photo and its usefulness for astrophotography image editing.

As it has been noted previously, version 1.9 launched with a dedicated workspace for stacking astrophotography data—this came about because one of the developers and myself are keen astrophotographers, and seeing as Affinity Photo has other advantages for astrophotography retouching it made sense to put the effort in so that people could stack in the software as well and therefore have an all-in-one solution.

Basically, I'm a huge astrophotography geek, especially when it comes to the retouching aspect of the genre: I've been producing a variety of official video tutorials and providing macros (essentially the equivalent of 'actions') and example documents to try and make it as accessible as possible for people. I wanted to raise awareness about all this material that is available for people to take advantage of, and also to offer support on this forum if people had any questions about Affinity Photo for astrophotography.

 

Video tutorials

I've produced an array of video tutorials that cover stacking and subsequent editing techniques for various composition setups (e.g. one shot colour, LRGB, SHO, bi-colour, greyscale colour mapping), as well as some shorter videos that demonstrate how to use certain features like the background colour removal filter, file groups, sigma clipping etc. The best place to see them all is on YouTube with the Astrophotography playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjZ7Y0kROWit-4cZY2A-tiEsYaWzWQoIC

 

 

Macros

Since the release of version 1.9, I've been releasing and updating macros to support the software. As well as being a workflow aid to speed up the editing process, I also wanted to highlight the various non-destructive functionality that Photo offers, as the natural tendency is to try and recreate equivalent workflows from Photoshop which are not always the most efficient. The macro functionality includes:

• Automated tone stretching: normalised, logarithmic, colour preserving options.
• Composition setups: designed for greyscale data, these will quickly set up the appropriate layer structure, blend modes and colour mapping for combinations such as RGB, LRGB, SHO, HSO, HOO and many other variations, including more exotic combinations like HORGB-L and HaRGB-L.
• Structure enhancement, local contrast enhancement, structure softening, highlight brilliance enhancement
• Live luminosity masks that allow you to reduce background or star luminosity, produce weighted saturation masks etc
• Star reduction and fringing removal
• Star motion deconvolution
• Colour signal options including selective luminosity and saturation enhancement
• Noise reduction: luma and chroma, just chroma, structure denoising and harsh/blocky noise removal
• RGB and Min/Max calculation live luminosity options, to alter brightness and contribution of colour channel data
• Monochrome colour mapping for single greyscale data compositions
• Merge to 16-bit sRGB/wide gamut options (after tone stretching) to improve compositing performance on older/weaker machines. A separate 16-bit category with most macro behaviours tweaked to compensate for the difference in gamma compositing (32-bit uses linear compositing, 16-bit uses gamma transformed non-linear compositing).

I tend to add to these macros and improve them quite regularly, and they are now on version 9!

Alongside this latest release, I have finally managed to plan, record and edit a comprehensive video tutorial that covers how to use each macro in detail, and it's 41 minutes long! The tutorial can be viewed on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/s2vVO9WoDC0

I provide the macros as a free download, available on Gumroad (https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_macros) and my website (https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html)

 

Example documents

I have started compiling finished example .afphoto document files and providing them so that people can explore the layer structure and see how various non-destructive retouching can be achieved. The documents are produced from a combination of my own data and from remote imaging services. The layers are all colour-coded (the key is provided in the readme PDF) and you are free to experiment with the layers to gain insight into how they are all being used to reach the final result.

I provide these with an arbitrary £1 (GBP) fee, as Gumroad does not allow free downloads over a certain file size, and these documents are fairly large! Download link: https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_example_documents

There are currently 16 example documents featuring a variety of composition setups, and they are:

• California Nebula HOS
• Cone Nebula Ha
• Heart Nebula Ha
• Helix Nebula HORGB-L
• Orion Nebula OSC
• Rosette Nebula SHO
• Sculptor Galaxy LRGB
• Tarantula Nebula HaOIII
• Tarantula Nebula LRGB
• Crescent Nebula OHS
• Pleiades RGB
• Squid Nebula OSH
• Thor's Helmet HSO
• North America Nebula OSC
• Witch Head Nebula LRGB
• Rho Ophiuchi LRGB

(OSC stands for one-shot-colour imagery from bayer sensors).

 

Data sets and finished documents

More recently, I have also been providing downloadable data sets along with a finished .afphoto example document. The idea is that you can stack the data yourself in Affinity Photo and learn what its stacking functionality is capable of (e.g. sigma clipping to reject outlier pixels, file groups to quickly stack multiple data sets), then follow along with the finished document to see which macros and techniques have been used to achieve the end result.

All data is provided as calibrated FIT files, so there is no need to lengthen the stacking process with calibration frames.

Like the example documents, I provide these with an arbitrary £1 (GBP) fee, as Gumroad does not allow free downloads over a certain file size, and the data sets are typically quite large.

So far I have made available:

Pleiades (M45) one shot colour bayer sensor: https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/pleiades
Triangulum Galaxy (M33) monochrome LRGB: https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/triangulum_galaxy
Orion Nebula (M42) bi-colour HOO: https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/orion_nebula

I hope all the above material is of interest to fellow astrophotographers—we're always keen to find out if people are having a good experience with Affinity Photo for editing, and what the current frustrations or issues are. If anyone has any queries or feedback I've made sure to follow this thread so I can be notified. Thank you for your time!

Edited January 31, 2022 by James Ritson

[PeterCPC]

I am a big fan of Affinity and use it with my astrophotography. I would like the macros but when I go to the download page and click on "i want this" nothing happens.

You have to buy them to get them to download. Now downloaded.

 

Edited December 19, 2021 by PeterCPC

[scotty38]

Hi James good to see you on here. If I get stuck I can pop round and see you……

Great resources and professionally done!

Edited December 19, 2021 by scotty38

[Dr_Ju_ju]

I'm not sure if this is right, but if you just enter "0.00" and then your email address, you will be sent an email with a link to the files.....

[Steve143]

Hi James,

As a beginner with astrophotography I have recently purchased Affinity Photo after viewing a few of your videos on YouTube. The above information and macros will hopefully help me get to grips with the software and with my image processing.

Thanks,

Steve  

[wornish]

Great to see you on here.  I have already commented on your latest YouTube video it is truly excellent.  For all those on here who are not familiar with what you can now do using affinity photo I really recommend you take a look.  Especially those who use Photoshop for their Astrophotography processing.

[jjosefsen]

Hi james,

Great to see you here!

I really like Affinity Photo and have been playing with it in place of using PixInsight, as I enjoy working in it.

I still feel like there are some things in PI I can't really do without: Deconvolution and Local Histogram Equalization for instance, and also some more control on the stacking process, particularly when it comes to frame weighting.

So for now it is still a combination of PI and Affinity Photo for me.

 

Can you tell us if there are any planned new features related to Astrophotography comming in the next year?

[dannybgoode]

Wow - this looks really interesting. I'm a big Affinity fan and great to see AP being more and more integrated.

Will be watching the videos for sure and it looks to be another great option. I too use PixInsight a fair amount but the more decent tools the better and in particular it gives alternatives to those starting out. 

[James Ritson]

On 19/12/2021 at 12:28, scotty38 said:

Hi James good to see you on here. If I get stuck I can pop round and see you……

Great resources and professionally done!

Aha, not too far away then I take it? I used to live in Woodhall Spa, moved to Newark, then to Boughton (near Ollerton) which had some great skies for seeing around the pit wood, then finally moved back to Newark this year.

9 hours ago, jjosefsen said:

Hi james,

Great to see you here!

I really like Affinity Photo and have been playing with it in place of using PixInsight, as I enjoy working in it.

I still feel like there are some things in PI I can't really do without: Deconvolution and Local Histogram Equalization for instance, and also some more control on the stacking process, particularly when it comes to frame weighting.

So for now it is still a combination of PI and Affinity Photo for me.

 

Can you tell us if there are any planned new features related to Astrophotography comming in the next year?

Hi, the deconvolution would certainly be useful. May I ask what local histogram equalisation does? Is it similar to the tone stretching macros in my macro pack? (They will perform various nonlinear transforms such as log2, sqrt then do histogram equalisation).

Frame weighting: is that evaluating the quality of frames? Photo has the "Select best light frames" percentage option when stacking which might be useful?

I did also read somewhere—I can't remember whether it was here or another forum—that someone passed on using Photo because the stacking did not offer kappa sigma clipping. This confused me because it's the default option in Photo and is pretty much essential for removing outlier hot pixels and inconsistent pixels.

I can't say whether any new features will make it into the next version, as the dev team are all hard at work and need to focus on other longstanding features that have not yet been implemented. We did talk about the possibility of guided star removal in the future, however.

Edited December 20, 2021 by James Ritson

[scotty38]

41 minutes ago, James Ritson said:

Aha, not too far away then I take it? I used to live in Woodhall Spa, moved to Newark, then to Boughton (near Ollerton) which had some great skies for seeing around the pit wood, then finally moved back to Newark this year.

Yes in a small village just outside Newark. I know Boughton too and we have friends in Woodhall, small world 😀

 

[Gfamily]

Oh wow - shared with a couple of FB groups - in particular how it simplifies developing an image from the data 

 

[jjosefsen]

On 20/12/2021 at 18:13, James Ritson said:

Aha, not too far away then I take it? I used to live in Woodhall Spa, moved to Newark, then to Boughton (near Ollerton) which had some great skies for seeing around the pit wood, then finally moved back to Newark this year.

Hi, the deconvolution would certainly be useful. May I ask what local histogram equalisation does? Is it similar to the tone stretching macros in my macro pack? (They will perform various nonlinear transforms such as log2, sqrt then do histogram equalisation).

Frame weighting: is that evaluating the quality of frames? Photo has the "Select best light frames" percentage option when stacking which might be useful?

I did also read somewhere—I can't remember whether it was here or another forum—that someone passed on using Photo because the stacking did not offer kappa sigma clipping. This confused me because it's the default option in Photo and is pretty much essential for removing outlier hot pixels and inconsistent pixels.

I can't say whether any new features will make it into the next version, as the dev team are all hard at work and need to focus on other longstanding features that have not yet been implemented. We did talk about the possibility of guided star removal in the future, however.

I won't even try to explain the math (I can't  ), but you can use it to enhance contrast on variable structure sizes in a non-linear image.

From the documentation:

Histogram equalization takes the histogram and computes a transfer curve, which grants more brightness range to higher histogram peaks and less brightness range to histogram valleys. In other words, large areas of similar brightness get more contrast. Local histogram equalization works on individual pixels and computes a transfer curve from the histogram of a pixel neighborhood.

 

"Select best light frames" is nice, but what is it based on? PSF? SNR? It would be nice to have a little more input on how it determines the best frames.

Even better would be if the weighting would be taken into account when stacking, so not just rejecting whole subs, but using all (above  a threshold) and just varying the contribution to the stack.

 

I understand that the above is some very specific Astro related things, and you are getting into the nutty gritty part of it, so maybe not at the front of the roadmap.

Like I said I really enjoy Affinity Photo, and it is a Photoshop slayer for me, which speaks for its great use and value.

 

I hope we hear more from you on this forum, particularly about your own imaging projects as well. 

 

//Clear skies

Edited December 21, 2021 by jjosefsen

[powerlord]

I've  been using Affinity Photo for 2 years now I think - finally got sick of Adobe. After a fairly uphill struggle, I started to realise I like Affinity more. Your tutorials James made starting to use it for AP really easy when I started the hobby beginning of this year. Being native 32 bit is massive. I'd love to see integration with a 32 bit startnet++ (I sue startXterminator just now), and some sort of configurable auto stetching would also be great.

Fit support has been a real biggy, but I can't say i use stacking much, it just doesn't give me the control I get with Astro Pixel Processor... though by jove its fast!

I'd also like to see the align by stars get better. At the moment I find it works (i.e. does anything at all) about 10% of the time.

stu

 

[Littleguy80]

Hi James. Thanks so much for posting and sharing all these great resources. One thing I’d love to see is a really good guide to processing Milky Way images. This is something I’ve really struggled with. I’ve made some progress but I’m sure an expert could share all sorts of tips and tricks to help me and others along   

[James Ritson]

Hi all, I've taken the above feedback into account: @jjosefsen, I will check with the developer how best light frame selection is actually implemented so I can give you an accurate answer.

@powerlord that's interesting about the Align Layers by Stars feature, usually it works flawlessly unless one of the images has significant star bloat. For example, I tried to align two stacks of M42, one with 180s subs, the other with 15s subs, and because the stars were overexposed with the longer exposure stack it failed to align. Generally, though, outside of exposure merging, it should be fine–what are you using it with? Have you tried using file groups within the stacking workspace? It aligns different data groups during the actual registration process, therefore it avoids resampling (higher quality) and will likely be more successful with alignment as well.

I also just wanted to let you all know that I've released version 10 of the macros today: you can grab them for free directly on Gumroad or via my website. Alternatively, if you had already downloaded them previously, you can find the email with the download link and follow that again to re-download them.

Here is the change list for v10:

• Fixed issue with Normalised Tone Stretch where NaN (not a number) pixels could be created during tone stretching.
• Improved Soft Star Glow macro: completely changed implementation for a smoother appearance.
• New macro: Live Channel Mask, to easily mask based on channel contribution.
• New macro: Channel Masked White Balance, enabling you to change white balance and blackbody tint whilst masking to a specific RGB channel contribution.
• New macro: Average Neutralisation, useful for balancing out images that have strong colour casts.
• New macro: Diffuse Glow, renders a pleasing diffuse lighting effect on brighter areas of the image.
• New macro: Background Sharpening, which applies sharpening based on a non-destructive weighted intensity mask, avoiding bright areas such as star detail. Very useful for minimising black star halos around stars.
• New macros: Boost Red/Yellow Detail and Boost Blue/Green Detail. Compared to the Enhance Signal macros, these focus more on colour intensity as opposed to luminosity.
• New macro: Luma Denoise, for reducing luma noise independently of chroma noise.
• New macro: RGB + HOS (Mixed Luminance). Sets up RGB layers as colour data, then averages between Ha, OIII and SII data layers for luminance enhancement.
• New macro: Ha Luminosity Setup, to quickly take an additional Ha data layer and use it for luminance enhancement.
• New macro: Extract Inferred Ha Luminance, which extracts red channel data from your composition, tone stretches it and applies it non-destructively as a luminosity layer.

I haven't been shooting much over the holiday period as we ended up getting Covid and spending Christmas and New Year in isolation! It completely knocked us out, so I didn't even have the energy to jump on remote telescoping much, but I managed to produce a couple of results, mainly using the macros to achieve the majority of the editing:

I could have cropped Pleiades a bit more, but I'm quite fond of the detail on the outer parts of the image...

Edited January 9, 2022 by James Ritson

[Steve143]

On 09/01/2022 at 11:33, James Ritson said:

I could have cropped Pleiades a bit more, but I'm quite fond of the detail on the outer parts of the image...

Hi James,

Which of the macros did you use for the Pleiades? Any info on the work flow you used would be helpful.  

[James Ritson]

On 27/01/2022 at 16:38, Steve143 said:

Hi James,

Which of the macros did you use for the Pleiades? Any info on the work flow you used would be helpful.  

Hi @Steve143, here's a rough breakdown:

• Luma+Chroma Denoise (on the linear data)
• Colour Preserving Tone Stretch
• Live Background Subtraction to remove a red-ish colour cast
• Star Eater at 50% opacity to reduce star intensity
• Enhance Structure masked to bring out dust detail around the main stars
• RGB Luminosity—green and blue contribution brought up, red contribution all the way down
• Curves adjustment for a tone curve to boost the mid-tone detail
• Enhance Blue Signal for a richer blue colour around the stars
• Boost Red/Yellow detail to bring out very subtle colours in the surrounding stars
• Extract Inferred Ha Luminance to create a stretched luminosity layer based on red channel data—this helped bring out the dust and trail detail and also made the fainter stars more visible
• Reduce Harsh Noise (+) to tame some of the blocky noise at this point
• Soft Star Glow for some nice glow around the stars
• Diffuse Glow to bring in some deeper colour diffusion around the star detail
• Brightness & Contrast adjustment masked to exclude the bright star detail—this was to bring up the background tones
• Another Curves adjustment for a contrast tone curve
• Brightness & Contrast adjustment to increase general contrast
• Reduce Star Luminosity to dampen the bright star detail
• Another Curves adjustment to control tones
• Background Sharpening to sharpen detail whilst avoiding panda eyes
• Final tone adjustments (Curves, Brightness & Contrast etc)

 

So it's quite an iterative process. Some of my experimentation involved moving layers around in the layer stack Z-order, as this can affect the rendering. I've actually made some of my acquired data sets available for download on my website (https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html) including the Pleiades data—again, as it's via Gumroad and the download sizes vary from 1-5GB, I've added an arbitrary fee of £1 as I can't list them for free. They are hopefully good value for money, however, as they also include a finished .afphoto document with all the non-destructive edits, so you can stack the data yourself then follow along (or deviate!).

Thanks,
James

[Steve143]

5 minutes ago, James Ritson said:

Hi @Steve143, here's a rough breakdown:

• Luma+Chroma Denoise (on the linear data)
• Colour Preserving Tone Stretch
• Live Background Subtraction to remove a red-ish colour cast
• Star Eater at 50% opacity to reduce star intensity
• Enhance Structure masked to bring out dust detail around the main stars
• RGB Luminosity—green and blue contribution brought up, red contribution all the way down
• Curves adjustment for a tone curve to boost the mid-tone detail
• Enhance Blue Signal for a richer blue colour around the stars
• Boost Red/Yellow detail to bring out very subtle colours in the surrounding stars
• Extract Inferred Ha Luminance to create a stretched luminosity layer based on red channel data—this helped bring out the dust and trail detail and also made the fainter stars more visible
• Reduce Harsh Noise (+) to tame some of the blocky noise at this point
• Soft Star Glow for some nice glow around the stars
• Diffuse Glow to bring in some deeper colour diffusion around the star detail
• Brightness & Contrast adjustment masked to exclude the bright star detail—this was to bring up the background tones
• Another Curves adjustment for a contrast tone curve
• Brightness & Contrast adjustment to increase general contrast
• Reduce Star Luminosity to dampen the bright star detail
• Another Curves adjustment to control tones
• Background Sharpening to sharpen detail whilst avoiding panda eyes
• Final tone adjustments (Curves, Brightness & Contrast etc)

 

So it's quite an iterative process. Some of my experimentation involved moving layers around in the layer stack Z-order, as this can affect the rendering. I've actually made some of my acquired data sets available for download on my website (https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html) including the Pleiades data—again, as it's via Gumroad and the download sizes vary from 1-5GB, I've added an arbitrary fee of £1 as I can't list them for free. They are hopefully good value for money, however, as they also include a finished .afphoto document with all the non-destructive edits, so you can stack the data yourself then follow along (or deviate!).

Thanks,
James

Thanks James. I've got a steep learning curve ahead of me. I managed to capture about an hour's worth of data on the Pleiades last week so will see what I can get using your workflow. Really appreciate all the information.  

[James Ritson]

@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!

[James Ritson]

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

[fozzybear]

James,

Many thanks for all your hard work greatly appreciated. Just thought appropriate rather than an emoji Kudos

Andy

[powerlord]

SCNR! woohoo!! Downloading now.

[James Ritson]

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...

[James Ritson]

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!

[James Ritson]

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