Affinity Photo: Astrophotography macros, video tutorials and other resources

[AstroMuni]

On 22/05/2022 at 10:03, James Ritson said:

just another post to let you know I've released v13 of the macros

Do these macros work on the ipad version of Affinity photos?

[powerlord]

Just a note to say I now use these much more than I did. Thanks to things like the SCNR, and James' great docs.

[James Ritson]

4 hours ago, AstroMuni said:

Do these macros work on the ipad version of Affinity photos?

Hi @AstroMuni, yes, they will work on the iPad version too (just be aware there is no astro stacking functionality on the iPad version, but it will import 32-bit TIFFs or .afphoto files from the desktop version).

 

2 hours ago, powerlord said:

Just a note to say I now use these much more than I did. Thanks to things like the SCNR, and James' great docs.

Nice to hear! I'm doing a live stream this week dedicated to astrophotography editing, so that might give you some more ideas as well (I'll post a link soon)...

[AstroMuni]

1 hour ago, James Ritson said:

(just be aware there is no astro stacking functionality on the iPad version,

I wish it was made clearer on the website 😞 I had purchased it just last week based on this statement on the website.....
"Affinity Photo for iPad is a genuine desktop-grade, professional photo editing app. Completely reimagined for iPad with the same power as the desktop version and with complete file format compatibility, you can work across the same document wherever you are, without any compromise."

So what does the Stacking feature on ipad do? There is an option available I recall.

Anyway its good to hear that macros will work. Is there anything else that doesnt work please?

[James Ritson]

30 minutes ago, AstroMuni said:

I wish it was made clearer on the website 😞 I had purchased it just last week based on this statement on the website.....
"Affinity Photo for iPad is a genuine desktop-grade, professional photo editing app. Completely reimagined for iPad with the same power as the desktop version and with complete file format compatibility, you can work across the same document wherever you are, without any compromise."

So what does the Stacking feature on ipad do? There is an option available I recall.

Anyway its good to hear that macros will work. Is there anything else that doesnt work please?

Yes, that statement is 99% true—the stacking functionality would potentially work on iPad, but we didn't create the iPad UI for it because we didn't envisage that anyone would want to actually use it. Getting files onto iPad is still not as smooth as it could be, and syncing potentially gigabytes of FITs/RAW data through cloud storage when the app requests it for stacking would be rather painful. Most people dump images directly onto their laptops/workstations—we have to consider the realistic proportion of people that would use it on iPad versus the development time needed to implement the UI and also thoroughly test it to ensure the majority of iPads (e.g. from older generations) are performant...

The stacking feature that is present is live stacking: it aligns a series of images and performs operators on the range of pixel data such as Mean/Median etc. It's like Photoshop's Statistics except it renders live, so you can use it to remove outlier objects, increase SNR etc.

From memory, it's just the astro stacking that isn't present. All live filters, adjustments, tools etc are all there and functional, so you can certainly do a full edit if starting with the stacked image data.

[James Ritson]

Just a heads-up in case anyone is interested and is free at 4pm (BST) on Thursday: I'm doing an Affinity Photo live stream and it's an astrophotography special! I will go through the stacking and retouching process for at least two or three images, and I intend to demonstrate the most ideal non-destructive ways of doing things in Photo rather than porting over Photoshop techniques—things like false colour mapping for SHO data and so on. In all likelihood I'll use some of my macros as well!

I'm really looking forward to it, and I'll try and pack in as much useful material as I can. Here's the YouTube Live link which allows you to set a reminder before the stream date: 

 

[Edit] Holy moly, the embedded YouTube player is huge. Apologies, I can't see a way to reduce its size like you can with attached images..

Edited May 23, 2022 by James Ritson

[James Ritson]

Hi all, just a quick post to say that after the huge task of getting V2 released (along with tons of new video tutorials), I've managed to sit down and update the astrophotography macros to take advantage of V2's new functionality.

It's only the beginning, really, and as I experiment over time I'll likely find more uses for new V2 functionality, but for now I've released V14 of the macros. There are improvements to bandpass sharpening and some useful new retouching functions that use live masks and compound masks. You can download them from my website (https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html) or directly from Gumroad (https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_macros) and just put '0' into the input field to get them for free.

Please note that V14 and future releases will only be compatible with V2 and higher of Affinity Photo (since they now use certain V2 functionality). I am however providing a 'Legacy Macros' ZIP file that contains V13 of the macros, which will remain compatible with 1.10 and 1.9 releases.

Thanks again!
James

[Spile]

I’ve used Serif software for over 20 years and I still use all three V2 applications every day but as a visual observer not for AP!

I am a regular contributor to the Affinity forums and very pleased with the upgrade. Well apart from the new export submenu and poor contrasting UI.

[James Ritson]

On 16/12/2022 at 21:49, Spile said:

I’ve used Serif software for over 20 years and I still use all three V2 applications every day but as a visual observer not for AP!

I am a regular contributor to the Affinity forums and very pleased with the upgrade. Well apart from the new export submenu and poor contrasting UI.

Hi, I take your point about the low contrast UI—thankfully, in Preferences>User Interface you can adjust text contrast and UI brightness, and there are Default and High preset buttons you can click to quickly increase the UI contrast.

The export dialog was changed at this point in time, as a drop-down for the formats allows us to add more formats in the future easily (rather than add to the already long horizontal list of iconographic formats in V1). Given a bit of time it will hopefully make sense...

All the best!

[Spile]

8 hours ago, James Ritson said:

The export dialog was changed at this point in time, as a drop-down for the formats allows us to add more formats in the future easily (rather than add to the already long horizontal list of iconographic formats in V1). Given a bit of time it will hopefully make sense...

 

Hi James

The biggest annoyance is that the export option and indeed preset does not remember settings and reverts to “All Spreads”. I was hoping that this would have been fixed with the V2 upgrade.

[windjammer]

Hi JR

I have been using AP and your macros for the last few months - my processing has improved hugely.  Great job.  

One thing I would like to see is the ability to export files as 32 bit FITS.  I use external tools like graxpert and pixinsight, and using tiffs to move between AP and others doesn't seem quite right.  I am sure bit depth gets mangled along the way!

Simon

 

 

 

 

[powerlord]

Tbh iv went back to v1.

V2 seems unusable on my mac. Layer live filters don't work properly, masks don't work, it's a mess.

Hopefully they'll sort it soon.

[powerlord]

Oh.. And the genius who made ".aphoto"  not only not backward compatible, but with no way of save a v1 version!!!!

[Spile]

After reading the Affinity forums it would appear that Mac versions seem to be crashing more than Windows ones. I fall into the latter camp and have no issues in this respect.

[powerlord]

I'll let others post the bug reports - I'm happy to use v1 for now. It does seem some very basic bugs to be released with.

stu

[James Ritson]

Sorry to hear you haven't been having a great experience with it—it's frustrating because the apps work absolutely fine here, and V2 on Windows has had a huge OpenCL stability upgrade, which is very useful for 32-bit compositing as that's very taxing on the CPU.

 

Quote

V2 seems unusable on my mac. Layer live filters don't work properly, masks don't work, it's a mess.

@powerlord what issues are you having with masks? They behave the same as they did in V1 here. Also, if you're able to expand on the live filter issues that would be really helpful, as I haven't seen any major issues here—there may still be tile compositing issues with OpenCL that we need to iron out, so we're keen to know about any use cases and examples.

[powerlord]

32 minutes ago, James Ritson said:

Sorry to hear you haven't been having a great experience with it—it's frustrating because the apps work absolutely fine here, and V2 on Windows has had a huge OpenCL stability upgrade, which is very useful for 32-bit compositing as that's very taxing on the CPU.

 

@powerlord what issues are you having with masks? They behave the same as they did in V1 here. Also, if you're able to expand on the live filter issues that would be really helpful, as I haven't seen any major issues here—there may still be tile compositing issues with OpenCL that we need to iron out, so we're keen to know about any use cases and examples.

I'll do a video showing the issue with an image I have.

[windjammer]

>>V2 on Windows has had a huge OpenCL stability upgrade,

Fyi, I run Windows10. I had the OpenCL hardware acceleration turned off in V1 because of crashes.  The download of V2 turned it on again.  V2 had a spate of crashing, so it is now turned off, which got around the issue.  So perhaps some more work to be done on that!

Simon

[powerlord]

I just installed the update to v2 on mac.. Now you can count the seconds between turning a layer on or off and seeing the results.. How on earth did this get through testing?

[James Ritson]

On 21/12/2022 at 19:35, powerlord said:

I just installed the update to v2 on mac.. Now you can count the seconds between turning a layer on or off and seeing the results.. How on earth did this get through testing?

Have you got an example document I can look at? V2 if anything is faster here (some improvements to GPU compositing for export, for example), so that does sound odd. What are your specs?

 

On 21/12/2022 at 16:25, windjammer said:

>>V2 on Windows has had a huge OpenCL stability upgrade,

Fyi, I run Windows10. I had the OpenCL hardware acceleration turned off in V1 because of crashes.  The download of V2 turned it on again.  V2 had a spate of crashing, so it is now turned off, which got around the issue.  So perhaps some more work to be done on that!

Simon

Thanks for letting me know, are you by any chance using Intel HD integrated graphics? We're still having issues with OpenCL there, it's all driver related. I think we've ironed out crashing on the majority of nVidia cards (mainly due to memory allocation and budgeting), but it's useful to hear about different users' experiences.

[windjammer]

Yes, using onboard graphics (Dell motherboard), no 3rd party graphics card.  They always give up the ghost sooner or later!

Simon

[James Ritson]

Hello again everyone, I wanted to inform you that I've just released V15 of the astrophotography macros.

As always, you can download them from my website (https://jamesritson.co.uk/resources.html) or directly from Gumroad (https://jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_macros) and just put '0' into the input field to get them for free.

This version comes with a big change list, and also a huge improvement in tone stretching. The older methods have been revised, with vastly better highlight protection, but you'll also find some new mono data stretching macros (regular and log). These enable you to pull much more detail out of mono data. Additionally, there's a macro to convert an OSC data layer to separate mono RGB layers, which means you can easily use this new tone stretching method with one shot colour camera data as well.

It's a pretty big update, and I'm also conscious that the macros should be used a certain way to get the most out of them, so I've produced a video to go along with this update which you can watch here: 

 

 

Here's the full change list:

• Mono Data Stretching
  • This is a completely new approach to tone stretching for monochrome data. Rather than tone stretching the composited, colour-mapped result, these macros will instead tone stretch each mono layer individually. You can colour map using the data setup macros after this process. I have found that this approach can yield some much better results for complex nebulae, and it’s easier to pull the colours apart and create a final image with more depth.
  • There are two methods available for RGB, L-RGB and SHO data sets: Mono Stretch, and Mono Log Stretch. The log stretch may work better for clean, high quality data. If the data is not optimal, I would advise trying the standard stretch. Do try both, however, and see which works better for you.
  • Note that this should be considered as an alternative to the existing tone stretching methods, not a replacement! As always, experiment and see which methods work best for your data: indeed, you may find that one method may be exceptional for one set of data, but not another.
     
• Stretch Selected Layer
  • The mono data stretching macros also require masking to avoid overexposing bright detail: the masks for this process are based off an average of several different data sets. You may find however that you need more manual control over this process: you can use these macros to stretch an individual layer that you have selected. A Stretched (Merge Down) layer will be created, with a Protect Highlights mask inside it. Configure this mask until the highlight detail looks suitable for that data, then select the parent layer and use Layer>Merge Down to merge it into the initial data layer underneath. You can then repeat this process for all of your data layers until you are ready to colour map them.
     
• Redesigned Tone Stretching macros
  • The original tone stretching methods—Normalised, Logarithmic and Colour Preserving—have also received a revamp, and they now protect highlight detail much more effectively.
     
• Enhance Mono Layers
  • To aid the mono data stretching process, there are also macros to enhance specific mono layers (e.g. SII, Ha, OIII, R, G, B etc). You can use these to bring out more detail for a specific data layer, e.g. if the SII detail was a bit faint and you wanted to enhance it.
     
• Boost Mono Layers
  • These are designed to be used after the tone stretching process and further on in the edit. You may want to simply bring out some more colour or detail in a particular data layer such as OIII, or the G layer. This will copy the specific data layer, move it to the top and enhance its structure whilst preserving highlight detail.
     
• Darken Mono Stretched Result
  • When using the new mono data stretching macros, you will often find that the resulting composition is quite bright once all the layers are blended together. This will produce a pleasing brightness reduction, whilst also offering an optional non-linear brightness boost that will even out the contrast for trickier data.
     
• Highlight Recovery
  • If you are compositing multiple mono layers together (e.g. RGB, SHO), this macro can be used to recover any blown out highlight detail.
     
• Post-Tone Stretch Log Transform
  • I was finding with some imagery (especially L-RGB and RGB compositions) that I needed to pull more general tonal detail away from the background, and was struggling with conventional adjustments. I adapted the Logarithmic Tone Stretch so it could be applied after tone stretching to further bring out subtle detail, with configurable range and blend sliders.
     
• Masked Gamma Stretch
  • Creates a structural mask that excludes star detail and applies it to a Levels adjustment, allowing you to perform a non-linear gamma boost. Especially useful when used with individual colour channels (e.g. raising gamma of a weaker colour channel without overexposing bright details).
     
• Masked Curves Stretch
  • Performs a masked tone stretch that excludes bright star and nebula detail. Good for increasing brightness and contrast of darker areas.
     
• Masked Contrast Boost
  • Applies a gentler curves adjustment that is masked to exclude bright detail. Useful for a general contrast enhancement without significantly brightening detail.
     
• Enhance Nebula Structure
  • Enhances nebula structure whilst aggressively excluding bright star detail. The Star Exclusion Mask can be controlled with minimum, maximum and highlight threshold parameters.
     
• Masked Gamma Stretch
  • Similar to the ‘masked stretch’ concept that is so popular for boosting fainter detail without overexposing stars, this is best used for subjects with tricky bright areas and star detail. It creates a structural mask and uses it when gamma stretching.
     
• Masked Curves Stretch
  • Like the Masked Gamma Stretch, this creates a structural mask and uses it with a Curves adjustment to boost tones in the image without affecting bright detail.
     
• Masked Contrast Boost
  • Creates a structural mask and uses it with a Brightness / Contrast adjustment to provide a decent contrast enhancement.
     
• Highlight Protected Tone Lift
  • This has replaced the ‘Final Tone Lift’ macro and is more or less the same: it simply lifts the overall brightness and contrast of your composition without overexposing the highlights.
     
• Nonlinear Tone Boost
  • A nice simple equation filter option for achieving a tonal boost that focuses on raising darker tones. This is generally useful if you are trying to brighten up your composition but Curves or other adjustment layers just aren’t working.
     
• Weighted Intensity Mixer
  • Lets you mix together different weighted intensity calculations based on the RGB channel data. This could be useful if you are struggling to balance the luminosity of your different colours and want to quickly experiment with various blends.
     
• Weighted RGB Tonal Boost
  • Lets you add a subtle brightness and tone boost with configurable RGB contribution, in addition to offset sliders which allow you to gradually raise the brightness of the colour channel information in a gentle, non-linear fashion.
     
• Dual Band Colour Mixer
  • An experimental option: allows you to mix three different weighted intensity calculations for RGB channel data, producing a look similar to dual band compositions (e.g. HaOIII, HaSII). For further experimentation, try changing the layer’s blend mode to Saturation or Hue.
     
• Star Size Reducer
  • This has replaced the Star Eater macro. This is a less surgical and cleaner application that can be controlled with a luminosity mask to protect shadow detail from ‘circular artefacting’. It generally dims and reduces the overall size of star detail.
     
• Reduce Star Intensity
  • This macro has been updated and is now more effective. It also comes with a Protect Shadows mask that can be configured to prevent ‘circular artefacting’.
     
• Enhance Nebula Structure
  • Similar to the existing Enhance Structure macros, this uses a different method to create a structural mask and may provide a subtle—yet useful—difference in rendering.
     
• Diffuse Glow
  • This has been updated to avoid darkening the majority of the image, and instead brighten the diffuse areas.
     
• Brighten Star Centres
  • Sometimes, with aggressive masked stretching or stretching that protects highlight detail, you will find that star centres are darker than their surrounding glow areas and the result looks odd. This macro will create a star mask using a convolution filter and enhance the brightness of the star centres to try and mitigate this.

 

Thanks again!
James

Edited February 4, 2023 by James Ritson

[Steve143]

3 hours ago, James Ritson said:

Hello again everyone, I wanted to inform you that I've just released V15 of the astrophotography macros.

Hi James,

Will these macros work with v1.10.6 or do I need v2?

Thanks.   

[James Ritson]

Hi Steve,

V2 only I’m afraid, they take advantage of new functionality that isn’t present in V1. I’ve clarified this on the website and download page but must confess I keep forgetting to mention it in forum posts, apologies.

You can almost guarantee there will be a sale at some point this coming year if that appeals. An alternative way to look at it would be that getting V2 entitles you to free 2.x updates until V3 (so basically the same model as V1 which ran for about seven years)…

[PeterC65]

Thanks for starting this thread and for creating the macros. I've only just stumbled across it!

I've had Affinity Photo 2.0 for a few month now and didn't realise it could do stacking. I mostly do EEVA but have tried collecting frames for later post processing without much success (using AutoStakkert and DeepSkyStacker). Using the stacking feature in Affinity Photo is proving much more effective, but still not always any better than the live stacking in SharpCap!

The macros are amazing. I'm still trying them out and have yet to understand their effects but the results are very impressive.