Astrophotography Stacking Feature in Affinity Photo 1.9 🆕 along with Easy Background Removal Filter

hi everyone and in today's video i want to show you how you can do astrophotography using affinity photo now i've actually been working on a tutorial to how to do that and then they released the 1.9 update and now a lot of what i was going to show you is actually built in and that is the astrophotography stacker so i've opened up affinity here and we're just going to go to file and we go new ask photography stack and it's going to open up this page here now what we basically need to do is just add the files it is that simple now we have light files bias darks dark flats and flats so you're going to want to collect as many of those things as possible and put them in the right category and you also have different file groups so there's one file group two three four so if you're doing multiple nights each night's gonna have its own darks and flats so this is a really powerful tool and i'm going to show you how to use this in the most simplistic way since i actually currently don't take biases dark dark flats or flats because i'm lazy actually it's because my camera is really good and therefore i don't need it but lazy i should be doing it but lazy [Laughter] all right so we're going to go light and we're going to basically click add files and it's going to open up a folder that's going to show us where the data is and here i'm taking the picture of andromeda that i've used before in a couple things mainly because i want to keep it the same and if i can hold down the shift key select all the data click open and it's going to take a couple seconds to load in and you're going to have all the light frames into the photos here and there's all the stacking methods i highly suggest sigma clipping this is useful to get rid of any sort of like star trails satellite trails meteorite strikes or other little imperfections that are in there just gets rid of them and you can set the threshold and the clipping iterations i've just left them as normal um at some point i might play around with a little bit longer to figure out what works best or worse but i suspect that it's highly dependent on your photos which is going to be dependent on what filters and what type of sky conditions you have and what scope you're using then there's the raw options um and you can basically pick inferred for most digital slrs however if you are imaging with a astro camera or some other more scientific grade cameras you may have to indicate what the rgb setting is or if you're shooting and you're imaging with monochrome pick monochrome the d mosaic method again by linear default just leave it default and your white balance just leave it at daylight generally i find daylight works the best obviously you have a master flat and a camera option if you're taking flats it might be worthwhile doing that um but generally i would say daylight works for most stuff and that's it that really is how simple this is and then after you have all this information you go and you hit stack don't hit apply hit stack and then it's going to stack the photos now depending on how fast your computer is and processing power etc this is going to take a while affinity photo is going to use about 98 of your cpu power so it's important that all the programs are probably turned off so that this will function as fast as possible i do want to make a comment that while we're waiting here that it's actually stacking the photos it's also doing alignment and everything else in the background it doesn't tell you this but that's what's necessary because i just threw a bunch of raw files in and i know that they are not perfectly aligned okay so after waiting a while um you end up with this image here which has now been stacked with the settings so now you hit apply so now you've hit apply you can end up with this picture into sort of a regular affinity photo and you can see here that you have the actual pixels if i turn this off that have been stacked together it does a level correction for you and you also have a curve correction that's done the first thing you should do here is actually go and then save the photo all right the next thing you're going to want to do is crop the image and the reason that you're going to crop the image at this point is simply because a lot of the steps that you're going to do you're going to want to use as much of the photo as possible oh come on there we go awesome so the next step i'm going to do is crop the photo and if i needed to i would also like rotate the photo and whatnot so we're going to get here we're going to hit crop we're going to hit apply and there we go and the next thing we're going to do is make sure that we're selected on the pixel layer over here is go to filters go down to ask photography and remove background and i generally like to go and click here left and right and basically you drag this little point here to where you want the background and sample radius there we go and we're going to pick a spot like that and then you're going to go and try to pick a few spots around where you know it should be background all right all right next thing you're going to want to do here is you're going to want to make some adjustments to this this is going to affect how much of your background is going to disappear or show you also have it up here in this direction here or you can pick sample position and at this point here this is where you're going to want to make additional curve adjustments to the image and then you can always go back and we're going to further try to remove the background a little bit um picking pretty much the darkest spot we can sample location we can do here find a good spot that's brighter than it needs to be there we go hit apply and now we have the galaxy here at we can see now part of the thing with this is that there's a lot of things that you can do with curves and levels as i said i'm not the most knowledgeable about affinity photo itself but from a perspective of not trying to go too crazy we can recolor the image we can do an hls adjustment uh what else we have we can adjust the white balance making it cool or warm if we want depending on what you're looking for there we go um but you can see here that we have andromeda galaxy it's come out pretty well now one of the things i'd like to do is called star net and in order to do star net since it's not built into fenty photo i'm going to say yet is that we have to save as and we have to save it as apparently i need to maybe hit save oh there we go what we need to do is we need to export it and we need to export it as a tiff and ideally we want to export it as a 16-bit tiff because that's what um star net takes and then we hit export and it really doesn't matter what the name is we're gonna hit save so i have starting at plus plus here let's do this in large icons so i took the tiff file i'm basically dragging and dropping it on to sarnet rgb and it's basically going to uh process that and other than saying it's not configured a thousand times it seems to be working so starnet basically removes the background from the image and it produces a starless image you can also have it where you produce a star mask but i generally in this case we just take a difference and then create the star mask separately we're just waiting for it to finish processing again this is one of these steps that takes a few minutes to go again depending on how fast your computer is but even with a powerful computer expect to wait a bit which then produces this starless tiff here which we can drag up and it will go here and you can see here there are no stars now if i take this image here and we're just going to do this quickly and we paste it on top what we want to do is actually pick the layers function here and we want to pick instead of normal we want to pick difference and this is our star mask that we will then save as a separate file alright so we're back here with the actual starless image now here's where we can actually go again with various adjustments layers etc and adjust the image um to what we want to make it look like okay and then when we go up here we can go to filters and we can do unsharp mask which will allow us to actually improve the sharpness of the background galaxy and this works for nebulas as well without destroying the stars this is one of the best parts of doing a star mask because a lot of stars just go bluey whenever you add sharpening to them and then now that we've actually pulled out a lot more detail in andromeda we then go and we will open and hopefully i'll have it here go want star mask okay and we'll take the star mask that we created before put it on top and then we'll go to layers and change it to add where is the ad does it have add there it is add and there we've added the stars back into the image and we've been able to pull out a lot more detail of and now we've actually gone and added the stars back into the image and we put a lot more detail now one of the things we can do if we want to get really fancy though if we can go to the star mask and we can actually go and colorize it since we know that the the stars are a particular color there's a bit of color in here but we're going to adjust the white balance pick cool and we can basically now obviously this is too extreme but we can make it where we want the stars a little yellow or a little blue there we go and we just simply merge those together visible and we copy that and we can actually stack that on instead that's add and there we've added a bit of color into the image and this i would say is are going to be our final picture so we're going to hit save um and then wait for it to save affinity photo takes a little while to save documents this size odd but go with it and we're gonna hit export and we're gonna export it as a jpeg we're gonna pick best quality and by linear is fine quality 100 whole document good and we're going to hit export and we're going to export that to the page and we're good to go and this is what we end up with our end result and it looks pretty good so this is the conclusion of my quick little tutorial on affinity photo obviously there's a few other things that we could do with this photo that includes trying to improve the localized gradients trying to remove a little bit more of the gradient across the image that we couldn't quite get with the background removal infinity photo and a few other little tweaks and settings that we could play with to try to get that better image however that's i'm gonna have to say for another tutorial as i'm still trying to figure out how to do that exactly in affinity photo without having to jump into other software so i hope that you did enjoy this tutorial and thank you for watching

Channel: Ember Sky Media

Views: 5,514

Keywords: affinity 1.9, affinity photo, affinity photo review, photo editing for beginners, affinity photo tutorial, affinity 1.9 review, affinity photo 1.9, astrophotography, astrophotography stacking, astrophotography stacking tutorial, astrophotography stacking for beginners, affinity photo 1.9 astrophotography stacking, affinity photo remove background, affinity photo astrophotography, affinity photo astrophotography image processing guide, affinity photo review 2021

Id: 5nFWNLA-30Y

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021