Basic Astro Image Processing with Affinity Photo

hello everybody and welcome back to my channel so I've heard a lot of rumblings online about this affinity photo software which seems like another piece of capable software for astro image editing it's very much like Photoshop but a very different as well and it's a lot cheaper I think I've paid $23.99 for the copy of the software where is my Photoshop sort of subscription is like $9.99 a month you just come with like cloud storage though but yeah that's $9.99 a month for like a 12 month contract whereas this is like a one-time cost of well it was on offer for twenty three nights and I think it usually cost like 46 pounds or 43 pounds or something like that but anyway it's it's kind of like the new kid on the block I've had a few emails and a few comments asking if I'm ever going to do some tutorials on affinity photo so I took the opportunity that the other day to download it and yeah I've spent a little while kind of working things out and I thought I'd do a quick tutorial on how to do some basic image editing in this software this video is no means like by no means a comprehensive guide it's just to get you started and kind of stretching and doing you know some basic stuff to your images so first things first I'm going to open up an image it's a 32-bit TIFF of the Orion Nebula now you can stretch in affinity as 32-bits if you know Photoshop you know everybody kind of like switch used to 16-bit pretty much straightaway when they open up an image so that's what I'm gonna do here I'm gonna go to the document convert formats and I'm going to select RGB 16 and then I'm gonna make sure black scaled is selected and now I'm going to do an initial stretch of the image now in Photoshop you kind of like all your tools are up here but over in affinity they're over here so I want to click on levels or it's the same can ctrl + L as a shortcut so for this first stretch we're going to leave the black slider exactly where it is and I'm gonna move the gamma slider to the left I'm gonna click merge and you'll see our histogram peak has suddenly appeared and our image is slowly he's getting lighter this time I'm gonna move the black level slider so that the line meets the histogram peak and I'm gonna move the gamma slider to the left there's no on-screen kind of like white line wait to show you where it is so don't do like a crazy stretch and go to much kind of sort of lightening sort of Midway I'm gonna think merge again and then again I'm gonna take the black slider to the left of the peak and the gamma slider to the left no notice changing as you do these stretches I kind of get it I'm trying to get it sort of around a third of the way across just to show like a good level of exposure in the image so nearly there I don't try one more you might not take it very very very small stretch of that last stretch and merge okay so I've got a nicely stretched image now I'm going to go to document and rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise because this is the kind of framing that I wanted for this image and then I'm gonna crop the edges some say you should do this first but I wanted to see exactly what where I need you to crop before stretching the so there we go I'm literally just going to crop those edges okay so we've got a nice amount of detail in the nebula so now I'm going to do a curves adjustment so once again it's here let me see if I can find it there you go curves now you can either just place points on the image and do like a nice s s-curve to give it a bit more contrast or you could do something very clever and click on picker now I want this background to be a little bit darker so I'm going to click on the background and then I'm just going to drag the mouse down and you'll notice the dot the background getting darker and then I want this nebula to get a little bit lighter so I'm going to click on the outside edges of the nebula and I'm going to drag up just a touch and then I'm going to click merge you've also got a history and everything in in affinity so you can go back so it's non-destructive next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do some color adjustments some saturation still trying to find everything so I'm going to go to vibrance I'm going to increase the vibrance a bit I'm going to increase the saturation a fair bit and I'm going to click merge now it's not you don't have to just click merge you can do different ways of blending and see how it it turns out I mean some of these might take you fancy if you're doing something a little bit out there there's a few more options than Photoshop that one's cool but I'm for this purpose I'm just going to leave it as normal so if your noise reduction you can either go to filters noise D noise and you can do it here or if you're used to doing your noise reduction in Camera Raw in Photoshop you can go to develop persona and for that you're going to want to come to app details so you can do a bit of sharpening first these performs very much like Camera Raw [Music] and let's add some noise reduction to so I'm just going to some 30% luminance thirty percent cooler noise and then wouldn't you've made all the required adjustments you can even add noise if it's too smooth you just click develop sometimes takes a little while [Music] so if that's a little bit too smooth you can just undo it either by going to edit and undo we can do control + Z so if we go back to noise D noise I've obviously given it a little bit too much to think about and if we zoom in you can see that's starting to look pretty good we haven't blown out the core either and there's a nice level of detail so while I'm here you can actually use plugins Photoshop plugins with affinity photo to get them to work you have to go to edit preferences Photoshop plugins and then you can click allow unknown plugins to use to be used I put all my Photoshop plugins in a specific folder unfortunately it's called Photoshop actions on my could be unfortunately actions do not work so if you've bought like astronomy tools action sets or a nice after actions they won't work in affinity but what does work is stuff like hlv g and the Nick collection [Music] we go to fill plugins HL VG and you can do hasta LaVista green as normal and you can also do things from the filters such as like dust and scratches to do a bit of star reduction or you can go to so if I go to navigator I'm sorry layers and then live filters you can also do a minimum blur to reduce stars as well it won't work very well on this image because there's not it's not a massive star field but that's the way you can do it so once you're done go to file export and then you can choose how to export your file and what size and quality etc but that is some basic image editing in affinity photo as always thanks for watching and bye for now you

Channel: AstroStace

Views: 12,107

Keywords: affinity photo, tutorial, astronomy, astrophotography, deep space photography, how to, photoshop, pixinsight, altair astro, zwo asi, space photography, image processing, astro, astro pixel processor, dslr astrophotography, milky way, long exposure, night photography, noise reduction, deep sky, post processing, night sky, photo editing, amateur astronomy, cmos camera, affinity photo tutorial, light pollution, affinity photo vs photoshop

Id: 4luNi0hspIM

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020