Editing Astrophotography in Affinity Photo - Basic Workflow

hey my name is Yahoo and you're watching out getting subs alright so here we go welcome to episode 1 of out getting subs my little yeah series of videos that I want to share with you just as a bit of background my name is Elton I'm live in Germany and I recently picked up Astro photography again after living in a big city about 15 years so there was not a not a good opportunity to get on the balcony or into the backyard and set up a big scope and go for a deep sky stuff so I stuck to Moon Jupiter or Saturn stuff like that but some months ago I moved out of the city into a portal free village basically and so I picked it up again and went deep sky and just dug my head into it and mm-hmm took a lot of inspiration from all the other great guys on YouTube like Robert Jones Astro backyard or Frank from Astro photo cool own Tim from Astro addict it's a huge source of inspiration and fun and knowledge so first of all thanks for that thanks for getting me hooked basically what you see behind me a lot of blinking lights and a piano that's my day job I'm a music composer for film and advertising so Astro photography will stay a hobby I'm not planning to do something full-time or go into photography full-time so it's just a way for me to just yeah get some fresh air get out be be alone think watch and ease my mind basically and learn a lot on the other side I love learning and there's such a steep learning curve in the beginning I thought for a for a first episode it would be cool to do something that I haven't seen yet on the other channels I watch and that maybe it's one thing that distinguishes me or my approach from from many others instead I do most of the post-processing of my images in affinity photo which is pretty similar to photoshop I know Trevor uses Photoshop it's basically yeah for me the best alternative to photoshop and it's cheaper it's still young so there's bugs but totally fine nothing to worry about and yeah I would like you invite you to check it out it's a it's a really cool software package for photography but also for design for vector stuff there's as you have any Adobe package you have it there as well like different softwares for different approaches so recently I shot the Orion Nebula m42 in a very mediocre night I should say there was clouds there was wind so not a lot of data captured because a lot of clouds were coming in so I had basically two hours to set up polar aligned set everything up start shooting so I ended up with I guess 20 22 minute exposures without auto get auto guiding and the wind started to knock on on the scope so the stars are not perfectly round so it's not a it's not the greatest image but I still wanted to take this one as an example for my basic approach to post-processing images in I don't know I hope you enjoy I would love to read your comments about it maybe there's other affinity users out there that are interested astrophotography that got some more tips or can tell me stuff I can do better here or better they're a big thank you on this side again to Trevor Jones he's done a lot of processing tutorials with Photoshop and you will recognize some of his approaches in there just on an affinity done a bit differently yeah I hope you enjoy it and see you next time [Music] alright so here we are in affinity photo 1.8 I've already loaded the result of my stack which I did in deep sky stacker it's gonna be a later tutorial or you can just look around YouTube there's a lot of a lot of content explaining deep sky stacker and how to stack your images this is a pretty I'd say mediocre stack of the Orion Nebula with its neighbor the running man hey Beulah it's basically 40 minutes of total exposure so 20 times 2 minutes with a lot of wind going on clouds coming in and out so I basically had two hours to set everything a polar align searching the object or pointing at the object doing test shots focusing start shooting and then wind came in and ice has been shot with the portable small rack you can see it in the background there it's the sky got a pro with Williams optics William optics sees 61 so a pretty small reflector and a Canaan a DD DSLR camera stock in that case so the results are not good it's not gonna be a National Geographic cover but I really like to process everything I'm shooting even if it's good data bad data because I I believe you can learn a lot more about processing your images when not having the greatest the greatest starting point so we're gonna use this one loaded in affinity it's a 32-bit 32-bit TIFF when you load it in so the first thing you want to do I already did that is converted to a 16-bit which is document convert format iccprofile and there you choose RGB 16 which will convert into 16-bit so that's our starting point few small things I wanna do before starting to stretch the image and do all the other stuff you see in my layout I got two very present windows here one is the info tab and one is the channels tab we're gonna use the channels later but I want to get into the info tab first we got a sampler here that's two samplers basically our RGB and a CMYK sampler what these do I'll show you in a minute but let's just delete this seemed like a sampler so click it and say remove selected sampler and let's add a new sampler which is also RGB we don't need to seem like a because we're not gonna print this or convert it to CMYK later so we don't need to be aware of our CMYK values for both of these samplers choose them switch them to sample from location which will give you a seat up here a little magenta crosshair that you can drag around in your image and I'm just gonna drag this one to a very dark location so let's see if we can find the location without a star or anything seems good so that's gonna be our reference point for our black tone basically our dark tone and I'm gonna do the same for a light tone so I'm taking the next simpler and drag it to I'm looking for a big star and I want to drag it not on to the star directly but just next to it so we have we can see if our stars have a reddish greenish bluish halo later and we can work against that so I'm just gonna leave it here we got our two samplers and now you see the values for RGB of every sampler showing up in the info tab and if we start to stretch the image you will see that these values will change and we're gonna try to keep them as close as possible together so we're here in the 25 24 to 26 range and here in a 140 to 170 range which also already indicates that there's a lot more blue in the bright star halos then there is red for example and we're trying to adjust these so they're close to each other and we have a very linear light and dark in our image so all right let's get into into stretching [Music] so to see what stretching can do for the image and what it actually is we're gonna just quickly open a new adjustment layer levels and there you can see the distribution of dark and light tones throughout all the data we collected so you see that there's a lot of unused space down here before the darkest shadows are coming in there's a lot of space up here but don't be mistaken there's a lot of data up here that we just don't see you'll see that later when we start stretching so what you want to do is get your black level up to where the first channel starts it's curve in our case the blue Channel we don't want to clip every anything off here so you don't want to put it here you just want to put it just there where the little curve begins and then we're gonna move moving our gamma to work against it basically and shift the middle of the spectrum to the left basically so we are stretching out the spectrum just to give us more detail and give us get rid of all the noise below and above the data we collected so I'm gonna turn this one down and there's first time we can look at our indicator we want to turn the gamma down until we're basically at almost the same value as before so we were at somewhere between 24 and 26 we're gonna do that again 19 20 24 I'm fine with that but what you're already seeing is there is a brighter gap now between red and blue and that's gonna be even brighter when we do more steps of stretching and that's something we will work against later when we're stretching the individual channels of the of the image normally I just leave this open and start the next stretching in this case just to speed things up I'm gonna merge this one with the layer so it's processed in there there's no way back basically we're gonna do this again stretching is always done in several steps so now what you see is our spectrum of tones is stretched out already the curves are not as steep anymore so we're basically zoomed in because we got rid of all the noise on the left and the right so I'm gonna do the same again move our black point in and move our gamma down until we're basically add round about the same values as before with our dark sampler 28 21 20 I'm fine with that you could start already to even this one out 28 to 20 so let's see let's get into the blue channel what you see here the blue channel starts just down here if we switch to red it will start way above that green will be somewhere in the middle so that's why red and green are much less affected by what we do right now and we can work against that by just moving the gamma for only the blue Channel in this case to get close to the R value 28 we're now at 27 for blue that's fine let's do the same with green get it up a bit alright so we have a very linear dark again we're gonna merge this one what we can do now is maybe two another one it depends on the image I definitely want to do another one just to get this faint nebulosity worked out a bit more I'm just gonna do a quick curve stretch in between just to separate the light from the from the dark areas a bit more so we want to have our our line pretty straight down here and what you can see if I will turn it up a lot that the bright areas will really start to shine now this is way too much for me I want to like the the inner core of the nebula I just love to see all those little stars in there there's people processing the image and and they end up with just a bright area down here really shiny I think it's it comes down to taste I just like to see the little stars and details in there that's all tastes basically alright let's keep it like this so our plex are basically untouched or almost the same values it's just our lights that have changed I'm going to merge this one and to another curve stretch because there's still space down here that we don't need clip that off and move the gamma back so we're ending up at the same values around about 26 23 25 fine with that perfect maybe even a bit more okay merge it so that's it for the first stretching session I guess there will be some more stretching going on later small adjustments when you see there's still some space to get the the nebula worked out but that's it for stretching now for the next step we want to try to deal and hopefully get rid of a lot of noise in our image noise is the number one enemy when it comes to astrophotography and in this case we don't have a lot of exposure time so there's still plenty of noise in there and I'm gonna I'll try and show you a way of getting rid of most of it without destroying too many details without ruining a lot of the fainter details in the object so a good way to do it is if you do the denoising per channel and affinity has this channel step or you can see all your color channels so we got a composite red green and blue we got the same for background which is this with this layer if we rename this layer to stack it would say state stack green red blue and what we want to do now is look at our individual channels and see which one is more noisy than the other and try to get rid in the noise you know off the noise in the channels with the most noise in there so we look at our red Channel zoom in a bit there's quite a bit of noise in here especially in these dark and faint areas here the green Channel looks very good which is yeah typical for DSLR cameras got a blue channel that is pretty noisy pretty big grains as well so compared to the red which is a small grain or fine grainy and the blue is a bit harsher so we're gonna Dino is the blue and the red Channel I'm gonna leave the green channel as is so let's start with the red make sure the pen back here the Edit Edit icon is activated so everything you're doing now will only affect the red Channel so we're gonna use a filter noise tea noise which gives you this little it's the same as in the developer so now we're gonna see that one later I didn't know its filter so if we pump this one up you'll see that it gets very muddy we don't want that because we're losing a lot of detail a year so we're gonna always try I'd rather leave a bit more noise in then loose details that's just my way of going at denoising filters so I still got a lot of detail here maybe now we need to dial it back cool thing in affinity is you can activate one of these the middle one gives you a slider to see the before but before and after off your image so if I turn this up again you can see what happens that's the after the noise and nandi noise or you can just use this one so it will always show you the same area of your image once after filter or post filter and pre-filter I like to use this one so I'm just gonna dial this one back until I'm sure that we don't we only attack the noise but not so much to details a bit more on the luminance yeah looks better bit more maybe let's try it like this looks good dial it back a bit I can go hours for this and it's just a little fetish I got so let's apply it good for now we're gonna do the same with our blue Channel do it again filter noise D noise maybe even a bit less here let's see in comparison yeah it looks good you'll see a big difference up here a lot of noise going on here which is almost completely gone kind of after the filter so we can even dial it back a bit to keep more detail in these areas apply so that's it for the basic denoising of our image what you could do is if you want to let you switch on all the channels again if you want to do a general T noising again later I just recommend taking your your current state of the image and switch to the developer so now we can do this right now which is basically your persona to get into photo editing get into RAW files adjust different different parameters and in the details tab up here you got the noise reduction as well you can do this follow for the whole image here and if you're satisfied with what you see you can click develop up here and it will throw your back I'm gonna cancel now it will throw it back to here with the new D noise image as a layer so that's it for denoising now [Music] so the next thing I noticed when I look at the whole image now is this gradient we got from up here to down here there's a very pretty linear dark black up here and we got this blueish dark grey down here which can be too too light pollution the sensor I can have many many many sources that could be the moon somewhere so we want to try to even that out so what we're gonna do is we're gonna duplicate this layer and the process of going at it is we want to create a gradient a linear gradient from up here to down here which represents the background in our image so we need to get rid of the object itself which can be a pain in the ass if it's a like a huge object but you might just use another approach then it's a pretty pretty straightforward with the Orion Nebula in this size so we're just gonna take the healing brush pick an area with hitting the Alt key take an area somewhere here and just draw over our object the same for our running man up here just draw over it you can see it's at a hundred percent opacity around about 70 percent hardness 100 percent flow drawn here and maybe get rid of this weird star down here so we got a more or less linear gradient now and we're gonna for this layer we're gonna use a filter that's called dust and scratches and just crank it up to the highest value and what you see if I if I turn it down it was just even out all the noise in our case the stars from the image so it detects the stars as dust and scratches basically and even stoves out so if we turn this up for now we got a pretty linear gradient here what you see is we're getting round edges here this will be cropped off later so doesn't even matter and we're gonna apply it and what you want to do to this layer now which is only our gradient you want to change its blending mode from normal to subtract so it will subtract this from the background so it will even out the tones here and here and throughout the whole image so what you see is our image gets way darker the black is a really linear and dark black now so if I turn it off if you look at our dark sampler we are at 27 23 1024 if I turn it on we're a complete zero so the black is black you can imagine basically there's no color there that's a bit much for me so I'm usually I'm I will dial it back a bit maybe to 60 70 percent just to give me a chance to get all this in this faint nebulosity back later that's fine normally I keep it like this in our case as done before I'm gonna just merge these layers to a new one delete the other two so that's what we got and what you want to do now because we're way darker than before more wanna do is just do a little more stretching and get those brighter tones back and there's the next point where our sampler comes in handy you don't want to turn it up too much because you'll see that will we're starting to just boost the noise basically so we're going back to our 25-22 area that's fine merge it and that's it for our gradient removal so one more thing before we get into the colors I'd love to dial back some of the stars a bit because I feel like in this area here there these stars are just grabbing too much attention compared to the object itself so I always try to dial them back just a tiny bit to get more focus on the object itself and you'll see that the stars are very different in brightness between the different channels so in the red Channel the stars are pretty normal pretty okay the green will boost the stars a bit in the blue Channel there's mostly a huge huge shine around the stars so we might just pick the green or blue Channel in this case I'm gonna use the blue Channel because I know that the stars will be the biggest in the blue Channel and all those stars back a bit so what you want to do is make it editable go into the filters into the Select menu and select tonal range highlights what you're seeing now it's selecting the stars even smaller ones we wouldn't need those but I don't care if they are dialed back a bit as well but it also selects this bright area in here which I don't want to dial back so I'll take the lasso tool the free hands like to hit alt to subtract what I do from the current selection so we're excluding this area and I'll just leave the rest in I'm not going too much into detail now what I want to do now is refine the selection a bit so we don't have only the star but also a bit of the glow around it selected so I'm gonna click refine and it's gonna give me a little border with fader here that I'm gonna move up a bit just to get a bit more selective round these stars alright that's my selection now I hit apply and what you want to do now is go into filters blur minimum blur and if i zoom in on this big star you see what's happening that's our source image and the more we raise this fader the more we can do black holes here the more we raise this fader the smaller the core of the star will get so we need to find a position where we still have the roundness of the star so we don't want just this one because it will work with this star but it won't work with fainter stars so we leave it somewhere here and what you can do now is you see that that's the before and after so it's gotten way smaller which I like hit the circular the circular checkbox here so it would do it from all sides hit apply and there we go we just dialed our stars back a bit in the blue Channel so that's it for diving back the Stars [Music] so let's get into colors basically the fun part of processing your Astro images but also from my little experience the part you keep coming back to more often when I look at the images I processed two weeks ago I just want to take an hour to do a reprocessing and do some details here and there so it's a very detailed process which won't fit in a tutorial like this so what we are doing here is pretty rough and basic color adjustment make the colors pop out look for some areas in the image that we want to just get to the foreground it's just to give you an idea and you'll take it from there you might do things completely differently it's just the way I started about doing doing colors adjusting colors so first thing we want to do is look at our image and see and look for the areas we want to we want to enhance so for me pretty clearly on the Orion Nebula we got this contrast apart up here with the very dark dust particles this very light ball I'd say almost looks like like a sphere popping out of the of the nebula we got these quite contrasting color borders with the the tsiyon out here the blueish and then the red magenta areas in here also here with all those little tiny details another thing I like is a kind of Ark that's built up here we seem to be able to look through the nebula we might enhance this with a bit more contrast and also all the nebulosity around here which in this image gets lost in a lot of noise unfortunately but I said it's pretty short exposures in total so that's something you could work out in a in an image with better data much more as we can do now so first thing we want to do is look into our channels again and I'm just gonna select the red Channel for now and see where are the areas we can use from the red Channel to make things pop out what I see compared to the green and blue channel is that we got a lot more contrast here in this area and a lot of contrast in this area which I quite like compared to the green the blue doesn't have a lot of contrast here the Green has good contrast here so we could use this area from the green channel but let's just start with the red because we got pretty good contrast here and a very nice contrast here to make these areas pop-out with color so what I'm gonna do is I'll select the red Channel and say create greyscale layer which will let's just activate all the all the channels again which will give me a grayscale layer of just a red channel which I can use as a mask for future adjustment layers or effects I wanna apply first thing I want to do with this is give it a bit more contrast just thinking in terms of mask dark areas won't affect the the image beneath and bright areas will affect the image so I want to get as much contrast in my mask as possible so I'm just gonna do a quick contrast here so what you can see is this is getting pretty dark and we will keep the light areas here so everything that's wide now will have the full effect applied later everything it's great it's gonna be like 50 60 % everything it's black is not gonna affect our image so I'm just gonna try it like this I'm gonna say merge so another thing I want to avoid is to get too much color in my stars so what I can do now is just kind of erase those stars from my from my mask then I'm gonna use I'm gonna just use a brush with black color and I'm just gonna paint over those stars especially the big ones down here we don't want to those two get a lot of color so I'm just gonna roughly erase those and then take a soft brush and go over the other ones also exclude the big ones you don't wanna touch too much of the nebula itself you can always work that work more on that later when the effect is applied so let this be my mask for now little corner down here pretty good I want to deactivate this switch to our background layer and just apply a vibrance saturation adjustment layer and I'm just gonna pump it all the way up vibrance and saturation what you're seeing now is we're getting great colors in here the contrast between the red and blue is really starting to to jump out also the running man is getting this really nice blue color but also if you look at this star we're getting a very very bad blue circle shine circular shine around stars also here a lot of blue that's the thing we want to avoid with our with our masks so I'm just gonna take the pixel mask right click it and say rasterize to mask this is now masking everything we just wanted to mask the vibrance adjustment so I'm just gonna drag it down here and what's happening now is we're still getting more color here if i deactivate it you'll see it it's not as as obvious as before because the mask is kind of grey here and not white but we can work on that but also what you see is we're getting the color up here in the nebula but not the weird blue crazy blue circular shine around the stars which is pretty cool what you can do now just to try how far you can push it just duplicate this layer and see what happens still good there's a lot of science coming up here which I don't like too much but I do like the blue that is coming out here so what you can do with this is select the mask take black brush again and just exclude the areas maybe with a 50% opacity just exclude the areas you don't want to be affected by by the color change so all of this is too much for me nope using the white I want to use the black so I'm gonna exclude this from the mask down here all the blue areas pretty good even more maybe even more opacity so we're still keeping the blue back here but not too much in the middle so if I deactivate the the mask you'll see what happens I also I want a bit more of the blue from that one so I could take a white color brush and just follow these lines here just a slight adjustment maybe even down here I'd normally do this with a with a pen and a graphic tablet just to be a bit more precise but that's already detailed work so I'm just doing a bit of that down here to get more color in these faint streaks down here from the from the nebula maybe even down here a bit more alright it's already pretty pretty cool color information we get here another thing you can do to make certain areas pop out more or certain colors we can use a let's try the red channel again yeah let's try the red Channel again because we got these this nice contrast here we're gonna use our red and create another grayscale layer get it up here and just use the the curves adjustment and now find the areas that you want to use in your mask so I want to use this area all those dark areas down here and this area so what you can do is try and find exactly those spots where the the big contrast is so this one and this one I want those to really pop out of the of the mask I'm creating maybe even here if we turn this one up all right so don't worry just try and see where it leads these are the areas I need so I might have to get more of these down here that's pretty good yes I like that maybe not so much in here I might dial that back a bit let's merge it and then you can basically use the burn tool or anything else that will darken it you can also use a black color brush and just draw over here so these areas won't be affected as much and I'm just gonna give it a bit more opacity yeah I don't want these areas to be affected as much perfect but what I want is the contrast in here in this part and in this part so I'm gonna use the Dodge tool smaller opacity 25 and I want to I want it to affect the mid-tones so I'm trying to work these ones out a bit more get these bright and also the mid-tones down here get them very bright even with a smaller brush these little arcs in there just to get a bit more contrast in these areas maybe even the streaks here like this okay that's good for now maybe the border between the dark and the the bride here make that pop out a bit more looks good yep okay and what I'm gonna do it's basically the same as we did before I'm gonna erase the stars from my mask because I don't want them to be affected hundred percent bigger brush and goodbye stars not focusing too much on the running man right now just to give you an overview what we do with our main nebula nebula down here so these stars don't want peace all right now maybe with a bit less opacity bigger brush soft brush and give it a smooth smooth border all right let's try like this we might even might even work to give it a bit more contrast again so we have a really good separation between the bride and the dark tones here that's pretty nice and emerge this one so this is gonna be my mask for some red adjustment I'm gonna turn it off turning with the channels on again and what I'm gonna do is I just open a color balance and just I know I want to work in this area here so I'm just focusing on the colors here I want more wrap there I need to be more vibrant in the mids and the highlights as well what you're getting now is this really pink core which I don't want but we already raised that in our in our mask so let's try it like this maybe even the shadows a bit alright and what we do now convert this one to our to a mask and say hello so it just affects our color balance adjustment and you see what happens there we don't affect all the stars we don't affect the blue here too much we just affect all the red tones in there which is pretty nice it's too much in here so I'm gonna erase more of that in the mask gonna zoom in take it black brush with 50% 60% opacity and just go over the center a bit so we don't have these bright pink tones there alright pretty cool lots of contrast here lots of contrast here and that's what we want to work out in the next step so what I'm gonna do now is just I'm just gonna merge it and delete them so we'd only have one layer to work with to save a bit of CPU usage in this case what I'm doing now is I'm using the torch and burn brushes again to work more on these areas so I want to get in there to see what we're doing maybe even duplicate it so we can compare the two later and with with the the burn and dodge tool it's always always a thing to find the right balance like if I would just do this it would look very unnatural because there's like a black hole in here so you really have to do slide adjustment with this and therefore it's pretty good to have this off to affect only a certain tonal range so you see if I if I affect the shadows here it's pretty drastic so if I start here I would have I need to do it for the whole image so we will do to just avoid it looking like a like a black hole here if I'm doing it on the highlights we lose a lot of a lot of contrast down here we don't want that so in this case I'll just use the mid-tones here with a bit of opacity 1720 percent maybe a bit bigger brush and I'm just gonna slightly draw around the borders to just make those contrasts pop out a bit more same on this side same for these little dust particles here and for this one especially up here there we can even use it for shadows here to make it pop out even more maybe this one it's a very thin line to between making it look natural and unnatural so just be aware not to overdo it sometimes using a smaller brush to just affect small parts of it have a bit more contrast somewhere can already do a great job you see I'm going back and forth forth here it's always a I said a very very thin line maybe a bit more contrast here same with the dodging I wanna find those really small dark small bright areas and just feature those a bit more just a bit to give it more depth and more plasticity basically I hope that's the right word up here just work out the contrast a bit more between the dark and and the light areas yeah while while being zoomed into in this case four hundred and eighty percent because I resize the image before and you see how noisy and unsharp it is due to short exposure to to the wind so here we go look at this yeah still a bit too bright here for me I would work on that more but if we do it before and after now you can see what this bit of burning and dodging does to the image it really gives it more death and you can work on this for hours and hours and hours I think from here I just do some more adjustments affecting the whole image I don't want to get too much into detail I don't want to get lost it's easy to get lost so from here I might just do a bit of a curve stretch again to separate the dark from the bright areas because I got a lot of noise here and I don't want this to pop out too much whoopsie alright there we go yeah looking good I mean a good point to go on and just repeat steps just keep in mind two small adjustments work with blending modes work with the layers the channels so you get all the small details you can see in your image just pop out [Music]

Channel: OutGettingSubs

Views: 5,716

Keywords: astrophotography, affinity, editing, photography, nebula

Id: 9LUWxv1MJiw

Length: 53min 21sec (3201 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020