Re: Astronomy Tools Actions Set Crack 20
Oleta Blaylock
As I progressed into astrophotography, I discovered that a great deal of digital image processing can be needed to get the best out of one's astrophotos. While some good tools were available, there were simply some functions for which there were no easy solutions, and still others that I simply found myself doing over and over again in Adobe Photoshop. Hence Astronomy Tools were born. -Noel Carboni
Beginners: Ever shoot your own images of the night sky, then find yourself wondering how other astrophotographers make such breathtaking images while yours don't seem to have quite the same sparkle or magic? Chances are they do more digital editing of their images than you think.
Experts: These actions give you access to top-notch look and feel results otherwise difficult and time consuming to achieve. I've put together a great set of actions that deliver top quality results and can save you a bunch of time!
These are professional quality actions - macro operation sequences that you load into Adobe Photoshop - producing top quality results you can print or use in further Adobe Photoshop operations. I put a lot of time into getting them to work just right and to combine well with other actions and operations. They work great with Adobe Photoshop versions 6.0, CS to CS6, CC, 2020 and newer on PCs and Macintoshes alike, and come with a money-back guarantee. If you want to polish up your astrophotographs to be absolutely stellar, these actions are for you!
The Astronomy Tools Actions Set for Adobe Photoshop gives you the following 34 functions, each of which you can invoke with a keystroke or mouse click. You may use one or several, depending on your photo.
Some of the world's best astrophotographers and astroimage processors have created and posted tutorials, online videos, and reviews describing ways to use these actions. We invite you to follow these links to learn more about Astronomy Tools.
Depending on what kind of imaging system you use, you may have to combine data for individual red, green, and blue color channels from one or more files into a full-color image. Construct RGB Image from Channel Files automates this, so that you can quickly get to the editing.
Handy tip: This action works great with FITS Liberator software from NASA / ESO. If you have IEEE floating point FITS files, FITS Liberator v2, and Adobe Photoshop CS2 to CS6 or CC you can open the image in 32 bit per channel mode, ensuring no loss of data.
There are cases where you may capture red and blue channel data only, for example narrow-band imaging through hydrogen alpha (Ha) and Oxygen (OIII) emissions line filters. Also, some astronomy libraries contain only red and blue plates. In this case, you may want to create a more or less naturally colored image by synthesizing the green channel data from the red and blue channels.
Optical misalignment, stray light entering the imager, the moon, and light pollution can all contribute to a color gradient in your image. Color Gradient Removal can detect the color bias across your image and neutralize it.
As light travels up from city lights and bounces off dust and air molecules in our atmosphere, it adds to the light coming in from outer space. This is called light pollution. Because it is additive, when adeptly done light pollution can be digitally subtracted quite nicely from an image, leaving a surprisingly good astrophoto with great color, dark backgrounds, and plenty of contrast. Some of the finest astrophotographers in the world today shoot through light-polluted skies!
Chances are good that, unless you're using the Hubble Space Telescope, you need to subtract a background atmospheric light level from your photos to bring out the best results. Simply setting the black point will not give you a proper color balance in your deep sky objects and stars. This action makes a "false flat" image, then subtracts that level of light pollution from the entire image, producing a more contrasty image with truer colors.
Restrictions in the light path, different responses to light arriving at the imager at different angles... All of these can create vignetting, gradients and/or hot spots in your images. The trick is to determine the proper illumination levels to subtract across the image. The Light Pollution Removal action does that, and you can even remove noise from the background of some types of images while you're at it!
Handy tip: Even if you take the trouble to shoot true flat images and include them in your processing, the Light Pollution Removal action can still help to further refine your results, giving you deeper contrast and a more 3D feel.
Ever wish you could easily work on the stars in your image separately from the nebula or galaxy? Imagine being able to select just the stars and increase saturation. Then invert the selection and sharpen just the nebula.
Select Brighter Stars finds the stars in your image, even those intermingled with a deep sky object, and selects them. Further Photoshop operations can then be done on just the selected area. You can also invert, expand, shrink, and feather the selection using Photohop's Select menu.
Handy tip: Ever get dark halos around your stars from sharpening or combination of Hydrogen Alpha and color data, and wish there was an easy way to reduce or remove those halos without negatively affecting anything else? Select the stars with this action, expand the selection by a few pixels using Select-Modify-Expand to surround the halos, and use Filter-Noise-Median then Edit-Fade-Lighten. Problem solved!
Handy tip: This action actually affects the entire image, and can help smooth the image as well as reducing the star size, but it can be limited just to the stars by running the Select Brighter Stars action first, then running Make Stars Smaller, then running ...Per Selection Only.
If you look closely at the best astrophotographs on the web, you begin to realize that the top astrophotographers leave their images a little fuzzy for a more real, 3D appearance. This helps bring out star color and avoids dark halos around stars.
The Less Crunchy More Fuzzy action not only smoothes out star edges, but also helps clean up dark, crunchy-looking noise in your deep sky objects, giving the image a less processed, more natural appearance.
Many cameras, when pushed near their limits to detect dim objects, will produce pattern noise in their images, seen as horizontal or vertical stripes or banding. This is sometimes also referred-to as readout noise.
Up to now one has either had to try to hand-edit this out, or just not stretch the luminance levels so far as to make the banding appear out of the background, losing precious dim detail. With the innovative Horizontal and Vertical Banding Reduction actions in this set this noise is history in a matter of seconds, allowing you to bring out the faintest details in your images.
Handy tip: If your image has strong horizontal banding, and you run Horizontal Banding Reduction, you may see remnant vertical banding that was hidden before. You can then run Vertical Banding Reduction and end up with a pattern-free image!
Sometimes you find yourself having stretched the levels and sharpened an image so much that the cores of the larger stars are burned out to white, leaving the star field less colorful looking than you'd like.
The Increase Star Color action is perfect for fixing this. There is very likely some color information around the edges of those hot white stars, and this action pulls that color back into the star centers for an overall more visually pleasing appearance.
Digitally-captured images, because of the necessity to convert from linear to gamma-corrected representation (i.e., levels stretching), contain more random noise in the darker parts. What if you had a way to do noise reduction in just the darker parts, while avoiding oversoftening details in your galaxy or nebula? Now you do!
Handy tip: Sometimes you want to remove noise from only the very darkest parts of the image, to preserve the most detail in dim nebula or galaxy images. Deep Space Noise Reduction provides an even less aggressive noise reduction that really makes your image look cleaner.
One kind of noise digital imagers deliver is color noise. One mistake many people make is to try to eliminate color noise by using a luminance noise reduction method. This can end up making an image look overprocessed and flat, losing important detail yet leaving much of the color noise intact!
Color Blotch Reduction, which also appears in my dSLR Tools set for general photography, finds the most visible color noise in open areas and eliminates it, while avoiding damage to the detail in the objects in the image.
Handy tip: If you have both color and luminance noise, chances are removal of the color noise will make it less necessary to do aggressive luminance noise reduction. Run Color Blotch Reduction first, and then judge the level of luminance noise to remove. You may have to do less than you think.
Local Contrast Enhancement, which also appears in my dSLR Tools set for general photography, is a more sophisticated form of local contrast enhancement than you may have read about on the photo retouching sites, because it emphasizes darkening more than lightening.
At some point in astro image processing one usually "stretches the levels" - lightens up an image in layman's terms. What usually happens at this point, if just the Adobe Photoshop Curves function is used, is that the bright stars get much larger and more distracting, though the dim stuff may be lightened to an acceptable level. This action actually isolates the brighter stars and lightens only the dim deep sky object and the dimmest stars in the image, resulting in a lighter image in which the stars are kept small and tight.
Handy tip: If an image needs a LOT of brightening, often a combination of this action and the Curves function will give the most natural looking result, while still keeping bright star sizes small.
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