I have been delving a little more into Pixinsight and Photoshop for editing and post production of my Astrophotography images.

Here’s the same output from Deep Sky Stacker edited in two different workflows and tools.

The first edit below was my very first attempt at editing an astrophotography image. I was happy with it, but knew there are many improvements to be made. This image was edited exclusively in photoshop, and utilized only the standard tools no paid plugins. It impressed family and friends, but anyone who knows astrophotography can see all the flaws!

Now this isn’t perfect, but bearing in mind it’s only the end of my first week in this hobby, it’s a vast improvement. Same data, only 1 hour of subs. This time I used Pixinsight, as well as paid tool star exterminator to remove the stars to a separate image. After doing some pre editing in Pixinsight and separating the layers I bought the layers into Photoshop for final integration and and post processing.

The results are night and day, stars are less blow out, details are much sharper, colors are better. What do you think?