

Serif Software's rival to Photoshop takes Adobe's selection and layer method of photo editing and applies it directly to night-sky images through its Astrophotography Stack persona. Affinity Photo: Budget option for astro enthusiasts They are essential for creating a star trail image where hundreds of photos are combined or revealing the soft light of a nebula from many stacked frames.

They can be moved around, merged, painted, hidden, or have holes cut in them. Layers give you the option to build complex effects. Of course, it can also be painstakingly manually created like in the good old days if you'd rather! Selections can be automatically identified using Adobe Sensei, a cloud AI tech that allows the subject of a photo to be accurately selected just by choosing a menu option, phenomenal. Photoshop's editing method utilizes selections and layers, meaning you can, for example, select only the sky in an image and edit this separately from the land. It is the industry-standard photo editing app, used extensively worldwide, and a great tool for astrophotographers. Much like Lightroom, Photoshop CC is the app that other image-editing software makers use to model their interface on. Adobe Lightroom: Best photo editing app overall Here are the best photo editing apps for astrophotography that we'd recommend you try. We've included off-the-shelf software that can be modified to meet the needs of astrophotographers, some do this better than others. There are a host of different photo editing apps available, with varying abilities and various tools which need consideration, especially regarding astrophotography's specific requirements. Photo editing apps can be an astrophotographer's best friend and such software has shot up in popularity in the digital photography community. It's just an extra means of polishing the finished product beyond the in-camera shot.Įven if the photographer weren't to use any apps but used in-camera filters, cropping or stacking, that is still a form of editing. While some consider using the best photo apps to edit images to be cheating, it isn't. Photo editing apps can transform your average-looking astro images into spectacular masterpieces by bringing out hidden elements.
