Excellent video. I was almost ready to give up on Affinity Photo until I found this video. Discovered I could now process my OSC images shot with an L-eXtreme filter in about 5 steps after stacking. (I still prefer Siril over AP for stacking--maybe that will change). It would be nice to be able to rearrange the macros to favor the ones I will use most--is that possible?
After a catastrophic visit to a computer shop for a memory/hard drive upgrade resulting in a major "program" data loss, I ended up considering a different approach from Photoshop and perhaps a package that leant itself more towards astrophotography. At this point, "Google was my friend", I found your macros, watched your videos and have literally just gone and bought affinity photo. Above video was exceptional, lots of information to refer back to - I have just bought a Vaonis Vespera II smart telescope complete with a full compliment of filters (all 3) so there is lots of opportunities over the winter months to have a play. Again, thank you so much for your macros and also the tutorial - happy times ahead :)
James Ritson has transformed my astrophotography results. I tried to use Affinity Photoo pre macros and struggled somewhat , now with James's Macros and his excellent back up and explanations I am getting far better results. Thank-you James.
Excellent work James, thanks for the tutorial. I've been trying the various macros since you released them but probably sub optimally so nice to get clear guidance how to properly use them.
Wow! This is by far the best astrophotography processing tutorial out there. It demonstrates how Affinity Photo should be the software of choice for astrophotographers. Thank you very much for sharing, I have a lot of info to digest.
Thank you David, I'm really glad that I can highlight the various functionality in Affinity Photo. There's quite a lot to offer besides simply translating equivalent workflows from Photoshop :)
James - outstanding job on both the video and the macros. The demonstrations really illustrate how to get the most out the macros and the best way to use them. This adds significant value to Affinity Photo for astrophotography. Thank you!
I'm using this video to learn and understand V18 of Jame's macros. Some macros in this video are no longer used in V18 and there are some new macros not mentioned in this video. I'm new to Affinity with very little experience in image editing . It would be nice to have some updated videos. Learning these macros isn't that cut and dry. I'm finding I need to find other Affinity videos from other content providers to explain basic features, like masking, levels , curves etc that help me understand the macros. I'm trying to figure out what macro to use and when in the workflow and when to stop working on the image. My only other processing experience is with Siril. I'm just using a OSC. Some of the macros are for mono. I can use the Extract OSC Layer to Mono RDB macro and maybe learn some of this other macros. I don't know what the acquisition of Affinity by Canva means for the astrophotography feature for Affinity. I hope Jame can come back and resume making astrophotography content.
Thank you very much! Most of the macros are indeed self explaining with litte experimenting, but some seemed not to work properly - just because I did not understand the intentions and where to change settings. With your detailed explanation this is now clear!
Quel travail impressionnant ! Merci pour ce tuto très clair et indispensable pour bien utiliser ces macros qui constituent une boîte à outils extraordinaire. All the best !
An outstanding body of work here, James. If the AP community should ever issue awards - an 'appy' perhaps :-) - I'm sure the committee would be flooded with nominations. Bravo!
Hi James, I'm excited by the prospect of using this, but two questions: You say the lights are already calibrated, and the the sigma clipping will remove remaining hot pixels. This suggests there should be an earlier tutorial of preparing light frames. Where is it please?
Was about to pull the trigger on APP cause I'm struggling to make a decent image even following the tutorials (I Suck at Computers). I still have some gradients I can't seem to get rid of, but I think I'll try again using Macros as I never tried them when I downloaded V10 because I didn't' really understand them. Just curious, about your "calibrated" frames, how do I Calibrate my frames prior to stacking ? (and yes I donated Again cause I love your tutorials and continued awesome content !)
Fascinating to observe what Affinity Photo is capable of doing for specialists in Astrophotography. I wonder if the audience for this niche interest represent an underserved or poorly served customer segment that Serif have identified as being key to their business strategy. Do the astrophotography features of Affinity Photo represent a significant point of differentiation within the market for image editing apps including Adobe Photoshop?
James, thanks, awesome! It'll take me months to get through this lot! 🙂 I think I asked this before, but is it ok to remove my earlier macro versions of 'Astrophotography 16-bit' and Astrophotography 32-bit' ?
Hi James, very good video. I cannot get the "Live Star Mask" Macro to work. I followed your video carefully and then tried to do a curves stretch. The level of the nebula AND the stars was increased. Any ideas pease.
Question .... i have about 6 hours of data of the orion nebula taken using just my DSLR and 600mm lens (no filters) they are just straight photos in RAW from the camera /// can you tell me how i would go about creating the hubble pallet look using your macros please , huge thanks good sir :)
I am only working with single 16 bit TIFF files. Can these 32bit macros be used to tone stretch my TIFF? I'm trying them out, but all of them seem to remove most of the blue clouds from my Pleiades TIFF
Just reprocessed some old data using this. Worth the purchase. Thank you. One question, when I go to add files, my data isn't just fits files. There is a fits and a jpg for each sub so I end up taking longer to select the files. I end up CTRL-click on each fits file. Is there a way around this, to only show the fits files?
Hi, thanks for the support. Can you filter by file type in the file browser using one of the rows at the top? It should sort all the FIT files together and you can just lasso/shift-click select them and ignore the JPEGs which will either be above or below. Hope that helps
Hi, just tried here, it all seems fine-which part are you having the issue with? Via my website, the Gumroad functionality gets embedded so pop-up blockers might be stopping it. You can always visit the URL directly and see if that works: jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_macros Thanks, James
How did you arrive at individual "calibrated" light frames to start the stacking process? I have always stacked my calibration frames with the lights and generated a single composite stacked file in Affinity in the past. Excellent vid BTW, thank you.
I think this needs some additional clarification from James. I had the same question. I normally calibrate my Lights with the D, F and DF/Bias and get one FITS file which is may calibrated stacked file for further editing.
Hi John, is this on the Gumroad page? You might need to type a “0” into the input field above the “I want this” button before it will let you click it?
James, I thought about your macros the last hour or so and also re-edited one of my images. It worked like a charm. As you are a Affinity professional I hope you can help me with the following questions I got while thinking about the macros. I'm shooting with an ASI 533MC Pro. It takes the pictures with 14bit. The fits are saved with 16 bit. Astrophotoprocessor saves the as 32bit fits I think. Up until now I saved them as 16bit tiff for processing as the 16bit won't hurt my 14bit originally - I think. Do you recommend to use 32bit for processing or is this unnecessary as my source only has 14/16bit? Are there any advantages to use 32bit even in this case? For re-edit I used Tiff's I did with APP. I shot with a Duo-Band-Filter and extracted Ha and Oiii as separate images. Imported them to Affinity, labeled them as Ha and Oiii and then applied your macros. Worked great and I really liked the output.
Hi, I would generally use 32-bit if you have not performed any tone stretching yet. Affinity Photo, as with most other software, uses linear compositing in 32-bit, which is more mathematically correct. If tone stretching has already been performed, 16-bit will provide sufficient resolution for further work. My composition setup and tone stretching macros also assume you are in 32-bit. This is because 32-bit is unbounded (meaning pixel values can never 'clip' if they go outside of the 0-1 range), and I use the 'Add' blend mode when colourising the greyscale data layers-this may produce bright pixels greater than 1, which would then be tone mapped when using the automated tone stretching macros. If you are in 16-bit, which is a bounded format, I cannot guarantee that bright pixel tones will be retained. However, you could also change the blend mode of the greyscale layers from 'Add' to 'Screen' which would help in this case. If the results look good to you then carry on! The composition setup and tone stretching macros are intended for 32-bit linear data, however. If you are editing in 16-bit, be sure to use the 16-bit macro category, as each macro has been tweaked for nonlinear compositing versus linear compositing in 32-bit.
James your Macros are great. I have installed them and everything works. only problem is that when I try to register my version of Affinity, the software takes me to an Open Sign-in Page which tells me that my Browser is not supported and I can not register Affinity. I am on Mac and use Safari 13.1.2 but can not put a later version of safari on my Mac as its old. any solutions ?
Hi David. I’m afraid I don’t know much about the in-app registration process, I can ask when I’m in the office on Monday though. Are you at least able to activate the software? (As I remember, you log in to activate and then are prompted to register)
@@JamesRitson thanks for the reply James. yes the software is loaded and works well. the problem is just registering my Affinity software. your Astro Macros are awesome, and I would like to get the V15 versions but cant unless I can access the account. thanks Dave
Never having used photoshop or any photography processing app, I am completely lost from the beginning of this. I've just bought Affinity with the intention of using it but purely with DSLR (unmodified) data. Do any of these macros apply or, are of use, for DSLR astrophotography?
Hi Mark, absolutely-I’m a DSLR (mirrorless) user myself and most of these macros will work just fine including the tone stretching macros. The most recent version of the macros also contains some experimental blending functions for full spectrum cameras that use the dual and tri band filters (capturing narrowband wavelengths which you then extract with channel manipulations in post). Not entirely sure they work as expected since I don’t have much data to play with!
@@JamesRitson Thanks. I was able to get a 6 month free trial of Affinity Photo 2 and so far haven't been able to get anything work except stacking. Always has a green hue on the stacked image and not able to get rid of it. I will give these a go. Thanks again
@@JamesKelly-ne3sm Ah, is that OSC or mono data? If OSC, you might want to look at changing the bayer pattern in case Photo isn't interpreting it correctly. Alternatively, you can separate OSC data into RGB mono layers using one of my macros, then use Linear Fit (select the layer you want to use for the base scale, then select the others and go to Filters>Astrophotography>Linear Fit to balance them)
00:00 Introduction
00:16 Installation
01:36 General Stacking Overview and How-to
04:00 Composition Setup Macros
05:00 Automated Tone Stretching Macros
05:50 Tone Stretching Macro Comparison
07:33 Live Background Mask and Live Star Mask
09:22 Live RGB Weighted Mask
11:02 Thresholded Star Mask
13:02 Weighted Saturation Mask
14:33 Live Background Subtraction
16:00 Reduce Background Luminosity
17:26 Reduce Star Luminosity
19:10 Reduce Star Intensity
19:40 Star Eater
20:21 Inpaint Star Detail & Inpaint Star Detail (Dimmer)
22:16 Remove Star Fringing
23:08 Star Motion Deconvolution
25:05 Soft Star Glow
25:23 Highlight Brilliance
25:40 Enhance Structure and Enhance Structure (Aggressive)
27:34 Local Contrast Structure
28:05 Soften Structure
28:43 Nonlinear Sharpening
29:16 Nonlinear Compositing
30:45 RGB Live Luminosity
31:13 Min-Max Live Luminosity
32:05 Deepen Colour Detail
32:35 Enhance DSO Luminosity
32:58 Golden Boost
33:20 SII Ha Tone Enhancement & OIII Ha Tone Enhancement
34:02 Enhance Colour Signals (Red/Green/Blue/Cyan/Magenta/Yellow)
34:55 Reduce Harsh Noise & Reduce Harsh Noise (+)
35:38 Denoising (Luma & Chroma, Chroma, Structure)
37:15 Monochrome Colour Mapping
38:26 Merge to 16-bit sRGB and Merge to 16-bit Wide Gamut
41:02 Outro and thanks
Excellent video. I was almost ready to give up on Affinity Photo until I found this video. Discovered I could now process my OSC images shot with an L-eXtreme filter in about 5 steps after stacking. (I still prefer Siril over AP for stacking--maybe that will change). It would be nice to be able to rearrange the macros to favor the ones I will use most--is that possible?
After a catastrophic visit to a computer shop for a memory/hard drive upgrade resulting in a major "program" data loss, I ended up considering a different approach from Photoshop and perhaps a package that leant itself more towards astrophotography. At this point, "Google was my friend", I found your macros, watched your videos and have literally just gone and bought affinity photo.
Above video was exceptional, lots of information to refer back to - I have just bought a Vaonis Vespera II smart telescope complete with a full compliment of filters (all 3) so there is lots of opportunities over the winter months to have a play.
Again, thank you so much for your macros and also the tutorial - happy times ahead :)
James Ritson has transformed my astrophotography results. I tried to use Affinity Photoo pre macros and struggled somewhat , now with James's Macros and his excellent back up and explanations I am getting far better results. Thank-you James.
Simply amazing. No need for expensive Sofware anymore + much simpler to process my astrophotos
I bought your macros simply for image stretching. I had no idea it could do all this other stuff as well! Thank you!
Excellent work James, thanks for the tutorial. I've been trying the various macros since you released them but probably sub optimally so nice to get clear guidance how to properly use them.
Thanks Michael, hope the video proves useful!
Wow! This is by far the best astrophotography processing tutorial out there. It demonstrates how Affinity Photo should be the software of choice for astrophotographers. Thank you very much for sharing, I have a lot of info to digest.
Thank you David, I'm really glad that I can highlight the various functionality in Affinity Photo. There's quite a lot to offer besides simply translating equivalent workflows from Photoshop :)
This is perfect!! Thank you so much. Now I understand your macros 1000-times better than before.
James - outstanding job on both the video and the macros. The demonstrations really illustrate how to get the most out the macros and the best way to use them. This adds significant value to Affinity Photo for astrophotography. Thank you!
Well done James - saves a fair bit of headache!
An already easy workflow made easier. Fantastic. Thank you.
I'm using this video to learn and understand V18 of Jame's macros. Some macros in this video are no longer used in V18 and there are some new macros not mentioned in this video. I'm new to Affinity with very little experience in image editing . It would be nice to have some updated videos. Learning these macros isn't that cut and dry. I'm finding I need to find other Affinity videos from other content providers to explain basic features, like masking, levels , curves etc that help me understand the macros. I'm trying to figure out what macro to use and when in the workflow and when to stop working on the image. My only other processing experience is with Siril. I'm just using a OSC. Some of the macros are for mono. I can use the Extract OSC Layer to Mono RDB macro and maybe learn some of this other macros.
I don't know what the acquisition of Affinity by Canva means for the astrophotography feature for Affinity. I hope Jame can come back and resume making astrophotography content.
Very well compiled tutorial. Looking forward to the next one.
Excellent explanation James, thank you. Great work!
Thank you very much! Most of the macros are indeed self explaining with litte experimenting, but some seemed not to work properly - just because I did not understand the intentions and where to change settings. With your detailed explanation this is now clear!
Thank you Jürgen, glad the video is useful for you!
what can I say just starting out and what a gift thanks James
Quel travail impressionnant ! Merci pour ce tuto très clair et indispensable pour bien utiliser ces macros qui constituent une boîte à outils extraordinaire. All the best !
excellent. Ill be watching that again before it sticks, but looking forward to trying some of them now.
An outstanding body of work here, James. If the AP community should ever issue awards - an 'appy' perhaps :-) - I'm sure the committee would be flooded with nominations. Bravo!
Back to reprocessing some of my images. Thanks!
Super boulot, j'espère que j'arriverais à tout comprendre. Merci beaucoup. Great Job, i hope i will all understand.Thank you very much.
Awesome work! Thank you very mutch I love the Macros :)
Hi James, I'm excited by the prospect of using this, but two questions: You say the lights are already calibrated, and the the sigma clipping will remove remaining hot pixels. This suggests there should be an earlier tutorial of preparing light frames. Where is it please?
Was about to pull the trigger on APP cause I'm struggling to make a decent image even following the tutorials (I Suck at Computers). I still have some gradients I can't seem to get rid of, but I think I'll try again using Macros as I never tried them when I downloaded V10 because I didn't' really understand them. Just curious, about your "calibrated" frames, how do I Calibrate my frames prior to stacking ? (and yes I donated Again cause I love your tutorials and continued awesome content !)
What did you use to create your calibrated light frames? How do you stack mono data shot over several nights with each channel with their own flats?
Fascinating to observe what Affinity Photo is capable of doing for specialists in Astrophotography.
I wonder if the audience for this niche interest represent an underserved or poorly served customer segment that Serif have identified as being key to their business strategy. Do the astrophotography features of Affinity Photo represent a significant point of differentiation within the market for image editing apps including Adobe Photoshop?
James, thanks, awesome! It'll take me months to get through this lot! 🙂 I think I asked this before, but is it ok to remove my earlier macro versions of 'Astrophotography 16-bit' and Astrophotography 32-bit' ?
Hi James, very good video. I cannot get the "Live Star Mask" Macro to work. I followed your video carefully and then tried to do a curves stretch. The level of the nebula AND the stars was increased. Any ideas pease.
Great tutorial, thanks a lot
Question .... i have about 6 hours of data of the orion nebula taken using just my DSLR and 600mm lens (no filters) they are just straight photos in RAW from the camera /// can you tell me how i would go about creating the hubble pallet look using your macros please , huge thanks good sir :)
A tutorial with a basic modified dslr would be great using the macros...
I am only working with single 16 bit TIFF files. Can these 32bit macros be used to tone stretch my TIFF? I'm trying them out, but all of them seem to remove most of the blue clouds from my Pleiades TIFF
Just reprocessed some old data using this. Worth the purchase. Thank you. One question, when I go to add files, my data isn't just fits files. There is a fits and a jpg for each sub so I end up taking longer to select the files. I end up CTRL-click on each fits file. Is there a way around this, to only show the fits files?
Hi, thanks for the support. Can you filter by file type in the file browser using one of the rows at the top?
It should sort all the FIT files together and you can just lasso/shift-click select them and ignore the JPEGs which will either be above or below. Hope that helps
A slider to reduce ringing in the Deconvolution macro would be welcomed…😊🙏
Great teaching with great software. Is your gumroad site not functioning? Tried to download your astro macros. Thanks
Hi, just tried here, it all seems fine-which part are you having the issue with? Via my website, the Gumroad functionality gets embedded so pop-up blockers might be stopping it. You can always visit the URL directly and see if that works: jamesritson.gumroad.com/l/jr_astrophotography_macros
Thanks,
James
Hello james, This is my problem i cannot download your macros im using macbook pro, do you have tuturial how to download your macros … thank you
Very cool picture
When exactly will Affinity 2.0 be released?
Do you have a tutorial how not to burn the center of the galaxy?? I have a session with andromeda, and every time I burn the center of the galaxy.
How did you arrive at individual "calibrated" light frames to start the stacking process? I have always stacked my calibration frames with the lights and generated a single composite stacked file in Affinity in the past. Excellent vid BTW, thank you.
I think this needs some additional clarification from James. I had the same question. I normally calibrate my Lights with the D, F and DF/Bias and get one FITS file which is may calibrated stacked file for further editing.
Excellent explanations James. I am excited to try out your macros however the link to the download the macros does not seem to work.
Hi John, is this on the Gumroad page? You might need to type a “0” into the input field above the “I want this” button before it will let you click it?
@@JamesRitson Thanks, that worked!
James, I thought about your macros the last hour or so and also re-edited one of my images. It worked like a charm. As you are a Affinity professional I hope you can help me with the following questions I got while thinking about the macros. I'm shooting with an ASI 533MC Pro. It takes the pictures with 14bit. The fits are saved with 16 bit. Astrophotoprocessor saves the as 32bit fits I think. Up until now I saved them as 16bit tiff for processing as the 16bit won't hurt my 14bit originally - I think. Do you recommend to use 32bit for processing or is this unnecessary as my source only has 14/16bit? Are there any advantages to use 32bit even in this case? For re-edit I used Tiff's I did with APP. I shot with a Duo-Band-Filter and extracted Ha and Oiii as separate images. Imported them to Affinity, labeled them as Ha and Oiii and then applied your macros. Worked great and I really liked the output.
Hi, I would generally use 32-bit if you have not performed any tone stretching yet. Affinity Photo, as with most other software, uses linear compositing in 32-bit, which is more mathematically correct. If tone stretching has already been performed, 16-bit will provide sufficient resolution for further work.
My composition setup and tone stretching macros also assume you are in 32-bit. This is because 32-bit is unbounded (meaning pixel values can never 'clip' if they go outside of the 0-1 range), and I use the 'Add' blend mode when colourising the greyscale data layers-this may produce bright pixels greater than 1, which would then be tone mapped when using the automated tone stretching macros. If you are in 16-bit, which is a bounded format, I cannot guarantee that bright pixel tones will be retained. However, you could also change the blend mode of the greyscale layers from 'Add' to 'Screen' which would help in this case.
If the results look good to you then carry on! The composition setup and tone stretching macros are intended for 32-bit linear data, however. If you are editing in 16-bit, be sure to use the 16-bit macro category, as each macro has been tweaked for nonlinear compositing versus linear compositing in 32-bit.
James your Macros are great. I have installed them and everything works. only problem is that when I try to register my version of Affinity, the software takes me to an Open Sign-in Page which tells me that my Browser is not supported and I can not register Affinity. I am on Mac and use Safari 13.1.2 but can not put a later version of safari on my Mac as its old. any solutions ?
Hi David. I’m afraid I don’t know much about the in-app registration process, I can ask when I’m in the office on Monday though.
Are you at least able to activate the software? (As I remember, you log in to activate and then are prompted to register)
@@JamesRitson thanks for the reply James. yes the software is loaded and works well. the problem is just registering my Affinity software. your Astro Macros are awesome, and I would like to get the V15 versions but cant unless I can access the account. thanks Dave
Nice work, but do these macros work with version 2 of Affinity Photo?
Hi, yes indeed, the latest version is actually only compatible with V2! (It takes advantage of V2-specific features)
Never having used photoshop or any photography processing app, I am completely lost from the beginning of this. I've just bought Affinity with the intention of using it but purely with DSLR (unmodified) data. Do any of these macros apply or, are of use, for DSLR astrophotography?
Hi Mark, absolutely-I’m a DSLR (mirrorless) user myself and most of these macros will work just fine including the tone stretching macros. The most recent version of the macros also contains some experimental blending functions for full spectrum cameras that use the dual and tri band filters (capturing narrowband wavelengths which you then extract with channel manipulations in post). Not entirely sure they work as expected since I don’t have much data to play with!
@@JamesRitson Thanks James.
Great!! Does anyone notice the face in some pictures?!!
Are these macros free to download
Yes, they are! When you go to the download page, just put '0' into the input box
@@JamesRitson Thanks. I was able to get a 6 month free trial of Affinity Photo 2 and so far haven't been able to get anything work except stacking. Always has a green hue on the stacked image and not able to get rid of it. I will give these a go. Thanks again
@@JamesKelly-ne3sm Ah, is that OSC or mono data? If OSC, you might want to look at changing the bayer pattern in case Photo isn't interpreting it correctly.
Alternatively, you can separate OSC data into RGB mono layers using one of my macros, then use Linear Fit (select the layer you want to use for the base scale, then select the others and go to Filters>Astrophotography>Linear Fit to balance them)