Want to get the most out of your astrophotos?

Every time I finish an astrophoto, I sit back and wonder "did I really get every bit of detail I could out of this data?". It is hard to know, but after years of experimenting and learning the fundamentals of digital signal processing, I have some techniques that could help you find the answer to that question.

I've been doing astrophotography for nine years, since the age of 14. In that time I've learned that the best approach to editing an image is not one that relies on any single software, but one that goes between various programs for their strong points to arrive at a great result with a minimal amount of effort.

I have also learned that no amount of image processing will save bad data. Astrophotography is a garbage in, garbage out process (GIGO). If you start with great data, it is almost impossible to make it look bad if you know what you're doing.

Image Processing Offerings:

Personalized editing video:

For this product, I offer a video of the editing of your image data which includes commentary of my thought process along the way, as well as the final images in raw format. The video will be around one hour long.

In-person lesson:

Like the video, but live! Here you can ask me any questions about my thought process along the way, as well as anything you want to know about astrophotography. The session will be recorded for your future reference, and you will receive the full resolution files as well. This will last three hours.

What you should bring:

In order to get the absolute most out of your image data, there are some things that you will need to supply.

1. A fully calibrated image set (raw or stacked)

To get the most out of your data, it is crucial that you have fully calibrated the data set, or supply full calibration frames (especially flats). It does neither of us any good to spend an hour trying to remove gradients and dust bunnies that could've easily been fixed with proper flats.

2. Your final image attempt at editing the data

This gives me an idea of your skill level and a benchmark of what to expect from the data set going in.

3. Ideally a high-quality data set

As I mentioned earlier, astrophotography is a garbage-in-garbage-out process. And while I can do a pretty good job at polishing garbage, that isn't really productive. You should try to get a nice clean data set to edit, which will give you and me the best possible chance to produce something amazing.

The data can be provided by whatever file sharing service works for you, I recommend google drive or dropbox.

Software used:

I take a multi-faceted approach to image processing, so here are the programs that I use. I recommend getting these, and many of them have month-long free trials so you can test them out yourself.

Pixinsight (HVB Scripts)
Photoshop (Starspikes Pro, FocusMax, StarShrink)
AstroPixelProcessor
Topaz Denoise AI
Topaz Sharpen AI
Topaz Gigapixel AI
Starnett

25% discount for returning customers

Image Processing Zoom Meeting