Tutorials

Intro

When it comes to astroimage processing, one of my favorite sentences that I repeat over and over is:

There are as many schools of astroimage processing as there are astrophotographers.

What do I mean by that? That as far as I understand it, often times what we label as right or wrong in astroimage processing is more an interpretation or an opinion... than a fact.

As such, I don't claim that what I do is the best or most effective way of handling any given processing problem. So what you'll see here is how I do (or if it's been a while, maybe how I DID) certain things, nothing more... Please leave a comment under any of the tutorials if you have suggestions, questions, etc.

The first thing you'll notice in my tutorials is that they're not HOW-TO's (ok, there's at least one how-to but it's not about image processing ;-). Sometimes people read tutorials looking for a cooking recipe. You might find those here, but I don't usually write my tutorials as a "do this, then that, then this" document without any further comments. Rather, I try to go through the thinking process that I follow when dealing with the problem at hand - and BTW, did I say I don't claim to be right all the time? :-) This may make my tutorials a bit "hard/long to read" at first, but if you have the time and patience, what you will see is that, next time you confront your own images, rather than mechanically reproduce anything I write here, you will be making your own decisions. Regardless, I hope you find these tutorials useful, and as I said before, please leave a comment letting me know whether you found them useful or not, etc.

One last thing - although I do still use Photoshop sometimes in my image processing, most of it is done with PixInsight, so likely most of the image processing tutorials you'll be seeing here are using PixInsight.

Tutorial Index

• PixInsight Video Tutorials
  Warren Keller and I have teamed up to produce a series of professional quality video tutorials. This series covers EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PIXINSIGHT AND MORE. No kidding!

• Star size reduction via Morphological Transformations in PixInsight

• HDR Composition with PixInsight

• HDR Composition for astronomical images

• Removing gradients while preserving very faint background details

• Multi-scale Processing - Revealing very faint stuff

• Luminance Processing - Making the IFN pop

• Formulas for Photoshop blending modes

• FSQ106 ED/EDX + Extender Q + STL "HowTo"