Five Photoshop plugins for efficient Astrophotography workflow

Whether you are a nightscape photographer or you focus on deep sky imaging, Astro Panel X Pro will serve you for your needs. Created and sold by Digital Solutions, this plug-in caters to some of the basic needs of astrophotographers. The plug-in is designed to do multiple tasks including details enhancement, star removal, and colour enhancement, among others. If you are a landscape photographer, you will be able to use luminosity masks, dodging and burning and many more tasks with the help of Astro Panel X Pro.

This remarkable software is the key to unlocking the potential of your images, offering advanced tools and an unparalleled user experience.

Main Features

• Price: $35.00 (one-time purchase)
• Compatibility: Astro Panel X Pro 2024 is only compatible with Adobe Photoshop CC from 2021 to 2024 version on Windows, Mac Intel and Mac Apple Silicon M1-M2-M3.
• Trial: Available for 15 days

Nightscape and deep sky photographers often require stretching and enhancing the nebulosity within their images. However, doing this with the stars present in the image not only creates a distraction, but also ends up with larger and discoloured stars in the image. To prevent this from happening, creating a starless image is required at some stage of the workflow. RC Astro’s StarXTerminator is a perfect tool for this job. This AI-powered star removal tool helps to remove stars from astronomical images and allows the photographer to process the background objects and stars separately.

StarXTerminator uses an advanced convolutional neural network with a unique architecture suited to this task. This network has been extensively trained on photographs from a wide range of instruments, from camera lenses to the James Webb space telescope. Small stars, big stars, huge stars, and even diffraction spikes are recognized and removed, with minimal impact to non-stellar features.

Main Features

• Price: $59.95 (one-time purchase)
• Compatibility: Photoshop CS4 or later (64-bit only)
• Trial: Available for 30 days

Doing astrophotography from a light polluted location, or a faulty calibration is bound to create gradients in the image. The gradient can be present in the form of differing luminance or it could show up as different colors in the final stacked image. To extract data from such images, the gradient needs to be removed. RC Astro’s GradientXterminator is a one-click solution to this. The resulting image is cleaner and flat-fielded.

GradientXTerminator is a gradient removal plug-in for Photoshop and Affinity Photo that is fast and easy to use. It can process 32-bit, 16-bit, or 8-bit images, grayscale or RGB color. It easily tackles large-scale gradients from light pollution, but can also handle vignetting and even tricky edge, corner, and circular gradients that are very hard to deal with otherwise. And assuming you already use Photoshop in your work flow, you may now have one less program to transfer your image into.

Main Features

• Price: $59.95 (one-time purchase)
• Compatibility: Photoshop CS4 or later (64-bit only)
• Trial: Available for 30 days

RC Astro’s third plug-in for Photoshop gets rid of probably one of the most concerning issues for astronomical images – noise. Although astrophotographers use various techniques like tracking, stacking etc. to reduce noise in the final image, images inevitably introduce noise while trying the reveal the faintest of data. This AI-powered plug-in gets rid of the noise with just a click.

NoiseXTerminator is a fast and easy-to-use AI-powered noise reduction tool specifically for astrophotography… NoiseXTerminator was trained exclusively on deep-sky astrophotography, so its neural network is “familiar” with stars and the types of detail we see in our photos.

Main Features

• Price: $59.95 (one-time purchase)
• Compatibility: Photoshop CS4 or later (64-bit only)
• Trial: Available for 30 days

Note that if you are purchasing multiple RC Astro plug-ins or have already purchased one, you will get a $10 discount off the full price of each tool.

How often have you felt the need to make a constellation stand out in your wide-field nightscapes or add spikes to the stars to mimic the results of a reflector telescope? If the answer is positive, then StarSpikes Pro 4 is the plug-in for you. Rather than solving a problem present in your image, the Photoshop tool helps you to artistically enhance your images. With the help of this, you can now easily add a soft glow to the stars making them “stand out” or add spikes to the stars. And all of this with manual control. You can decide the amount of glow/spike or the amount of stars you want to add these effects to.

Create and control every aspect of beautiful, realistic effects, based on mathematical simulation of light diffraction, resulting in attractive 3D-looking images.

Main Features

• Price: $36.95
• Compatibility: Photoshop CC, Photoshop 2020 or newer
• Trial: Available for 15 days