
When you first open an astrophoto, even if it has been stacked, the dynamic range is very low. It also handles dark, light, and bias frames, a method astrophotographers use to get the cleanest images possible. Affinity Photo 2 will stack 32-, 16- or 8-bit images and let you adjust levels and curves. With Affinity Photo 2, you select a stack of images, set a method of combining images to optimize image parameters, then click "stack," and you'll have a single image. Stacking increases signal and reduces noise, and if you use features like Sigma Clip when stacking, it will remove airplane and satellite trails automatically. Among its many astrophotography skills is the aforementioned stacking of FITS files.
#Affinity photo astrophotography workflow software
Now on a holiday sale for $40.99, Affinity Photo 2 does a lot of things good regular editing software does, and many prefer it to Photoshop.

When you open Affinity Photo 2 (the latest version, but Affinity Photo does this as well), there's a little hint in the file menu that this app handles astrophotos. All three run on Macs and Windows OS.Ībout a year ago, Affinity Photo quietly added the ability to handle FITS files, and it does it with aplomb. There are some powerful tools out there for astro images, like Pixinsight, Siril and the Astro Pixel Processor.

Photoshop won't natively deal with astro camera image files, which are in the FITS format. Most astrophotographers need special software tools to process their images.
