James, your Macros have been a game changer for me. I feel like your work with these has put me leaps and bounds further than just endless trial and error trying to stretch things. It makes post processing enjoyable, and that’s the whole point I think. I greatly appreciate your work and the fact that you offer this as you do. Keep up the great work brother!
Thank you for all your work with astro using Affinity! As a rookie, I just looked at 1.5 of your macros. While overwhelmed, I am starting to make sense out of what you have said and your macros could help me immeasurably. I am grateful for all you do.
James - you are seriously a genius! All of your macros have been game changers for us, but this set literally blew us out of the water! INCREDIBLE! Thank you so much! Looking forward to a longer video with more great tips 🙂
James, these macros are awesome, they've made a huge improvement in my photos. I use an unmodified camera so especially appreciate the process to extract one shot color data to monochrome channels. A question though - I have been watching the video you made last year (multiple times in fact), and I don't seem to see the star motion deconvolution macro or the various luma/chroma structure denoise options (I could use both!). Have they been removed or incorporated into other macros? Keep up the good work, I'm telling everyone about Affinity in my astronomy club...
HI. Thank you very much for your work. I question not about your macros but the video : which tool do you use to generate the 3d volumetric nebula effect in your video intro ? thanks.
James, having purchased Affinity based on your videos and understanding, primarily, there was an integrated stacking feature, I attempted to stack a series of subs of Jupiter and the program made a complete mess of it - from taking decently exposed subs, stacking them and totally overexposing the planet to rotation effects where the stacking ended up rotating the planet from one sub to the next so that it showed the moons in various locations on the end result stacked version. Can Affinity stack or not? I understand, at the moment, it cannot stack from a video (which is unfortunate) but while you present great work on DSOs, it was never mentioned that it could not stack a planet. Is there a solution or have I bought a 'dud'?
Hey Kevin, I actually took it away since you could basically just add a live denoise filter and bring the colour slider up: it felt a bit superfluous. That said, I'm bringing it back in a slightly different fashion for my next macro release...
@@JamesRitson very generous. I missed the sale but will update later this year. = AP is the best bang for the buck & an excellent value. Astro, = I would just want to Milkyway & some star trails at the most.
@@thomastuorto9929 hi, all V1 macros will work fine in V2-the new version of the macros just isn’t backwards compatible with V1. The new macro category includes all of the old macros anyway (although I removed a couple of them because they weren’t very good…)
As a bit of a beginner, is there any guidance on what order to carry out each stage of processing? And do these filters take me from unstacked raw images to final image or should I start with DSS and import into affinity. (I'm mid way through a free trial of afinity photo 2 atm but will be purchasing if I can get my head around these filters!!) ps, I'm also watching the longer tutorial video too
Hey Michael, sorry for not getting back to you sooner. The PDF readme for the macros will explain (if appropriate) the best stage to use some of the macros. Affinity Photo will do the whole process, from initial stacking of the raw data to final retouching and exporting. My macros cover all stages, from initial tone stretching to corrective work, colour/tone manipulation and final sharpening. People have their own preferred workflows, so they will sometimes use APP, PixInsight, DSS etc for stacking before bringing an image file into Affinity Photo, but you don't have to use any other software if you want to stay within one application. I would however recommend looking at StarXTerminator, which can install as a plugin within Affinity Photo (you can run it before/just after tone stretching). It's useful not just for producing starless imagery, but also for separating nebula and star detail so you can process them separately. Hope that helps!
@@markwelsh9068 Hey Mark, that's true, the astrophotography stack workspace only aligns based on stars. You can use File>New Stack for planetary stacking if you're working with pre-processed bitmap files (e.g. 16-bit TIFF) or RAW files-possibly calibrated FIT files as well but I haven't checked as of yet...
@@JamesRitson New stack screws it all up too (Raw files). Don't you think it may have been worth explaining this in your promotional material before people, like me, bought the software thinking it would do the job of stacking we wished/expected?
@@markwelsh9068 well, I’m not promoting the software-I’m showcasing my macros for the software and demonstrating the best use cases for them… I haven’t claimed anywhere that Photo does planetary image stacking? (And I certainly haven’t shown anything in the videos that can’t be achieved using Photo) You can download a 10-day trial of each app to see if it works for what you’re wanting to do. I’ve stacked plenty of moon shots in Photo and it has aligned those images without an issue, but I haven’t tried it with other planetary imaging. If asked, I would have said download the trial and try it with your own imagery, which is certainly good practice for any software. File>New Stack aligns based on features, and the determining factor for a “feature” is based on a certain level of detail. If the planet source images are blurry (e.g. are unsharp because of optics and may require deconvolution) then alignment may prove difficult using that method. As mentioned above, I’ve only tried to align moon images, which works for me, but I can’t speak for others…
James, your Macros have been a game changer for me. I feel like your work with these has put me leaps and bounds further than just endless trial and error trying to stretch things. It makes post processing enjoyable, and that’s the whole point I think. I greatly appreciate your work and the fact that you offer this as you do. Keep up the great work brother!
Thank you for all your work with astro using Affinity! As a rookie, I just looked at 1.5 of your macros. While overwhelmed, I am starting to make sense out of what you have said and your macros could help me immeasurably. I am grateful for all you do.
This video cements the fact that I've only been using 1% of 1% of affinitys potential.
As always, your macros are a great asset to Affinity Photo, thanks for the nice update to them.
James - you are seriously a genius! All of your macros have been game changers for us, but this set literally blew us out of the water! INCREDIBLE! Thank you so much! Looking forward to a longer video with more great tips 🙂
I can't wait to try it out.
Shoot I guess I need to get the upgrade. I wish I knew this while the sale was going on. However this adds to the value of the upgrade.
Thank you very much for the macros! Please keep on developing astro capabilities for AF.
Hi James, are you reducing the stars before running macros etc...? Thanks
Great video James and fantastic additions and improvements as usual
Many thanks for your outstanding work James.
U.B.D.Man....
Great update! Very much appreciated.
This stuff blows my mind.
James, these macros are awesome, they've made a huge improvement in my photos. I use an unmodified camera so especially appreciate the process to extract one shot color data to monochrome channels. A question though - I have been watching the video you made last year (multiple times in fact), and I don't seem to see the star motion deconvolution macro or the various luma/chroma structure denoise options (I could use both!). Have they been removed or incorporated into other macros? Keep up the good work, I'm telling everyone about Affinity in my astronomy club...
James, are you loyal to the natural colors - or aren't their any colors to be loyal to? I think I saw you make a hue shift at one point?
HI. Thank you very much for your work. I question not about your macros but the video : which tool do you use to generate the 3d volumetric nebula effect in your video intro ? thanks.
James, having purchased Affinity based on your videos and understanding, primarily, there was an integrated stacking feature, I attempted to stack a series of subs of Jupiter and the program made a complete mess of it - from taking decently exposed subs, stacking them and totally overexposing the planet to rotation effects where the stacking ended up rotating the planet from one sub to the next so that it showed the moons in various locations on the end result stacked version. Can Affinity stack or not? I understand, at the moment, it cannot stack from a video (which is unfortunate) but while you present great work on DSOs, it was never mentioned that it could not stack a planet. Is there a solution or have I bought a 'dud'?
Bonjour James les macros..c'est pour mac ou pc....?.Merci beaucoup .
Bonjour, les macros fonctionneront sur macOS, Windows et iPad. Merci!
amazing as always!
Thank you so much!!
Hey James, one question about the color denoise macro. Where is it gone? :D
Kevin
Hey Kevin, I actually took it away since you could basically just add a live denoise filter and bring the colour slider up: it felt a bit superfluous.
That said, I'm bringing it back in a slightly different fashion for my next macro release...
@@JamesRitson Thank you and have a nice day
CS
Kevin
That are very good news thank you very much 🎉🎉🎉
Are applicable for AP version 1? Thanks and regards
Hi, I'm afraid not-V15 takes advantage of functionality from V2 and isn't backwards compatible...
@@JamesRitson very generous. I missed the sale but will update later this year. = AP is the best bang for the buck & an excellent value. Astro, = I would just want to Milkyway & some star trails at the most.
Will all the previous macro that were for the versions 1.* work with V2? Thank you for any replies.
@@thomastuorto9929 hi, all V1 macros will work fine in V2-the new version of the macros just isn’t backwards compatible with V1. The new macro category includes all of the old macros anyway (although I removed a couple of them because they weren’t very good…)
@@JamesRitson Great to hear. Thank you.
As a bit of a beginner, is there any guidance on what order to carry out each stage of processing? And do these filters take me from unstacked raw images to final image or should I start with DSS and import into affinity. (I'm mid way through a free trial of afinity photo 2 atm but will be purchasing if I can get my head around these filters!!) ps, I'm also watching the longer tutorial video too
Hey Michael, sorry for not getting back to you sooner. The PDF readme for the macros will explain (if appropriate) the best stage to use some of the macros. Affinity Photo will do the whole process, from initial stacking of the raw data to final retouching and exporting. My macros cover all stages, from initial tone stretching to corrective work, colour/tone manipulation and final sharpening.
People have their own preferred workflows, so they will sometimes use APP, PixInsight, DSS etc for stacking before bringing an image file into Affinity Photo, but you don't have to use any other software if you want to stay within one application. I would however recommend looking at StarXTerminator, which can install as a plugin within Affinity Photo (you can run it before/just after tone stretching). It's useful not just for producing starless imagery, but also for separating nebula and star detail so you can process them separately.
Hope that helps!
@@JamesRitson You don't mention to Michael that Affinity cannot stack planets!
@@markwelsh9068 Hey Mark, that's true, the astrophotography stack workspace only aligns based on stars. You can use File>New Stack for planetary stacking if you're working with pre-processed bitmap files (e.g. 16-bit TIFF) or RAW files-possibly calibrated FIT files as well but I haven't checked as of yet...
@@JamesRitson New stack screws it all up too (Raw files). Don't you think it may have been worth explaining this in your promotional material before people, like me, bought the software thinking it would do the job of stacking we wished/expected?
@@markwelsh9068 well, I’m not promoting the software-I’m showcasing my macros for the software and demonstrating the best use cases for them… I haven’t claimed anywhere that Photo does planetary image stacking? (And I certainly haven’t shown anything in the videos that can’t be achieved using Photo)
You can download a 10-day trial of each app to see if it works for what you’re wanting to do. I’ve stacked plenty of moon shots in Photo and it has aligned those images without an issue, but I haven’t tried it with other planetary imaging.
If asked, I would have said download the trial and try it with your own imagery, which is certainly good practice for any software.
File>New Stack aligns based on features, and the determining factor for a “feature” is based on a certain level of detail. If the planet source images are blurry (e.g. are unsharp because of optics and may require deconvolution) then alignment may prove difficult using that method. As mentioned above, I’ve only tried to align moon images, which works for me, but I can’t speak for others…