I’ve gotten really proficient with Pixinsight over the years, but feel it lacks when it comes to making nebula really pop. I’m curious if anyone can provide me a workflow for after I do my initial curves/stretch/saturation adjustments in Pixinsight. When you bring an image over to PS, what adjustments and processes are you doing that you are not doing in PI?
Workflow for combining Pixinsight with Photoshop?
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I don’t use PhotoShop for this but I always output from PI to Affinity for you same reasons. My export is usually a stars plate and a starless plate. On the star plate I might make fine adjustments to color balance but nothing more. The starless plate gets the most work with sharpening and small adjustments to color balance and black point. Then I will screen the stars in and make any final adjustments and cropping if needed. The export for the final render master is always a 16 bit TIFF.
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Tony Gondola · Jul 5, 2026, 03:35 PM
I don’t use PhotoShop for this but I always output from PI to Affinity for you same reasons. My export is usually a stars plate and a starless plate. On the star plate I might make fine adjustments to color balance but nothing more. The starless plate gets the most work with sharpening and small adjustments to color balance and black point. Then I will screen the stars in and make any final adjustments and cropping if needed. The export for the final render master is always a 16 bit TIFF.
When you say “screen the stars in” what does that mean. Are you adding the stars in layers, simply adding via Pixel math, or are you using the imageblend screen?
Eric Miller · Jul 5, 2026, 03:53 PM
Tony Gondola · Jul 5, 2026, 03:35 PM
I don’t use PhotoShop for this but I always output from PI to Affinity for you same reasons. My export is usually a stars plate and a starless plate. On the star plate I might make fine adjustments to color balance but nothing more. The starless plate gets the most work with sharpening and small adjustments to color balance and black point. Then I will screen the stars in and make any final adjustments and cropping if needed. The export for the final render master is always a 16 bit TIFF.
When you say “screen the stars in” what does that mean. Are you adding the stars in layers, simply adding via Pixel math, or are you using the imageblend screen?
I was talking about what I do in Affinity, not PI. When I say “screen stars back in” I’m talking about layers.
Tony Gondola · Jul 5, 2026, 03:56 PM
Eric Miller · Jul 5, 2026, 03:53 PM
Tony Gondola · Jul 5, 2026, 03:35 PM
I don’t use PhotoShop for this but I always output from PI to Affinity for you same reasons. My export is usually a stars plate and a starless plate. On the star plate I might make fine adjustments to color balance but nothing more. The starless plate gets the most work with sharpening and small adjustments to color balance and black point. Then I will screen the stars in and make any final adjustments and cropping if needed. The export for the final render master is always a 16 bit TIFF.
When you say “screen the stars in” what does that mean. Are you adding the stars in layers, simply adding via Pixel math, or are you using the imageblend screen?
I was talking about what I do in Affinity, not PI. When I say “screen stars back in” I’m talking about layers.
Understood! That makes sense. That leads to a tangential question, do you always add all your stars back in one layer or do you separate the stars into different layers? I was thinking of maybe darkening the far away stars that show up behind my nebula to make them look a bit more screened while brightening some of the nearer stars to make them pop more. Is this a thing or a dumb idea?
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Personally, I really wouldn’t want to manipulate the data to that extent. In fact, I really only do a star separation if I absolutely need to and I never do it for Galaxies.
I change to PS when this is done in PI:
Gradient
Solver
SPC
Continuum substraction (where possible or necessary)
BXT
SXT
GHS
save as TIF and change to PS with different layers. Then I denoise, sharpen the different layers a little bit and combine the different layers with stars at top.
Check out Utah Desert Remote Observatory on YouTube. That gentleman has a terriic PI to PS workflow. I use it all the time.
I’ve got some examples of how I’ve used it on my own images here : kozastro.space
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The biggest reason I use PS (or affinity) is the ability to keep things in layers throughout the entire process. I often have starless, stars and then continuum subtracted Ha or other NB layers. I can adjust each to my hearts content until I’m happy, and look only at a single layer at any time l. Always save as 16 bit Tiff. I occasionally send it back to PI if there’s a tool I like there, but then it puts everything in a single layer.
in PI I get the data calibrated, combined, deconvolved, star removal if I’m doing that, sometimes noise reduced and MAS stretched. Then I use PS to give it my final look, especially curves and local sharpening
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Eric Miller · Jul 5, 2026, 01:33 PM
I’ve gotten really proficient with Pixinsight over the years, but feel it lacks when it comes to making nebula really pop. I’m curious if anyone can provide me a workflow for after I do my initial curves/stretch/saturation adjustments in Pixinsight. When you bring an image over to PS, what adjustments and processes are you doing that you are not doing in PI?
Depending on how much you want to tweak your images you might also consider Adobe Lightroom. I have used both PS and LR for many years but am relatively new to astrophotography with an astro camera. Initially I used PS more to try to make my images look acceptable, but now that I have become more proficient with PI, I can do the majority of the final adjustments in Lightroom. The advantage is that LR is non-destructive, the original image remains untouched and all adjustments like crop, curves, saturation, dehaze, clarity, masks etc are simply layers over the original image. The only thing lacking in LR is stacking multiple images, so if that’s what you are looking for PS is the right tool. But otherwise LR can also serve as a database for image management.
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