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.
📷 image.png
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Serously, I am not a master in image processing, by far. But obviously, today it is absolutely part of the game and you have to invest your time. In my case, it means spending as much time as taking the light frames itself behind a computer to process the data. Anyway, I do use photoshop after processing everything in PI and to me it seems, that there are some algorithms that work better for the final color tweaks in PS. When it comes to printing the images, Photoshop is a must for me. In theory, everything should be possible in PI as well, but using PS works surprisingly well at the end of my workflow.
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That’s the thing, everything isn’t possible in PI or at least very difficult. I use Affinity for the same reasons you finish up in PS. Fine control over a professional layers process, along with everything else, really makes things easy. In my mind, that’s a must although I’m sure a lot of people don’t work that way.
Hi Eric,
Once you have streched your image and happy with the result, save it in TIFF mode in Pix, 16B, in order to further process it in PS
Unlike Pix, as you know, PS does work with adjustment layers and filters and therefore there is not a given workflow that fits all images
You could star with “Camera Raw” filter where you can adjust almost everything in your image and undo if not satisfying
The power of PS, is to work locally in your image, for example, boost local contrast, light, color saturation,vibrance…, I recommend layer mask .
I am uso using some plugin with PS, like the Nik collection wich also bring a huge set of enhancement capabilities
hope this helps
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I recommend that, after stretching the image in PI, you separate the stars—for instance, creating a starless LRGB image and a separate star layer.
You would end up with: Luminance (or Super-Luminance), RGB (starless), and RGB stars.
Save them as 16-bit TIFF files.
In Photoshop, use the "Load Files into Stack" script to import all the images.
Now you can create groups; for example, you can place the starless image in a group where you apply saturation, curves, and other adjustments without affecting the other images. This allows you to work on them separately while offering the advantage of merging them—stars and all—with a single click, saving you time and effort while helping you maintain focus.
From that point on, the long learning process in Photoshop begins; you will find tools in the Nik Collection that will help you, as well as various plugins—such as RC-Astro and Astronomy Tools—filters, and much more.
CS
Brian
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