Best astro processing plugins

[gregbradley]

I predominantly use CCDstack and Photoshop for image processing. I use PI a little (DBE, morphological transform to round stars etc).

Photoshop allows plugins which are very handy and some are really useful.

I am wanting to know what plug ins you have found good for Photoshop.

A couple I use are:

Noel Carboni actions - still super useful and some of the best. Deep space noise reduction is very good, select brighter stars is a fast way to make a star mask, increase star colour is a quick way of improving star colour.

NoiseNinja. Quite a good noise reduction plugin but best used with a layer hide all mask as it can make images look plastic easily.

Focus Magic. Several sharpening tools but a tiny bit goes a long way - very harsh.

Topaz adust. Can improve colours a lot if you want to boost them. But it will also increase background colour noise so again best done with a mask to keep the background clean.

Topaz has several plugins. One for denoise - not sure how good it is.
Lightroom has excellent noise reduction sliders. Perhaps the best I have seen.

What noise reduction plugins have you found to be good?

Gradient Xterminator from Russell Croman is still a good tool. I often use the apply image type gradient removal approach but that can be touchy if you don't make a very even smooth blurred no detail image that shows only the light gradients. It can create gradients if done poorly.

Greg.

[sil (Steve)]

I find I rarely touch photoshop, all astro processing I tend to stay in PixInsight. But I do use Star Spikes Plugin in photoshop ocassionally. For wide field shots of constellations I use it to add subtle spikes to the main stars of the constellation.

Neat Image has always been my noise reduction tool of choice, though I don't bother much anymore.

[gregbradley]

Thanks Sil.

I may have tried Neat Image before. As I recall it was quite good.

Imagenomic has Noiseware which seems versatile. Lightroom noise reduction is superb.

I am trialling Topaz denoise. I know Mike Salway uses that one. I also need to implement dithering as Sky X offers that if you can get all your gear to connect to it. Its still a work in progress in some ways.

Greg.