How to Process your astrophotography Images. Maximize detail thru Contrast and Basic techniques! 

Fantastic! You wouldn’t believe how much this tutorial series has helped me. Thank you so much!

Your PS processing videos are among the best (if not THE best) I've seen and/or studied. Workflow that makes sense. Very clear, at an excellent pace, explained as to the why, not simply the how. You are an excellent teacher, and very kind to share your knowledge and experience. Well done, thank you very much for the boost in confidence and the incentive to revisit ALL of my images.

As I am very new to deep sky imagery....I found this vlog...highly informative.....people forget 50% of the work is PS afterwards...great video...more of these please.

This series was the best lesson I’ve seen. Thank you!

Absolute Gold Dust! Time to reprocess some old data while the weather is rubbish. This has taught me so many new things. Thanks buddy :)

I am learning so much from this series. Thank You

Excellent. Just what I was looking for. Very impressed with workflow and results. Thank you!

I've watched a ton of videos but your series of 3 has been the most helpful to me in dealing with a very poor set of data. This data is of the region around Sadr and is my first serious attempt to image - I have an old Canon EOS 450D modified DSLR I bought for under $200, and a brand new move-shoot-move tracker. The seeing conditions weren't great and I suspect I had too high an ISO setting - but hey, it's all good learning & experience. I followed along with your videos but my data set and got an outcome that I'm satisfied with - my 6th attempt! I learned so much in this process about what I might do differently in capturing the data as well as processing it - so , thanks hugely for that! Big lessons on capturing - getting the best focus possible and getting a good polar alignment, which I knew wasn't great as my laser pointer for my tracker arrived broken and I couldn't wait for a replacement - I used a rolled-up sheet of paper to form a narrower field of view, and some thread across the front opening to create cross hairs, and then I googled where Polaris would be at that time of night relative to the North Celestial Pole and used the full moon's size to guestimate the angular distance from the cross hairs to the NCP. It was better than nothing! I checked! Anyway, thanks again - I like your style, tone & pace in your videos, keep at it now I'm subscribed! And stay safe & well! Clear skies!

I will be saving this if the day ever comes of me switching to PhotoShop - thanks for putting this together.

Stunning transformation expertly explained - thank you 😊

This is the best. Great help for PS post processing!!

Thank you! This series has been of incredible help!

Just found these videos. Thank you so much. Amazeballs!

amazing workflow. thank you for sharing and keep teaching us !

WOW, this has changed my life. Well at least my AP life. I was getting frustrated with BS workflows, overly complicated tutorials and generally crappy results. You rock! In one evening I took my skills to a whole new level. I followed along with all tree videos with a small data set and the results were stunning. I haven't got a lot of image data yet, thank goodness, because I'll be going back through all of it and re-editing. Thanks and please keep helping our community.

Thanks for the series. Really enjoyed it.

Cannot be done more articulately!! I’ve learnt tons.. thank you from India 🇮🇳

Incredibly helpful, this and your Stretch enhancement. Why have I only just seen this! As others have said good explanation, for me the pace was good and I get consistent results. Followed along on my Rosette Nebula, it's the best I've seen it!

This series has been incredibly helpful. I am seeing how these processes have changed the image quality of the date I’ve been capturing. Very helpful!

Brilliant tutorial👌. Thank you

I just watched all three of the episodes, really stunning processing and very well explained, thank you for making this 👍👍

Thanks for this really useful video. Amazing!!

Thank you so much for your tutorials. All your videos are a GEM for anyone learning how to process their images! Again, thank you so much! Can't wait for more tutorials coming from you! Excellent!!!

Incredible! Like others have mentioned, I've used tutorials by many well known astrophotographers, and your methods have by far produced the best results. Not only that, they were the easiest and most consistent to implement. Masking stars can be a nightmare. Thank you so much for this series of videos. I'm very hopeful that you'll reveal some of those secret techniques you mentioned.

Absolute legend 🙂

Superb tutorial, thank you for doing this 👍🏻

What a phenomenal amount of help. I've been struggling with getting decent results after editing. Seeing what others do with my data and what I was ending with was almost discouraging. By chance, I've stumbled across this little series and it's transformed what I've been able to do. I think I've re-edited the same data set 4 or 5 times now with your assistance, and I've been able to improve each time to get a better and better result. I really appreciate you explaining each step, and even going so far as to explain keyboard shortcuts and what you're achieving with them. Underrated channel. This was one is bookmarked.

Brilliant tutorial AstroEd!

Thank you, so very interesting for me as a beginner!

There are so many astro processing vids out there, but yours are absolutely standout in both content and presentation. Thank you! Hoping you'll eventually get to that video about how you process from your triad filter data. Terrific stuff, thanks again!

The best tutorials I've seen to date. I've been using techniques from all the usual suspects and they don't even come close to what I've learned in 3 of your videos. Your techniques and delivery are very easy for me to understand too. I've basically been doing a lot of things that you do but not quite as efficient as your method. Thanks for the videos! Bravo!

Hard to add much more than has already been said. Helpful to beginners like myself, being clear and concise and easy to follow. Thanks much Thomas.

This was really useful thanks.

Absolutely brilliant method of post processing astrophotography images. I’ve been using curves for enhancing contrast, using acr but didn’t really get good results. Your technique is really unique from what I’ve seen so far on RU-vid. Thank you for sharing. It makes newcomers like me want to carry on instead of giving up.

Thank you for this detailed explanation. It helped me a lot :) i saved all your videos to my libary and wrote a small spreadshead for myself!

Absolutely fantastic video. The difference this has made to my images is incredible! Thank you 👍

Stunning work dude thank you.

Wow, amazing tutorial. It's so nice to see some other teqnuiques used than the same old stuff thats repeated throughout other channels. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. Hopefully you will find the motivation to make more tutorials like this in the future

another super helpful video .. subbed 😜

Brilliant !

Just started in deep sky astro and I can’t wait to try this out !

Thanks for that beginner tutorial man! Will help a lot!! Love your work, keep it going :-) Clear skies mate!

Excellent workflow tutorial Ed You managed to extract some great detail in your image Cheers mate as always Keep up the great work

Fantastic! Thank you!!!

Thanks for sharing !

Fantastic tutorial. I really hope you decide to a narrowband tutorial which I'm sure would be equally well received and would no question increase your subscribers

Thank You for the excellent tutorial Thomas! I will have to start using Photoshop, you made it look so easy. All the best for 2021 and CS Tam.

Thank you very much Thomas! This series has been incredibly educational for me. My images are so much better and I hope to incorporate this new info. Happy New Year to you and your family my friend.

Super nice ... but I would love to see how you bring out the blue from the triad filter.

Awesome tutorial!

I enjoyed this video very much. You got some real PS talent. I did luminosity layers but have been unimpressed with it. I shall try this and see what comes out!

These three videos are absolutely the best and clearest I've found for PS! Thanks a lot Ed you are great! Only one more question ... this workflow works also with shots taken with light pollution filters?

Thank you

please do narrowband imagin processing that would be great

Thanks for the amazing video Ed! Does this method of stretching the image has your preference above an earlier video where you used the 'gray multiply' and 'gray devide' layers? It appears to me both can have the same result but somehow I like the Starnet++ option allot better. Great tutorial, allot better then most stretching vids on YT. You got yourself a sub!

Im the first !! nice video brudda

Fantastic. Very impressive. What is the background music?

Hi Ed I found this incredibly helpful, I have been using your methods to go back and reprocess all my nebula images and achieving excellent improvements. I tried your methods on other images such as Orion and some star clusters, but could not get this system to work as well, obviously I am doing something wrong. I was wondering whether you could process some of these types of images in another video just so I could see the differences if any that are required? Looking forward to whatever you put up next, thank you for sharing these wonderful techniques.

This is a great series and very helpful. I must be doing something wrong though. I'm working on a one shot color file and when I attempt to copy the red channel data only when it gets pasted back in, it is full colour so the next layer etc don't work. Any suggestions would be very helpful.

Hi AstroEd! As a rookie to AP, AND Photoshop, your tutorials is very helpful! Last night I shot the North America and Pelican nebula with a moded dslr and a 200mm camera lens. I tried to apply the contrast techniques in this video, but ran into what is probably a simple PS problem: When selecting channels on a layer, click the red channel, ctrl a, ctrl c and then click rgb and back to layers, and then try to ctrl v to get a new luminance layer, nothing seems to happen. No new layer with the red channel only is created. I tried to get around by creating a new empty layer and paste the red channel in there. This seems to work, but I don't understand why this lummlayer is not created 'your' way. Probably some setting or locks I have (the layers are not 'locked'). Any ideas...? Thanks! 😊

Awsome Ed, Would love to see how you do your Narrowband processing, I have been dabbing in to it using the L Enhance. Do you have a Twtitter accnt?

At 23:19 how did you combine the star image with the starless image? Did you click on the Layer 1 item?

Interesting that you use a different layer for each Camera Raw tool. Does this give better image quality than making multiple CR adjustments per layer or is it more personal preference?

Extraordinarily easy and efficient processing! I learned so much! Thank you for posting this. One comment/question however: the star color *appears* to have taken on some of the color of the background nebulosity (or perhaps it is my monitor or eyes deceiving me). I assume this is from the blending mode you used when you rejoined the stars with the starless layer. Is there some way to avoid this? To preserve the star color just as it appears after the arcsinh stretch you used? Thanks so much, yet again. I truly great series!

Was waiting for this tutorial since starnet++ episode :) just curious, isn't it possible to achieve with contrast or curves adjustments?

I keep referring back to this video cause of how good it is. But for some reason, after installing photoshop on a different computer, my luminosity layer actually changes the star color (when I make the star layer visibile). What's up with that? it never happened before. I have to use color dodge instead now. EDIT: WHOOPS! my star layer is at the bottom instead of top. heh..

Hi I tried to send you a message on your website contact form. Don't think it went through. Basically I followed your technique using the arcsin10 adjustment but am not getting the same results. I use a DSLR and telephoto lens on a Star tracker and take about 50 to 100 lights and stack them to start my image in photoshop. My question is will your arcsinh10 adjustment process outlined in your Photoshop videos work for my DSLR image or is that for sophisticated telescope cameras that take color images in different channels?

Great video. I've just moved from.a DSLR to a OSC. I've used the Lextreme filter with it. Would this workl flow be good for that filter?