Most Powerful Photoshop CC Tool for Astrophotography 

Trevor you are a genius. Have used Select and Mask for composites and played a bit with it for Astro but never thought about two passes with the mask. You and Dylan O’Donnell make astrophotography so exciting for us mere mortals... my heart is singing!

Trevor, I just want to say, that thanks to your videos and blog getting into astrophotography is less painful for me. Keep up the good work, man!

Watching all of these excitedly before my mount and scope arrive, all of your videos are so inspirational!

THANK YOU!! I've needed this for a LONG TIME...how did I ever miss this??!!

Trevor, what a pleasure to see an instructional style video like you used to make rather than the advertising style video where I feel like you are selling products. Videos like this are what brought me to your channel originally.

Great video Trevor I'm looking forward to trying it. For you Pixinsight users the equal to this would be your "RangeSelection" mask under your processes.

CS 6 you can do a color range selection and go into these same adjustments by clicking refine edge

Wow ! Learned a lot on that one Trevor . I usually use Light Room ( wide field Milky Way , moon etc . ) and have little to no experience with PS. Just acquired Star Adventurer for tracking and I’m eager to try PS. Thanks Trevor

This is really helpful.

what a nice video Trevor, thank you!

Great tutorial Trevor! It cool watching you grow over time and teaching others as you go. Nice giving heart. Keep up your enthusiasm .

Trevor, I feel your pain with the weather lately. I'm in New England and it's been sucky for weeks now. Just wanted to thank you for this Ps tutorial video as that is an area I'm still trying to get used to with my own astrophotos. If you have any other tips and tricks I'd love to see more videos on this subject. Keep it up!

Very interresting! I will defiately have a look at maybe finishing off my pixinsight images in PS. Masking is one of the things I find most difficult in PixInsight, and it just seems so much more intuitive in the way you do it here. Good video Trevor!

Nice work Trevor. I checked and most of this capability appears to be present in Photoshop CS6 as well, though not put together as a "tool". Just an FYI for people with older copies of PShop running.

Excellent, I have learnt so much from your videos. Keep up the great work.

Trevor, great information and video. Love your passion for the hobby.

Glad your back Trevor! 😄🙌🏽

Awesome Trevor. I will be trying this out if it ever clears up again and I am able to image something. These days I use PI for initial analysis, stacking, background neutralization, some noise reduction, combining LRGB and narrowband images, some stretching, some star reduction and then use PS for more of the same. I am not purest of either program and see no reason to choose one over the other. I have found both programs can do the same thing, it is just how easy is it to do. PI does range masks but I do like the simpler control PS has to offer. I have been doing the color range method in PS with the 'ants'. I didn't know you can make them go away. Thanks for sharing - Cheers

Thank you Trevor for this tutorial. I was so disheartened between modifying my camera because to capture more H Alpha on my stock d800 or buying new Camera.I did not want to buy a new full frame to modify it as my filters are all for FF. Since its a new hobby, I do not gave the budget. Great tutorial.

Great video Trevor! Keep it up!

Seems Trevor found a secret weapon for us, gonna redo some old data with this, Great Video. +10

Great video...PI has a more limited version of this called 'range selection' which works, but this seems like it offers a greater range of control for fine tuning. I'll definitely give this a shot moving forward when it comes to final saturation/contrast adjustments. Weather in northeast US has been abysmal too...one clear night since a week before NEAF, and the nights are only getting shorter. The FOMO is real.

Great video Trevor! I will indeed be using some of these techniques :)

Haha, "Control Zed"... Canadians. gotta love em! Great video Trevor!

A powerful tool indeed, thanks for sharing.

Perfect for me! Thank you Trevor!

Brilliant! Thanks for that Trevor! At least I have something to do for the cloudy nights now ;)

I think Photoshop is charging extra for that color select function. Is there a way to find out which new functions come with various upgrades or do you have to pick them one at a time and pay out the 👃

Oh I love this! It really smoothed out my background noise. I know I should know this, but what are you doing with the layers you modified? Merged down? Or kept the layer as is? EDIT: Yup, merging down and maybe that secret 66% opacity.

Could you do a tutorial in Gimp?

Trevor try to use also Capture One for editing, is very good on masking and other stuff :)

First step... NOT have the lagoon Nebula directly over NYC =/ But in all seriousness, thank you for all these photoshop tutorials. They make a world of difference.

Great video. thanks

Trever you shuld make some merch of your pictures

Well done Trevor ! Thanks for the video and insight . Question for you was this shot from saint Catherines ? Reason I ask is because you were able to get up to 5 min subs at iso 1600 ?

Trevor, very cool. Have you completed a project with your Meade DSI yet? I'm curious to see how you make out assembling multiple filters with Photoshop. Trying to put together an LRGB image in PS made me switch to PI.

Hello Trevor, thank you very much for your wonderful tutorials. I am just starting out in trying to take images of the milky way, (not yet been bit by the deep space photo bug yet), and was hoping for some guidance. Most of the tutorials I watch on improving your images either involve using a tracker which seem to always involve some sort of app needed or recommended to make finding polaris easier among other things. Secondly I often read about 'astro converting' your camera. I am tempted to try using a tracker, but I do not own a cell phone, and not really keen on getting one either. Are these 'apps' necessary and how challenging is it to use a tracker without all those misc items like a cell phone and the many apps mentioned? Also what is your opinion on getting a camera 'astro' converted? I have read of people that have done both, using a tracker with an astro converted camera. I guess if money was no object, and I wasn't a luddite, it might be feasible, but with the restrictions I have mentioned. What would you suggest? Much appreciated and apology for the long winded question.

What format are your images to open in ps. When dss saves them I can’t open them in ps. I click open in ps then select the stacked from dss click open and it opens in a screen called CAMERA RAW 7.4-TIFF and not the actual ps screen ? Anyone know why please. Great video as always.

So 80mm refractors can still see detail in deep sky objects like nebulae?

Then what did you do? Merge all the visible layers? I guess the question is, how did you finish up with all those layers?

hey Trevor, just wondering what is the light pollution level in your area(1-10)?

I never apply NR just integrate more and more and you will have Incredible Snr to process and then do aggressive stretching data You won't find noise there

Make more video's please! We have clouds and rain for at least 10 more days😅

How is he creating the Layer 2 after making the first adjustments? I dont get it..

Just started to go through some pixinsight tutorials. Do you think PS is needed well? Side note: do you still stand by your comment that the asi294mc pro is the best OSC you've used?

Yup nice

I,m excited about star party! Who else is?

why 15 fps ;-;

For someone like me who is a totally beginner at photoshop all these video skips were you create layers etc its really hard for me to understand..

This works on Milky Way too?

So do you use PixInsight?

It has been raining for almost 2 weeks straight, and just yesterday got a night to get my telescope out.

Security breach - there's a WiFi password on the white board :)

Wow!?

@astrobackyard If you want to learn a massive amount of general photoshop techniques valuable for astrophotography look at the @piximperfect channel. He has a lot of detailed knowledge of photoshop and is great at presenting the techniques in an easy to understand and reproduce way. Oh, and also always convert your layer to a smart object before applying a filter - that way you can go back at any time and adjust a previous filter without having to re-do it from scratch.

Sadly I am stuck with CS5

sorry Trevor but did you know Adobe is going to abolish all licensed software from them that's not based on subscription and being sued if we continue using that? you should make an awareness for this as well.

err your pic's makes me miss taking the telescpe out i have a 8" lx200 cat i had a run of bad luck the meade fork died 2 weeks out of warranty and meade refused to put a board in it so i deforked it an sold my fork and bought a new EQ-6 with hd field tripod with Astrophotography package addon cam with a qsi camera with 5 filters and a auto guider (dont rem. brand) from ebay packaged deal for $2200.00 i should have known it was to good to be true for $1500 mount ,1k camera , $50. x5 filters ,$200 auto guider. i paid and 3 days later he closed his paypal and ebay accounts and never shipped it. this guy sold 11 of the 20 he had listed and because i paid by bank and not a credit card i lost my $2200. now i have to save a few yrs again to get a mount. wow what a long story of why i don't have a mount anymore it sucks me and the kids loved taking the scope out. take lots of good pic for us to look at and thanks for sharing. new sub

Tervor please slow down ime ok with photoshop but trrrrrrrrrrev racing aint worrrrrking

Can u give me a junkies run down on cheap stuff to use for people who live life’s with no money and have to steal there stuff please. Free and cheap would be great. Not rich and proud. Thank u

Trevor like your stuff but as far as Photoshop goes, Oy vey! That can be expensive. what are you spending annually with Photoshop? I believe it can range anywhere from $9.99 a month to over $50 a month. a lot of us out here I just amateurs, like yourself, but we’re not making money off of this. I know you can download and buy a program for $79 but it’s just a basic and I’m not sure what I can do it basic. I’m not gonna spend $60 a month to edit photos as a hobby. it’s enough I’ve got to spend thousands of dollars now getting the good equipment to view and or take photos. Can you recommend a program that can give us reasonably good editing and at a reasonable price?