From stacking to post processing in Affinity Photo a high quality, low cost image processor.

Astronomers have been doing their stacking and post processing in a single application for a long time. However, this has been virtually always with expensive, dedicated software.

Affinity Photo by Serif is a high quality, low cost image processing application for macOS and Windows. In the latest version 1.9.0 there is astronomical image stacking as well as the usual range of image processing functions.

I have been testing the one for all application idea using data captured by AstroDMx Capture for macOS, stacking and post-processing the images in Affinity Photo.

Full details of the testing can be found HERE

The equipment used for capturing data

AstroDMx Capture for macOS capturing data on M1, the Crab nebula

M1 stacked and processed entirely in Affinity Photo

The Rosette nebula data captured by AstroDMx Capture for macOS with an Atik 314L mono camera was also stacked and reprocessed entirely in Affinity Photo.

The Rosette nebula

Affinity Photo is a very capable piece of software which also complements opensource software such as the Gimp. In particular, in combination with AstroDMx Capture for macOS, Mac users now have all they need to do all of their astronomical imaging work on the Mac without recourse to using virtualisation or the Wine compatibility layer.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin