How To Reduce Star Sizes In Affinity Photo | Affinity Processing Guide

Reducing star size is a quick and easy way to make your deep sky photos pop. In this tutorial I show you how you can do this in Affinity Photo, and show two examples with two different visual effects.

In this tutorial we'll cover:
- Selection Tools
- Expanding A Selection
- Feathering
- Minimizing The Stars
- Opacity
- Masking

I do hope you join me for this and I hope it's helpful! Any other requests for tutorials, drop them down in the comments below.
Clear skies!

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[geoffjackson]

Absolutely the best and easiest to follow star reduction tutorial I have seen for Affinity Photo. Thank you!

[timschaeffer]

Thanks man! This just made my Image look 10 times better :)

Your channel is really amazing! Keep it up

[davideckes]

Thank you! would you use these same techniques with live stacked images from a CMOS camera?

[stormingbarney]

This is excellent and going to try it on some of my old data - thanks for sharing, Ruz!

[GrowingAnswers]

I like using starnet to remove the stars and then add them back via photoshop with an apply image technique. The best thing about that way is you can use curves to reduce star size, halo and brightness with a simple curve reduction. And it doesn’t make the stars look unnatural like using “minimum” does. Once I learned the starnet method I’d never go back to using the other way now. No masks needed and there is a lot more control.

[alex_g]

I had a Photoshop subscription and mainly used for star reduction. This just made dropping my Photoshop subscription a great decision. Thanks man. If you could make a video on how to deal with gradients in Affinity photo that'd be great.

[KJRitch]

I wish you would make more Affinity Photo tutorials. James Ritson has macros that can do a lot of processing. Maybe you could incorporate them into your workflows or if you find a better way of doing a task manually. Thanks.

[yervantparnagian]

A great simple to the point explanation on how to reduce the stars. Thanks you.

[javiervvgarcia]

Congratulations! I have just tested your procedure steps and it works really well. Just to try different intensity for the adjustments to fine tune star reduction depending on the type of the picture that you have taken. Nice!!!

[cindymathe]

I would love a tutorial on processing nebulae such as Orion, but on Affinity photo for ipad from start to finish! Great tutorial!

[dazza]

Nice demo mate, I use this all the time. The tip about using masks is really useful.

[wyngaart]

Thanks! I was just looking for this explanation.

[AstroCloudGenerator]

Hey Ruz. Great tutorial. Do you have any advice on setting DSLRs up in the cold? For instance, is it better to leave your gear in the garage for a couple of hours before taking it outside, or is it okay to go straight from the house to the garden?

[dazza]

Ruz, just to let you know, only whole pixel values are valid in the minimum blur filter. I was wondering why I couldn't enter a decimal value in the minimum blur filter on Mac, so I asked James Rittson the question he confirmed that this was a UI oversite on the Windows version, the minimum blur filter only uses whole pixel values and rounds any decimal value. So a value of 1.2px would just apply 1px and 1.6px would apply a value of 2px.

[russgenzmer]

How did you get the "Star Red (pixel) in the lower right of the screen to begin with. Thanks

[EverydayAstro]

Think you may have just sold me on trying Affinity... especially as it’s half price right now!

[reallymustgetalife]

Can you redo this for Affinity Photo 2? Most of the layers stuff is basically the same but I don’t seem to be getting the same results. I am doing wide angle Milky Way if that makes any difference. Thank you!

[eplumer]

Excellent video as always. I was having difficulty with the radius of the min blur filter. At 1px it did very little, at 1.1px it mostly removed the selected star. One work-around I found was to change the opacity on the blur filter itself. This seemed to get the finer control of the star size. Other alternatives you know of?

[gwthomas]

If you have stacked your images and have stretched the stacked image to bring out the details, but the color is wrong. For example, I made a first attempt at the Rosette Nebula, but it came out very greenish when stretched. How do you fix the coloration?

[yannickjullian]

Hello
Hello
Bonjour

thank you for your tutorial video
I have the ipad format and I want to crop a logo that my 14 year old son made younger to transform it from 3d into c4d
I saw that on Photoshop we could transform a clipping path to export it to c4d
my question is that on affinity this manipulation is possible and how
thanks a lot for your help
yannick france (toulouse)