Paint Shop Pro

For processing images Paint Shop Pro graphics editing software is used. It is a much cheaper alternative to Photoshop and for astrophotography it does everything you need of it.

There are many useful functions in Paint Shop Pro. One such function is "image arithmetic" whereby one image can be subtracted from another. This is particularly useful when cleaning up an original image by removing the errors in a dark image from the original.

Other useful functions in Paint Shop Pro are the cropping, resizing, sharpness, brightness and colour balance functions. The colour balance function is useful for altering the red, green, blue (RGB) balance in a photograph so as to accentuate a particular colour.

The matt function is very useful for layering photographs on top of each other. For example, you might take various exposures of different time length of the Orion nebula (M42) so as to bring out different features in each photograph. Matts can then be created to only allow that part of an image that is correctly exposed. Finally, all the images are merged to create a single image whereby all elements are correctly exposed.

In the case of M42 the central star cluster in the dust cloud needs a shorter exposure than the surrounding dust cloud. Two separate images with the correct exposure times can then be merged using matts to create a composite image.