Photoshop Actions

I spent a little (emphasis on little) of my holiday money on the purchase of two Photoshop action packages for astrophotography. My simple goal for today was using the packages to reprocess one of my old images. Here's my original take on NGC 6781, a small planetary in Aquila. This was shot in June 2012 using H alpha and OIII narrowband filters with my ST8300M CCD and C925. This was my original "final" image:

Original Processing

I used the OIII data for both the blue and green channels, which produced a washed-out cyan in the nebula's interior. Other defects in this image include some uncorrected mild vignetting, a noisy background and almost colorless stars. Using the actions it was an easy task to generate a synthetic green channel, clean up the background, give the stars some color and pretty much obliterate the vignetting (without any flats). Wow! That's not bad for a day's work with new software. Here's the result:

Processed using actions

Not that it's perfect by any means. I think the background is too black and I've lost a lot of the dimmer stars. I'll take it as good enough for the first day of using the actions.

The two packages are Astronomy Tools ($21) and Annie's Astro Actions ($15).  There's some overlap between the packages, but they're so inexpensive that you can get both!