As an amateur astrophotographer, you know that capturing the night sky requires more than just a good camera. You need software that can help you process your photos to bring out the best in them. Here’s our list of the best astrophotography software.
The Benefits of Using Lightroom and Photoshop as Astrophotography Software
Astrophotography editing includes many steps. Some of these are tedious or repetitive.
Photoshop actions, plugins, and panels can speed things up. They can even guide you through some steps, such as:
- Removing light pollution;
- Removing the luminosity gradient;
- Creating a flatter field, i.e. reducing vignetting;
- Removing green color casts;
- Reducing halos;
- Performing a histogram stretch;
- Applying a different kind of sharpening and noise reductions;
- Creating a star mask.
Lightroom presets are more limited to starry landscape editing. They help balance the image and boost the details and the colors in the sky.
5 Good Reasons to Invest in Lightroom and Photoshop
If you don’t want to use dedicated editing software, such as PixInsight, you may want to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud.
You may be tempted to use programs that do not require a subscription. These include Gimp, Affinity or Darktable. Affinity is the strongest of the three, and it now costs nothing at all: RAW development, layers, HDR, macros and PSD import all sit in the free app. What none of them have is the preset, action and panel ecosystem the rest of this article is built on. That is why Adobe still wins here.
The reason for this is that the subscription has a lot to offer. For the price, you have:
- Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, always updated;
- Bridge, to easily cull your images;
- Web space to store and share images;
- A portfolio you can build without buying anything else;
- The rich ecosystem of third-party add-ons and extensions created for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, which every tool below depends on.
Are You Using Windows or macOS?
Lightroom and Photoshop are multi-platform. Plugins and panels may not be. Some only work on Windows (or, more rarely, only on macOS). For some, you can have both versions.
Lightroom presets and Photoshop action packs usually work on both operating systems.
Lightroom or Photoshop: Which One Is Best for Astrophotography?
Lightroom is a raw developer and image organizer. It is like Adobe Camera Raw on steroids.
Editing for astrophotography benefits from heavier image manipulation. Photoshop makes it possible to do histogram stretching, masks, layers blending modes, etc.
Lightroom Tools For Astrophotography
There are two ways to use add-ons and resources from within Lightroom.
Edit Your Image Outside Lightroom
Lightroom, LR, cannot use plugins or panels. But you can link it to external software (e.g., Photoshop, Topaz Photo, Nebulosity, etc.).
Go to the develop module and right click on the image preview in the bottom panel. Next, choose the proper software in the “Edit In” menu.
When you choose to edit an image outside Lightroom, the following will happen:
- LR creates a physical copy of your LR image, usually a tiff file.
- This copy is opened in the external software;
- Saving the image after the editing will update the copy created by LR.
This way:
- you can keep profiting from LR image organization (smart collections, localization, etc.);
- you can use, say, Photoshop CC for the needed image manipulation, and LR for the final touches.
Install Lightroom Presets
You can see LR presets as recipes. Select one and it will apply a series of adjustments to the image.
Single Raw developed in LR with the Venice preset from Lonely Speck’s Film One free preset collection.
Presets are often used to give the image a particular look. Their strength is the fact the editing is non-destructive. You can always tweak the result of a preset.
LR presets are often available as collections. Here’s an overview of some interesting LR preset collections for your astrophotography.
Lonely Speck's Film Speck One (Free)
Ian Norman is the man behind Lonely Speck. Together with Astrobackyard, Lonely Speck is a great resource for beginner astrophotographers.
In particular, Ian’s main astro activity is to photograph the Milky Way from a fixed tripod.
The Film Speck One preset collection is still on the Lonely Speck website and it is still free, with an optional pay-what-you-want donation. It contains 102 presets, aiming to give your image a distinct look. Eighty-four are color and eighteen are black and white.
The Acamar Preset. Image Credit: Ian Norman.
If you are also into landscape or portraiture, you should consider this collection. Not all presets are specific to astrophotography.
It works in Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC and Adobe Camera Raw. Because the pack is a grab bag rather than a focused astro set, expect to audition a lot of looks before you find the two or three you keep using.
Lonely Speck's Film Speck PRO
Aside from the Film Speck One collection, you can get the Film Speck Pro one for a price. The pack contains 17 core styles and 138 fine-tuned presets for starry landscapes.
If you buy this collection, you get the Urban Dreams collection for free. That one is more for night urban photography, so if you only ever shoot the sky it is a bonus you will not use.
Example of nocturnal cityscape you can obtain with the Urban Dreams collection. Image Credit: Ian Norman.
This one is a paid pack, and it works in Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC. It is the refined version of the free set rather than a different idea, so if Film Speck One already gets you where you want to go, you can skip it.
Northlandscapes’ Free Astrophotography and Night Sky Presets
Jan Erik Waider’s free pack is ten presets built specifically for astro and long-exposure work, each one tested against more than a hundred images from different camera models.
The adjustments are deliberately restrained. They draw the detail out of the Milky Way and lift the stars without pushing the frame into an over-edited look, and they hold up on Northern Lights shots too, because they keep the color and only tighten the contrast.
You still set white balance and exposure yourself in the Basic panel first. The download is one click, with no email sign-up, and the files ship as XMP, lrtemplate and DNG, so they load in Lightroom 4 through Classic CC, in Lightroom Mobile, and in Adobe Camera Raw 10.3 or later.
The catch is support. Waider says plainly that he cannot help with his free products, so if a preset misbehaves on your files you are on your own. Ten presets is also a small set next to the two above.
Photoshop Tools For Astrophotography
With Photoshop, you have a greater choice of add-ons and extensions. You can install Action packs, Plugins and Extension Panels.
Photoshop Action Packs
PS actions are a bit like LR presets. Actions can perform complex tasks and are very useful to automate editing steps.
When it comes to astrophotography, there are several action packs worth considering.
Astronomy Tools By Pro Digital Software
The Astronomy Tools action pack is arguably the most complete action set for astrophotography.
The main focus of this action pack is to automate many of the classic editing steps for deep sky photography.
The action pack (version 1.6.2) contains 34 actions covering a broad range of editing steps and techniques. You pay for it once, it runs on Windows and macOS, and it has kept pace with Photoshop from CS through the current release.
These include:
- RGB image reconstruction from single channels,
- Remove/reduce color gradient and light pollution,
- Shrink stars,
- Sharpening and noise reduction,
- Contrast and DSO enhancement,
- Halos reduction.
Some actions allow fixing classic problems, such as color gradients and halos.
The result from running the Color Gradient Removal action. Image Credit: Pro Digital Software.
Other actions are more oriented towards enhancing the image by reducing noise, adding contrast, and so on.
The result from running the Local Contrast Enhancement action. Image Credit: Pro Digital Software.
The use is simple: choose your action and execute it. The result overwrites your original layer.
A better way to work is to have the result of the action on a new layer, instead. This allows you to change the new layer opacity to tweak the strength of the effect.
You can do this executing the As Layer On Top / As Layer Underneath actions.
A faster way to have the layer with the action on top of your original one is to use the undo command.
With some actions, you will be prompted with some windows, like curves and levels. Default settings work rather well, but I miss having a text telling me what I should aim for.
Two things to know before you buy. The actions do not work in Photoshop Elements, only in full Photoshop. And this is a deep sky set at heart, so if you shoot wide Milky Way landscapes rather than nebulae through a scope, several of the 34 actions will never come out of the drawer.
Photokemi’s Star Tools By Ken Mitchell
Ken Mitchell is an experienced amateur astrophotographer who built a fantastic action pack. The main set is now at version 3.1.3, and it has grown well past the seventeen actions it started with. The current list runs to nearly thirty, all of them aimed at deep sky astrophotography.
Particularly interesting are the stretching and detail extraction tools.
The Nebula Filter action allows extracting more details from the nebula. Image Credit: Ken Mitchell.
Another great action is the green hue removal one. Sometimes we get a green color cast. There is very little green in the night sky. This action helps to remove the unwanted color cast.
The green hue removal action suppresses the unwanted green color cast, to give more natural colors. Image Credit: Ken Mitchell.
The star removal actions deserve a special mention. They are a great way to strip the stars out so the nebulosity of your target carries the frame. Note that the heaviest of them live in the paid Extras set, not in the main pack.
The Star Removal action allows removing the stars to put in evidence the nebulosity of the target. Image Credit: Ken Mitchell.
Two add-on sets sit alongside it. The Extras set is mostly star-reduction work, about a dozen more actions plus a few older ones kept for experimenting, and there is a third set rebuilt for mono images. Neither is free. Both are sold on their own or bundled with the main pack, and every set is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.
Be honest with yourself about how current this is. The main set and the Extras set were last revised in 2020 and the mono set in 2022. Photoshop actions age slowly, and the vendor still lists compatibility from Photoshop CS all the way to Photoshop CC 2025 on Windows and macOS, so they install and run. But you are buying a finished tool, not one that is still being developed, and none of it touches Lightroom.
This action set is still a must-have if you are editing your astrophotography in Photoshop.
Photoshop Plugins
GradientXTerminator By Russell Croman
This plugin is worth every penny. It allows you to correct gradients in a few clicks:
- Select the area you want to keep unaltered.
- Invert the selection.
- Run the plugin (the default settings work like a charm most of the time).
Done. The gradient is gone.
Bob Franke documents an alternate use for the plugin that goes the other way. Instead of flattening a gradient, you select the bright part of a nebula, invert, run the plugin hard, and blend the result in Lighten mode to brighten a dark region without blowing out the rest of the frame.
It runs on Windows and macOS, it is a one-time purchase, and the same installer covers Affinity Photo 2.1.1 and later, so you are not locked to Photoshop. The version to know about is 1.6.0, which dates from 2023. Nothing has changed since, because nothing has needed to. What you are buying is one job done properly: it removes gradients and it does nothing else, so it only makes sense once light pollution or vignetting is actually the thing spoiling your frames.
StarXTerminator By Russell Croman
The single hardest thing to do by hand in astro editing is to separate the stars from everything else. StarXTerminator does it in one pass, using a neural network trained on photographs from everything between a camera lens and the James Webb Space Telescope.
Once the stars are on their own layer, the rest of the edit gets much easier. You can stretch a nebula as far as you like without bloating every star into a white blob, work the background and the stars with different noise reduction settings, or leave the stars out of the final image altogether. Small stars, big stars and diffraction spikes are all recognized, and non-stellar detail is left alone.
There is nothing to learn. The plugin has no sliders and no parameters, so it is one of the few tools here that a beginner can use correctly on day one. It installs into Photoshop, and the Photoshop version also runs in Affinity Photo 2.0 and later. You buy it once and keep it.
Check your hardware before you buy. It needs a CPU with AVX instruction support, which rules out older machines and some of the stripped-down chips in mini PCs and lightweight laptops, and on Windows and Linux you have to do the work yourself to get GPU acceleration. Apple silicon Macs get it automatically. Take the free trial first and confirm it runs on your machine before you pay.
NoiseXTerminator By Russell Croman
General-purpose AI noise reduction is trained on daylight photographs, and it treats a field of faint stars as noise to be smoothed away. NoiseXTerminator is the same idea trained on astronomical images instead, and the difference shows in the corners of a frame.
It was also trained discriminatively rather than generatively, which is the important part. A generative model invents plausible detail where the data ran out, and in astrophotography invented detail is a lie about what is in the sky. This one reduces what is there without adding anything that is not.
Like its sibling it installs into Photoshop, works in Affinity Photo 2.0 and later, has a real-time preview and a permanent one-time license. Recent versions separate noise by color and frequency, so you can be heavy-handed with the chroma noise in a dark background while leaving the fine luminance detail in a nebula alone.
It carries the same AVX requirement, and it overlaps with the noise reduction already built into Lightroom and Photoshop. If you shoot single wide-angle Milky Way frames at high ISO, Topaz Photo or Lightroom’s own denoise may be enough. This one earns its place when you are stacking deep sky data and every faint structure matters.
Photoshop Extension Panels
Extension Panels, like plugins, may add extra features to Photoshop. Or they can make existing features easier to reach and, like actions, automate steps.
Panels usually pack a greater number of functionalities than action packs and plugins.
While it is easy to work with two or three different action packs, I suggest you stick to only a panel. It can take quite some time to master it.
Astro Panel
Astro Panel is the panel to reach for if you want one tool that covers the whole night-photography workflow. The current release is Astro Panel 2027.
It is the priciest option in this article, and the most capable. It turns Photoshop into a dedicated night-photography environment: it calibrates and stacks RAW sequences, strips out gradients and light pollution, edits the stars separately from the landscape, blends a tracked sky onto an untracked foreground, and prepares the final export. It runs on Windows and macOS, works as a hybrid UXP plugin for Photoshop CC 2022 through 2027, and gets a new version every year.
There is plenty here for landscape photography too. The workflows it ships with cover:
- Milky Way editing
- Star trails and deep-sky stacking
- HDR and multi-exposure blending
- Focus stacking and long exposures
- Panoramas
- Luminosity and color masking, plus finishing tools
If you are a landscape photographer who is also interested in astrophotography, this panel is for you.
The price is the reason not to buy it, and so is the yearly cycle: each new version is a fresh one-time purchase unless you take the lifetime licence. If you shoot the Milky Way on three clear nights a year, the action packs above do most of the same jobs for a fraction of the outlay. Astro Panel starts to pay for itself when you are calibrating, stacking and blending most months. There is a lot of surface area to it, too, which is why the advice above holds: learn one panel properly rather than three badly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I Need Dedicated Astrophotography Software?
No. Lightroom and Photoshop, plus one or two of the add-ons above, will take a Milky Way landscape as far as most photographers ever need. Dedicated packages such as PixInsight earn their keep on deep sky data shot through a telescope, where you are stacking dozens of frames and working with calibration files.
Which Should I Buy First?
Start with the free presets. Film Speck One and the Northlandscapes pack cost nothing and tell you quickly whether preset-led editing suits how you work. When you outgrow them, the next purchase depends on what is spoiling your images: a color gradient across the frame points at GradientXTerminator, bloated stars point at StarXTerminator, and grain in the shadows points at NoiseXTerminator or Topaz Photo.
Are Photoshop Actions Still Worth Buying in 2026?
Yes, with one caution. Actions are recorded Photoshop steps, so they age slowly and the two sets above still run on current versions. But they are finished products rather than actively developed ones, so check the vendor’s last update date and their stated Photoshop compatibility before you pay, exactly as you would with any other tool that has stopped moving.
Conclusion
You don’t need to buy editing software specific to astrophotography. Particularly if you are a beginner, both Lightroom and Photoshop will do the job quite nicely.
Here is the short version. If you edit in Lightroom, take Film Speck One and the Northlandscapes presets, both free, and stop there until they frustrate you. If you edit in Photoshop and shoot wide starry landscapes, one action pack plus GradientXTerminator covers almost everything. If you shoot deep sky through a telescope, StarXTerminator and NoiseXTerminator are the two that change the most, and Astro Panel replaces the lot if you would rather learn one system than five.
We have a post on best apps for astrophotography or milky way photography to check out next!
