A new astrophotography processing contender Affinity Photo has entered the Mac…and PC race. Affinity introduced it’s suite of applications to compete against Adobe Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator a few years ago. They are extremely capable applications and in their effort to remain competitive come at a very nice discount in pricing compared to Adobe’s applications. Currently Affinity Photo is for sale at a 50% discount.
They’ve recently upped their game to add features beyond Photoshop’s set of tools by getting into the Astrophotography realm with the following new features in their 1.9 update:
Dedicated Persona for stacking
RAW and FITS image support
Stack light and calibration frames (dark/dark flat/flat/bias)
Stack, tone stretch and retouch entirely in 32-bit
Stack files from different sessions using file groups
Create full color, composite (HaRGB, SHO), grayscale or false color images
One advantage to Affinity Photo compared to existing astrophotography stacking and calibration applications is that it takes advantage of the GPU in your Mac for very fast processing and stacking. I calibrated and stacked a set of 12 images in about 1-2 minutes on my iMac Pro. This compares to about 10 minutes in APP and PixInsight.
Not only does this program calibrate and stack your images, but it’s a full fledged photo editing program, so you have all the tools at your disposal for stretching, sharpening, color enhancement, mask manipulation, and more with a vastly superior interface for ease of use.
Here’s a set of tutorials to get you up and running with Affinity Photo’s new features.