Members of the society participate in visual and photographic astronomy and cater for members of all ages and abilities and take an active role in the education of school children with regards to astronomy and science.

The purpose of Layer Masking is to try to separate some parts of a photograph from others, so as to be able to work on them independently. In astrophotography usually stars from background or background from nebulosity. You can leave it as it is or work on it with Levels to accentuate the black or white areas to gain more or less effect. The general practice is to use Layers to darken the black and lighten the white to a reasonably far extend to ensure the black as fully as possible protects and the .

Back to Processing with Photoshop. Unsharp Masking and High Pass. The more commonly used is Unsharp Masking. Easy enough to use, but it has drawbacks as you take it to extremes.

This method, in Photoshop, is called the J GaBany method. What Saturation does, but without inducing noise or other artefacts. Make three copies of the frame, these will lie above each other in the layers list. With the top one active, make the blending mode Luminosity. The second one, Soft Light.

Open the dialogue panel, and click the Channel button which should have RGB on it. It will open alternatives of Red, Green and Blue. Click your choice and the dialogue square and diagonal line will change to that colour. Dragging the line upwards will increase the intensity of that colour. All other facets of the dialogue box will perform as it does for RGB.

This is a way to make a large number of field stars smaller, it uses the Minimum filter in Photoshop. This will hide the Marching Ants so you can see the next actions without the Ants spoiling things. Clicking on Control-H again will bring them back.

1 Make a copy of the background layer onto a second layer. 2 Change the blending mode from Normal to Darken. 3 Click on the Move Icon, top of the tools column on the left. Then with the arrow keys, move one of the layers till the stars become round-ish. 5 Flatten the two layers into one.

Smoothing the Background with a BG coloured layer. Making the Background more uniform, smoother, less mottled, in Photoshop.

The controls are operated in a dialogue box, a panel. There are two variants of the control panel, this one is the basis one and is classed as destructive. This means that it changes the actual data of the image, permanently. The hatched box has a diagonal line, bottom left to top right and the borders to the box are darker at the bottom left. But if you grasp the line with the cursor and left button of th.