It's a non-issue if your focus is solely on capturing images of the sky without any foreground, such as the Milky Way, nebulas or constellations, and many astrophotographers often replace the foreground entirely anyway. However, when we tried to stack an image that included a foreground, it struggled and only aligned the stars, which is the opposite of what we found in Photoshop. In our testing, we were very impressed with its performance, especially in aligning the stars - they came out perfectly. With just a few clicks, you can import these frames and let the software stack them automatically. To put it simply, astrophotography stacking in Affinity Photo 2 is an easy way to combine your calibration and light frames. There is a dedicated 'Astrophotography Stack' function and we were very intrigued to see how it compared to Photoshop, which we found wanting in that department. During our Affinity Photo 2 review, we spent most of our time in the Develop and Photo Personas. The Liquify persona is to warp or distort your images, Tone Mapping is most typically used for 32-bit HDR files and the Export persona is self-explanatory. The Develop and Photo personas are where you make your initial edits, much like in Lightroom or in Photoshop's Camera RAW. Each persona serves a unique purpose in the editing process - there's Photo, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping and Export. While these updates may not be specifically designed for astrophotography, they significantly enhance Affinity Photo's overall capabilities and user-friendliness.Īffinity Photo 2 is divided into five different 'personas' - the personas are essentially different workspaces within the software. The live mesh warping feature and layers panel also make the software even more powerful than before. They also added non-destructive RAW development, meaning your original photos remain untouched no matter how much you edit them. We particularly love the masks, which now work as well as those you'd find in Lightroom and Photoshop. In late 2022, 7 years after the original software was released, Serif launched the latest version of Affinity Photo, packed with fantastic new tools for editing and manipulating your photos.

That said, it's affordable and fairly user-friendly, and has a bunch of useful features once you delve in. ★★★★½ 🔎 Affinity Photo 2 The best app for astrophotography, its astrophotography stack persona is like no other, although it has a way to go in other areas to live up to Adobe.

Funny galaxy photo filter