The app also includes some nice features for Milky Way processing, including removal of light pollution, enhancing color, and increasing sharpness. Star trails are covered as well, with the ability to increase star colors, increase sharpness, and remove distortion. Many of the functions in AstroPanel Pro X create a new layer, leaving you with plenty of control. I found the functions worked well, and happily, there was an undo menu and a redo menu.

There are methods to remove gradients, reduce bright star halos, reduce stars in nebula photos, and enhance star colors.

There are a lot of one-click options that are time-savers, like removing the green cast in photos caused by light pollution. I'm mostly a deep sky photographer, so I concentrated on those tools. I started with some astrophotos I've taken recently, including the star cluster M13 I grabbed the other night. When you open the plug-in, you'll see it's divided into two sections, Astrophotography and Landscape. The package is $56 U.S., but prices tend to fluctuate as the author has sales and upgrades for users of older packages. Coming soon to buyers is a retouch and portrait tutorial. Also included are 25,000 Lightroom presets and a good video tutorial available online with a provided link. Also included are raw files so you can follow along with the training and overlay files in JPEG and PNG of skies and night skies to use with your photos.

Included in the purchase are some e-books (How to Photograph the Night Sky, Landscape Photography, and a PDF Manual). Installation is a couple of clicks, and the suite of tools appears under the Photoshop plug-in menu, not the filter menu. Finally, and happily, the latest Astro Panel X Pro embraces the newest chips from Apple, and I did my testing on both a MacBook Pro with an M2 Max chip (12 cores and 32 GB unified memory) and a new Mac Studio with an M2 Max with 12‑core CPU, 38‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine, and 96 GB of unified memory.Īstro Panel Pro X requires Photoshop CC and is only compatible with Adobe Photoshop CC from 2021 to the current 2023 version and, as I said, it is compatible with the new Apple Mac M1/M2 processors and Windows. Recently, I stopped using the plug-in as it did not work with Apple Silicon Macs (it does work fine with Windows).

Free sky overlay photoshop