The best photo editing apps for astrophotography can take ordinary images and turn them into stunning works of art. All types of photography can benefit from good image editing software, but astrophotography is especially reliant on it. This is because the subjects that astrophotographers capture are often very faint and difficult to see with the naked eye. As a result, astrophotographers often need to use editing apps to bring out the details in their images. Skip ahead to see which image editing program we think is the best photo editing app for astrophotography, but take note that this isn't the best or most powerful image editing app overall.
When we look up into the night sky with the naked eye, we can make out light sources of light from distant stars, see the bright light from the moon and possibly, on a clear night, see a nearby planet or two. But with the help of the best cameras for astrophotography, we can see the much fainter glows of nebulas and galaxies. Even the best telescopes and best binoculars can't reveal all the subtle colors and patterns that post-shoot editing using photo editing apps can.
Photo editing software can boost colors and highlight hidden details, especially when astrophotographs are shot in RAW format. The RAW data captured often looks dull and lifeless straight out of the camera, so using one of the best photo editing software can help refine an astro image. Even NASA uses editing software to enhance its images.
Many photo-editing apps are readily available, each with different tools and features that are useful for different photographic styles, which can be especially useful when it comes to the unique needs of astrophotography. In this guide, we've included off-the-shelf software that can be modified to meet the needs of astrophotographers. Some are better at this than others, so here are the best photo editing apps for astrophotography that we'd recommend you try.
Best photo editing apps for astrophotography 2023
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Best photo editing apps for astrophotography 2023 ranked
Lightroom is primarily a RAW image organizing, cataloging, and developing tool aimed at professionals, although it's also widely used by casual photographers, too. After a shoot, you can offload your memory cards into Lightroom to quickly get a database of the shots taken that day, complete with geotags and facial recognition if you wish. You can search and rate files using flags, stars and colors to select the best photos and discard the ones you won't use before you return to them later on. This organization feature makes Lightroom different from many other editing apps and is extremely useful for those who shoot weddings or events and can have thousands of images to sort through at a time.
Lightroom also has an extensive editing toolset. When editing in Lightroom, the user has complete creative control over contrast, brightness, texture and clarity, color hue and saturation; and the option to smooth out any distortion and lens idiosyncrasies. You can also create presets of your edits, edit with masks and heal any unwanted dust spots in your images. Then, once you've finished editing, a high-quality JPEG image can be watermarked, exported and shared, all while keeping your original RAW file intact. To read more about the extensive list of functions Lightroom has, check out our Adobe Lightroom 2023 review.
As the workflow in Lightroom is entirely non-destructive, you're always left with your original file rather than overwriting the original. Only when you export an edited image do your changes become permanent; even then, your original RAW image is safe.
Although you don't necessarily have to work with RAW files in Lightroom, we do recommend shooting your images (in particular, your astro images) in RAW because of the increased detail and color depth. Lightroom also excels at batch processing photos so you can import all 300 of your star trail images at once, batch edit (essentially copying and pasting the same editing settings onto each image), then export them to another app for stacking. Lightroom is a powerful app with many features and tips that can speed up your workflow and make post-processing quicker and easier, so it's no surprise that it's said to be the most widely used and best-rated image-processing software.
- Read our full Adobe Lightroom 2023 review
Much like Lightroom, Photoshop is another piece of software that many other image-editing software makers use to model their interfaces. Although Photoshop does come with a pretty steep learning curve, it is an excellent tool for astrophotographers and the industry-standard photo editing app that is extensively used worldwide — even NASA use Photoshop to enhance the detail in their images.
We looked at all the pros and cons of the most recent version of this powerful software in our Adobe Photoshop 2023 review. It can be pretty daunting to figure out how to use Photoshop if you're a complete newbie, but there are plenty of online tutorials on how to do pretty much anything and everything in Photoshop.
Photoshop uses selections and layers in its editing process — something that Lightroom also utilizes. By creating layers, you can edit specific selections of a photo (e.g. just a fire hydrant, or just the color of someone's jumper) without affecting the rest of the image. This is great if you are doing complex edits because if you make a mistake, you can just adjust or delete that specific layer rather than have to redo the entire image.
This feature is also useful for astrophotographers — you can edit the sky separately from the foreground in astro images — you could brighten rocks or building in the foreground while maintaining the dark sky. Selections can be automatically identified using Adobe Sensei, a cloud AI tech that allows the subject of a photo to be accurately selected just by choosing a menu option — or you can create a selection manually if you'd prefer.
Layers give you the option to build complex effects in your images. The layers can be moved around, merged, painted, hidden, or have holes cut in them. Layers are essential for creating a star trail image where hundreds of photos are combined or revealing the soft light of a nebula from many stacked frames
One thing we mentioned in our previous Adobe Photoshop 2021 review was that we'd have loved to see the ability to automatically stack and line up regular astro images rather than having to line them all up manually. This updated version does allow this in the form of Auto-Align and Auto-Blend, but during our testing when trying to stack a set of astro images, there were issues lining them up reliably and consistently regardless of the method we used — this needs work and hopefully, Adobe will address this.
Plans from Adobe are decently priced considering the variety of tools you have access to. For $19.99 a month, you can purchase a subscription to Photoshop and Lightroom together, which is an excellent deal if you regularly use both apps — especially considering Photoshop is $20.99 on its own, it's a no-brainer. If you don't want the full-fat version of Photoshop, you may find Photoshop Elements a bit easier to navigate — it's a little further down in this buying guide and might be more suited to your needs.
- Read our full Adobe Photoshop 2023 review
Best photo editing app for astro
Serif Software's rival to Photoshop breaks down into five different 'personas.' Each persona has a different purpose within the software — Photo, Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping and Export, they can otherwise be considered as different workstations in a photo studio.
Develop and Photo is where you make initial edits, much like in Lightroom or Photoshop's Camera Raw. Liquify 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. During our Affinity Photo 2 review, we spent most of our time in the Develop and Photo Personas.
There is a dedicated 'Astrophotography Stack' function and we wanted to see how it compared to Adobe Photoshop 2023 which we found wanting in this department.
Simply put, stacking means you can import calibration and light frames into Affinity Photo, then stack them automatically at the click of a button. We stacked a few light frames with one dark frame and Affinity Photo 2 performed surprisingly well. The software prioritizes aligning the stars rather than the foreground, so we found that all of the stars throughout the frame were lined up perfectly, but the foreground was slightly off, this is the opposite of what we found in Photoshop. This isn't an issue if you're taking exclusively sky images such as nebulas or constellations without a foreground in the shot, and often astrophotographers replace the foreground image anyway. In the stacking respect then, Affinity Photo 2 performs better than Adobe Photoshop 2023.
Another Astro-friendly function is the 'Remove Background' filter. AI helps to restore the dark sky around the stars back to its original dark color and removes color casts that may have crept into your images.
Serif released this version of Affinity Photo at the end of 2022 and it has some great new photo editing and manipulation tools. Some of our favorite new features are the introduction of masks to keep up with some of the Lightroom and Photoshop functionality. Affinity Photo 2 has also brought in a non-destructive RAW development (so your original photos are always safe regardless of how you manipulate them), live mesh warping, and a layers panel. While these aren't necessarily astro-specific, we think they do warrant upgrading to this version of Affinity Photo as they add to the editing experience and workflow efficiency for all photography disciplines.
Affinity Photo 2 is now available as part of their universal license — you pay a one-off fee of $164.99 for Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher, and Affinity Designer. If you don't need these, you can still purchase Affinity Photo 2 individually for a one-off payment of $69.99.
- Read our full Affinity Photo 2 review
Another app that follows the Lightroom template rather than the Photoshop one, Capture One Pro's specialty lies in tethering and studio photography. It's renowned for the superior RAW image decoding it offers, and it is also compatible with a wide range of other image formats, including the HEIC files generated by more recent iPhones.
There are very few things that Capture One Pro doesn't do well, and its primary focus is around perfecting color, with many editing and color grading tools at your disposal. We think this could be a fantastic tool for manipulating colors in those deep sky images of nebulae and cosmic dust clouds to really bring out those pinks and blues. When we reviewed Capture One Pro 21 back in 2021 we loved its ability to accurately color grade images and how well it manipulated colors in the image, and it seems that Capture One Pro 23 still maintains this performance — keep your eyes peeled for our review of the new version coming soon.
This software is primarily aimed at professionals, however, once you've got used to it, it's uniquely powerful, bringing together the best of Lightroom and Photoshop. It does have a 'learn' feature that, by offering a series of in-camera tutorials, helps make it less intimidating for beginners — although, unless you're happy to be thrown in at the deep end, we wouldn't necessarily recommend this as your very first piece of photo editing software.
Although Capture One Pro is a fantastic tool for improving workflow, many of its most recent changes appear to be more focused on photo organization than editing, making it better for photographers who photograph people or events and need to sort through a high number of images quickly — taking a leaf out of Lightroom's book.
The downside? Capture One Pro is expensive whichever way you slice it. Monthly subscriptions are $24/m, annual is $179/y and a one-off payment for the license is $299. You could get two or more of the other apps for the same price so it's probably not worth it unless you are a studio pro.
- Read our Capture One Pro 21 review
While it used to be Luminar AI that sat in this guide, it was discontinued in 2022. It is now Luminar Neo that we think you'll want to consider as an astrophotographer who wants traditional image-editing tools. While in our Luminar AI review, we thought it was great for adding Instagram-friendly filters and adding creative manipulations to your images, this wasn't necessarily best for astrophotos where each image can have very different needs.
Neo is different, and now takes center stage as Luminar's flagship product, bringing a new editing engine and the ability to create more polished and professional-looking images. Luminar built Neo from the ground up rather than modifying the previous AI software, although Neo still offers powerful one-click AI adjustments to speed up your workflow.
It has introduced the ability to add layers to your edits, much like Photoshop. It also has a developer module, similar to Lightroom. Unlike Lightroom, however, the cataloging functionality is basic, and only allows you to flag images, so we wouldn't recommend managing your image storage system with it.
We've yet to do a full review of Luminar Neo, but keep your eyes peeled as we'll do one soon. Some users have reported the software being a little buggy, but hopefully, these will continue to be ironed out over time.
- Check out the Best cameras for astrophotography
Adobe Photoshop Elements is a simplified, user-friendly version of Photoshop designed for beginners and enthusiastic amateurs rather than professionals. Sadly there isn't much to draw astrophotographers in particular, although Photoshop's layer and selection method is nearly identically replicated in Elements, along with some neat new Sensei AI features.
You can use tonal and color adjustments and replace backgrounds and generally enhance photos with automatic adjustments, or use the integrated guide to teach you as you go. It's ideal for quick edits, and you can also make collages and slideshows. We'd suggest pros (or aspiring pros) go for the full Photoshop software so you're not restricted in the long run.
The differences between Photoshop and Elements are stark, not only in the number of features they include but also in the way you pay for them. Adobe's Creative Cloud apps (Photoshop and Lightroom) are subscription software, which means you pay a fixed amount each month (currently $19.99 per month in the Photography plan, which is pretty reasonable for what you get). The benefit of a monthly subscription is that you always have access to the most recent version of the software, which is regularly updated to include bug fixes and new features.
With Photoshop Elements, however, you just pay a one-off fee (it also has a video-editing sibling called Premiere Elements). The downside of this is that you pay for that specific version, and it's only a matter of time before there will be a new version available. So, if you want to make use of any newer features you'll have to shell out for the new version again. As Lightroom and Photoshop are available in the good-value Photographer's Bundle, you'd need a pretty good reason to purchase Elements instead. If you do think Photoshop Elements may be more suited to you, check out our Photoshop Elements review.
- Read our full Photoshop Elements review
If users are on Mac-based operating systems then they will be able to access both PhotoDirector 365 on a subscription but if one wants to purchase the standalone one-off software (PhotoDirector 14 Ultra) then that is only available on Windows. PhotoDirector 13 which we reviewed didn't offer much for specific astrophotography editing and while we discovered the same in our PhotoDirector 365 review we think of it as a jack of all trades, master of none. That means it's suitable for beginner editors.
There are plenty of social media-friendly editing tools which allow users to add stickers and generally jazz-up images for online use. However, we don't see it appealing to any serious or professional photographers because more sophisticated and cheaper image editing software is available.
- Read our full CyberLink PhotoDirector 365 review
Paintshop Pro, a long-time member of the image-editing club, takes a layer-based approach to editing (similar to Photoshop). It does have RAW image support, and it's beginning to gain the kinds of AI and content-aware technologies that can significantly improve astrophotos. It's primarily designed for beginners and hobbyists, although it still packs a punch in regard to technology when it comes to editing photos. In our Corel Paintshop Pro review, we found that although it's good for beginners, experienced users and anyone with a lot of photos to edit would likely get frustrated with its performance as even on faster machines, it can be slow and sluggish — not ideal for anyone who shoots events or weddings.
Paintshop Pro is separated into three different workspaces: Photography, which uses a full-screen environment and includes basic editing tools; Essentials, which is a stripped-back version still with good editing capabilities, and Complete; which is a more professional interface.
Paintshop Pro isn't designed specifically for astrophotography, however, it does have many tools that can be utilized to enhance your astro images. But despite the fact that it offers specialized workspaces with custom editing tools for drone and underwater photos, sadly night-sky images don't receive the same attention — this is particularly true of its noise reduction tools. As we all know, taking photos of the night sky often requires raising the ISO to uncomfortably high levels, so we need some kind of noise-reduction function to get rid of unwanted noise while still preserving the sharpness of the stars.
Corel has added focus stacking into their most recent update (Paintshop Pro 2023 which we review soon) though, which is great for stacking astro shots with different exposures for the sky and foreground. The performance and useability have allegedly also been improved. We look forward to trying it.
- Read our full Corel PaintShop Pro 2022 review
We think of DxO PhotoLab as more of a digital darkroom rather than a fully-fledged image editing app, and it has one feature in particular that will be music to an astrophotographer's ears. Its DeepPRIME XD noise reduction upgrade, powered by AI, is said to restore previously unseen detail like 'nothing you've seen before,' and the haze-removal Clearview tool claims to significantly boost the contrast and color saturation of your deep-sky photographs. This is excellent news for astro given the high ISO sensitivities we sometimes have to push to. Comprehensive lens correction also smooths out the distortion that camera lenses add to photos — especially ultrawide lenses. We will be reviewing the newest version (DxO PhotoLab 6) soon, but in the meantime check out our DxO PhotoLab 4 review.
Although it can process compressed files like JPEG, you will need to shoot in RAW if you want the additional detail and color depth — which you'll always want when editing night-sky images.
If you like, you can even install Photolab as a Lightroom plugin, so you can spend most of your time on Lightroom, then switch over to Photolab to make use of its impressive AI tools.
- Read our full DxO PhotoLab 4 review (DxO PhotoLab 6 review to follow soon)
ACDSee is a great choice if you're looking for a general-purpose image editor as it's a very versatile editing app — see how the 2022 version fared in our ACDSee Photo Studio review. It's organized into a number of modules (much like Affinity Photo's personas) and features a catalog management interface that's largely similar to Lightroom's. There are several tools available to help you enhance your night sky photographs between the develop module, which decodes your RAW images, and the main edit module, which operates more like Photoshop.
There are different versions of ACDSee available: Home, Professional and Ultimate. Home is the base model which is more than suitable for beginners, while Professional is for, well, professionals. Ultimate is the full-fat, beefy version that does everything. To really get the most out of your night-sky images, we'd recommend going for the Ultimate version, as it's designed to be an all-in-one solution for non-destructive editing, organizing, storing and sharing images.
You won't need a separate app if you're shooting RAW files as ACDSee offers RAW image processing, and the Ultimate version has several Photoshop-like layers so you can stack your night sky images. There's also an Advanced Lighting EQ tool that can be applied selectively, which helps to bring out the best in soft, dim glows from the night sky or to darken night skies. The editing process is non-destructive, so you don't have to worry about losing your original images.
In the most recent 2023 version, like with many of the software updates in this guide, there is enhanced AI editing, allowing you to do more (such as replacing the sky in an image while maintaining the foreground image) with a single click.
- Read our ACDSee Photo Studio review
How we test the best photo editing apps for astrophotography
To guarantee you're getting honest, up-to-date recommendations on the best photo editing apps to buy here at Space.com we make sure to put every photo editing app through a rigorous review to fully test each software. Each photo editing app is reviewed based on a multitude of aspects, from its layout and design, to how well it functions as an image editing software and its performance when processing still photos, especially astrophotography.
Each photo editing app is carefully tested by either our expert staff or knowledgeable freelance contributors who know their subject areas in depth. This ensures fair reviewing is backed by personal, hands-on experience with each editing app and is judged based on its price point, class and destined use. For example, comparing the image editing behemoth of Adobe Photoshop to a freeware image editing software wouldn’t be appropriate.
We look at how easy each image editing app is to operate, whether it contains the latest up-to-date imaging technology and file format compatibility. We'll also make suggestions if a particular image editor would benefit from any additional plug-ins to give you the best editing experience possible.
With complete editorial independence, Space.com are here to ensure you get the best buying advice on photo editing apps, whether you should purchase one or not, making our buying guides and reviews reliable and transparent.
