Simply put, this means you can import calibration and light frames into Affinity Photo, which will stack them automatically at the click of a button, ready to be moved to the app's primary Photo persona for color correction and image sharpening.

The 'personas' are Affinity Photo's way of reconfiguring its user interface for specific tasks, it has one for exporting images, another for decoding RAW files, and so on. Serif Software's rival to Photoshop takes Adobe's selection and layer method of photo editing and applies it directly to night-sky images through its Astrophotography Stack persona. If you don't want the full-fat version of Photoshop, you may find Photoshop Elements a bit easier to get on with - keep reading to see if it's better suited to you.

Plans from Adobe are fairly priced considering the variety of tools you have access to for $19.99 a month, you can get a subscription to Photoshop and Lightroom together, which is an excellent deal if you regularly use both apps. Though, the one feature missing from Photoshop CC that would be ideal for astrophotographers is being able to stack images automatically rather than having to match them all up manually, which is time-consuming and, a pain. 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. The layers can be moved around, merged, painted, hidden, or have holes cut in them. Layers give you the option to build complex effects in your images. Of course, it can also be painstakingly manually created like in the good old days if you'd rather! 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. This is an incredibly useful feature for editing astro images, and Lightroom has recently included this capability as well. Photoshop uses selections and layers in its editing process, allowing you to, for example, select only the sky in an image and edit this independently from the land or foreground. We looked at all the pros and cons in our Adobe Photoshop review. Although there is a learning curve, it is an excellent tool for astrophotographers and the industry-standard photo editing app that is extensively used worldwide. Much like Lightroom, Photoshop CC is the app that other image-editing software makers use to model their interfaces.

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