AstroFlat Pro

Because skies have airglow and telescope systems have imperfect optics, most astroimages don't start out "flat" with regard to luminance. Freshly opened astroimages often have light and color gradients or hot spots, even when flats are used during stacking.

Vignetting, imager inconsistency, and gradients in sky glow all introduce unwanted things into our astroimages, which we've spent hours capturing.

Even with the most awesome optics the very nature of astroimaging - where we are trying to capture a glimpse of the dimmest things imaginable - means that the tiniest variations in light levels ultimately get amplified in our digital image processing - to the point where they get in the way of bringing out the best from the data.

The incredible challenge we astroimage processors face is to remove the non-linearities and aberrations our imaging hardware, locations, and processes have left in our captured data, yet retain all of the beauty of the actual deep sky objects against a nice dark, even deep space background.

Our AstroFlat Pro plug-in seeks to make it easy and fun for you to flatten your astroimages fast, saving time for you to do more and better finish processing. Once well-flattened, you will find that your images can be taken further, with you being able to bring more dim detail out, revealing the full beauty of everything your imaging system has captured.

This manual will provide you with everything you need to know to use AstroFlat Pro to flatten the luminance in your astroimages.

We provide a table of contents and the entire manual can be searched. Where topics refer to other topics, colored links are provided in the text. For example:

You may wish to visit the Introduction or Installation sections next.

If you're having a problem, please look in our Troubleshooting section.