Speed up your processing workflow

How to use Photoshop's Actions tool to drastically cut your processing time

- ALL PICTURES: CHARLOTTE DANIELS

There's a lot to master in astrophotography processing. Pulling fine detail from noise and coaxing out faint colour is rewarding, but it can also be very time-consuming. Today, editing software ranges from manual hands-on options that let you tweak every pixel, to AI-powered tools that make sweeping image-wide enhancements.

Adobe Photoshop remains a favourite, thanks to its extensive functionality for both deep-sky and landscape images. An often-overlooked feature, however, is its 'Actions' tool. Actions let you record a full sequence of edits, save them and apply them to other images with a single click. No more repeating the same fiddly hue adjustment or adding the same watermark over and over again. An action turns a laborious workflow into one quick, automated step, meaning more time under the stars, fewer hours on the laptop and a greater number of impressive final images to admire and share.

In this guide, we create an action for a common workflow that many monochrome imagers perform: combining separate hydrogen-alpha (Ha) and oxygen (OIII) narrowband frames into a single bi-colour image. We'll add Ha to the red channel, and OIII to the blue and green channels, producing a classic narrowband look. We'll guide you through using narrowband images of the Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237) as an example.