Astrophotography - Creating masks

[roymixon]

Can anyone guide me to a video, link or post that explains how to edit and create mask for astrophotography images?

[rich2005]

Maybe a search:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gimp+mas...e&ie=UTF-8

[Ofnuts]

For astro, you have better work directly from the raw files, and AFAIK there are free astro-specific applications.

[denzjos]

For PS but the same workflow is possible in gimp :

https://www.cloudynights.com/forums/topi...nh-stretch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU1BeS_XED4

Some more infomation: if you can't import the ArcsinhCurves in gimp you can convert them to cube files (see link) files and use them in gimp : Filters/G'Mic-Qt/Colors/Apply External CLUT.

https://clayharmonblog.com/stacker.html

[roymixon]

(10-18-2025, 12:45 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: For astro, you have better work directly from the raw files, and AFAIK there are free astro-specific applications.

I'm work with converted tif file 16bit

[Zero01]

(10-28-2025, 12:59 AM)roymixon Wrote:

(10-18-2025, 12:45 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: For astro, you have better work directly from the raw files, and AFAIK there are free astro-specific applications.

I'm work with converted tif file 16bit

You might have luck with DS9 (https://sites.google.com/cfa.harvard.edu...9/download) (free, widely used), normally you would use the FITS format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS) with astrophotography - but you can still import tiff etc into DS9 and take it from there, but you would lose metadata probably, so I would suggest you convert your tiff files to fits using ImageMagick first, should be as simple as..
magick image.tiff image.fits
..then when you've finished you can maybe use GIMP to get everything just right!

This video might help with your initial request:

Using masks with ds9: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H49fnw9w6y0