This is a series of tutorials on how to use FITS Liberator with Adobe Photoshop. I don't work for the ESA or Adobe -- I'm just a heavy Photoshop user who loves astronomy. Please understand that this is NOT a replacement for MaximDL. This is a tool that will allow you to manually manipulate FITS images. MaximDL will automatically stack and stretch (terms explained in the tutorials) whereas FITS Liberator is an all manual operation. But FITS Liberator will allow you to take advantage of Photoshop in places where MaximDL comes up short.

To download FITS Liberator, go to the ESA FITS Liberator download page.

I highly recommend you go through the text tutorials before diving into the video versions because some terms are explained and a few mysteries are unveiled.

Text:
Intro
MegaPixels and JPEGs
Bits, Stretching and Binning

You'll need the following FITS files of M82 to follow along with the video tutorials:
Red  Green  Blue  Lum
(Special THANK YOU to Larry Waddill of the Fenwick Observatory for these images!)

Video:
(These video tutorials are screen capture videos. Due to compression, the images will not look *exactly* like the original.) And please pardon my ramblings. Since I'm not a trained trainer, I have a tendency to use weird words or phrases. Well, it sounds good to me, but you'll probably have to infer at some spots what I'm trying to say.

Loading FITS Liberator
FITS Liberator Interface
Processing the Red Layer
Processing the Green Layer (and how to stack layers in Photoshop)
Processing the Blue Layer (and how to deal with images that aren't the same exposure)
Processing the Luminescent Layer
Aligning the Images
Running the FITS Liberator Color Actions
Performing Color Levels Adjustments
Luminescent Layer Adjustments (Sorry for the cell phone interferrence)
Performing Color Tweaks
Taking Care of Glare
Making a JPEG File

After thoughts:
Fixing Those Holes

Planned video installments (when I can get the time!)
-- I didn't like the way the stars with the fixed glare turned out. How do I deal with that after the fact?
-- Why 16 bit? Why not just put'em all together as one 8 bit image and go from there?
-- I'm still having problems with the adjustment layers. I don't understand them. (This goes beyond a FITS Liberator tutorial into a Photoshop tutorial. Will get this done if there's more demand.)

Questions/Comments: Email Tom here!

The targeted audience for these tutorials are for members of Slooh. Not that this is a private party - all are welcome! But- if you want to see what Slooh is all about, then click on the logo:

(And be prepared - it is one of the most fantastic astronomy sites around!)