When selecting these areas to process, you want to avoid creating a hard, unnatural edge between your selective area and the original. For example, there are times when you will want to increase the brightness of a nebula, without bloating the stars in your image. When processing a deep sky astrophotography image, it is often beneficial to select different aspects of your images and process them independently from one another. It gives you complete control over your layer mask and allows you to precisely define the edges of your selection. The Select and Mask tool is Adobe Photoshop’s powerful selection tool with advanced mask refinement options. Creating layer masks is one of Photoshop’s core features, and it is especially useful when editing astrophotography images. The Select and Mask tool allows you to get very specific about each and every edit you make to your images. It has quickly become one of my favorite and most-used features of this application for processing my deep sky astrophotography images. If you use Photoshop to process your astrophotos as I do, this tutorial should be very useful to you.Ībout a year ago, I experienced the true power of the Select and Mask tool in Photoshop first hand. Whether you want to separate the stars from your deep-sky target, or apply subtle noise reduction to the background sky of your image, the select and mask feature will get you there.Īdobe Photoshop CC is an effective way to process astrophotography images, in a very creative and enjoyable way. The Select and Mask Tool in Photoshop CC is a powerful way to edit selective areas of your astrophotography images.