Catchy name eh? 
I've been playing around with Photoshop, learning some astro image processing tips and tricks along with way. I am no expert at astro imaging, nor am I an expert at Photoshop. But rather than doing the same things over and over in PS, I've recorded some of (what I think are) the cooler ones into an action set. Thought some here might be interested. Especially since they're free.
The idea is that they are not a one-stop-shop for astro tools, but rather supplement other astro software I use, or fill in gaps of what other software doesn't do. You may have already seen my post on the "Get your astro software here" thread. In addition to that, there is the excellent Noel Carboni's Photoshop Astronomy Tools Action Set
. Check them out.
So what do my actions do? I'll write a better description of all of them later, but the one I'm most happy with is the star removal ones. There's one that takes a layer of your astro image and separates into 2 different layers the background/nebula and the stars. There is also an action to just strip the stars away, and a separate one to just extract the stars into their own layer. Note that the starless image will probably need a little bit of a manual tidy up with the clone tool still, but I think it's worth it.
As an example, here's an example of my NGC6334 Cat's Paw Nebula without stars:
Here's what it looked like with stars:
The starless image may not be to everyone's taste as a final image, but it does mean you can concentrate your processing on the nebulosity without having to worry about blowing out the stars. Then just add the stars back in at the end of processing.
I would appreciate any comments/feedback/bug reports and I'll fix them as we go.
I'll build on the tools and update here along the way. For now, download them here:
Troy's Astro Actions v0.9.1
[edit] - I no longer have a way of hosting these actions, nor the motivation to maintain them. I use PixInsight pretty much exclusively for image editing these days.
