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One-Click Star Reduction with MiniSTARS in Photoshop

How to install and use MiniSTARS for easy one-click star reduction in Photoshop. Expose your Milky Way details!

Far too often, our Milky Way and night-sky photos have beautiful starry scenes that get absolutely ruined after the often heavy post-processing that is required to bring out those dim galactic details.

That’s where MiniSTARS comes in. Using masking techniques to ONLY affect the stars in your nearly-completed photos, we’ll reduce the apparent size of most of the smaller stars so that the structure and beauty of the Milky Way and sky features pop out — all in a single click! Constellations will start to pop out with more clarity and be more well-defined. Milky Way detail you may have never seen before will be more apparent. Meteors and ISS passes in photographs will no longer be overpowered by the smaller stars in the sky.

Be careful when you try it out on your older already-finished photos, because you might just get hooked!

With the MiniSTARS Photoshop action pack, you get:

  • 5 levels of one-click star reduction
  • The ability to use all star reduction levels at once to pick the best in one click
  • Automatic star masking, so as to only affect stars
  • The ability to chain multiple levels of the same or other MiniSTARS levels for subtle to extreme effects

It’s this easy:

  1. Step one: get MiniSTARS. (or the discounted bundle!)
  2. Step two: watch the video below for installation and usage instructions. 
  3. Step three: Enjoy your Milky Way and astrophotography images with reduced star size, popping constellations, and less star bloat, all with one click.

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About the author

Cory Schmitz

Co-founder of PhotographingSpace.com, co-owner of several telescopes and mounts, too many cameras, and not enough hard drives, Cory is an American expat living in South Africa with his wife, Tanja Schmitz.

An avid astrophotographer for timelapse, deep-space imaging, lunar, planetary, and star trail imagery, he is an all-around jack-of-most-trades for night-sky photography.

He is also an internationally published and commissioned astrophotographer, where his photos have been used in multiple online and print publications.

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