Remove Background

The Remove Background filter eliminates background light in astrophotography by sampling one or more colors from the image. Use it to get rid of sky glow and light pollution, which tend to be exaggerated by tone-stretching.

Before
After

About the Remove Background filter

This filter can be found in the Filters menu, in the Astrophotography category.

A color-sampling handle is precreated at the center of the image. Drag it to reposition as needed to sample a background tone to be subtracted.

Use a single handle to remove a fairly uniform background. Click within the document view to create additional handles to remove gradients, e.g. caused by light pollution, sky glow or moon illumination.

Alternatively, specify your own gray and RGB levels for subtraction by selecting a handle and manually setting the filter's Grey, Red, Green and Blue values. Manually setting any of these values will cause Sample color at handle to become deselected for the selected handle.

Settings

The following settings can be adjusted in the filter dialog:

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