The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator v.2.2

The logo for the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator

A screenshot of the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator v2.1.

Note: The creation of Fits Liberator 3.0 has started.
We would like to solicit inputs from the community. Please let us know what you would like to see in FL 3.0. Email to lars@eso.org

Photoshop CS 3, Intel Macs & Vista: See known issues for more information.

For many years astronomical images from the world’s telescopes were reserved for an elite of astronomers and technical people. Now anyone with a desktop computer running Adobe® Photoshop® software can try their hand at crafting astronomical images as beautiful as those from the Hubble Space Telescope. This free software plug-in, makes a treasure trove of archival astronomical images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and many other famous telescopes accessible to home astronomy enthusiasts.

The first version of the FITS Liberator brought non-professional astronomers the possibility to produce stunning astronomical images that, for years, had only been the privilege of the scientific community.

With the advent of the FITS Liberator v.2, it became possible for people at home to create even more spectacular pictures like the iconic Hubble image “Pillars of Creation” in a matter of minutes.

Version 2.2 of The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator has been improved in several areas, some of which are:

Universal Binary for Mac allows native CS3 operation on Intel-based systems.
Flip image checkbox allows image orientation to be selected on import.
Root functions (x^1/2, x^1/3, x^1/4, x^1/5) now operate symmetrically about x=0.
Version 1.1 of the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) standard is now fully supported. For more information see http://www.virtualastronomy.org
The import of coordinate metadata from the FITS header has been improved

Apart from the great advantages of an interactive workflow, the Liberator enables creation of images with improved quality as the many greyscales in the original observations are preserved. This gives added detail in the shadows and an increased gamut (colour space) in the finished colour images. Get more information about the FITS Liberator on this podcast from Adobe.

Requirements:

Windows PC or Mac (OS X 10.4+);
Screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels or better;
Photoshop 7.0 (or later) or Photoshop Elements 2.0 (or later);
Mac: Photoshop CS 3.

Limitations by Photoshop version, Photoshop Elements and CS, known issues:

Photoshop CS2, CS3 (32-bit colour depth);
Photoshop CS (16-bit);
Photoshop Elements 3 to Elements 6 (16-bit);
Photoshop 7.0 (only 15-bit colour, and only partial functionality for more than
8-bit colour);
Photoshop Elements 2 (only 8-bit colour) (Elements 1.0 NOT supported);
On Mac only Photoshop CS3 is supported.

The team

The team that produced the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator consists of:
Project Lead: Lars Lindberg Christensen (lars@eso.org)
Development Lead: Lars Holm Nielsen
Core Functionality: Kaspar K. Nielsen
Engine and GUI: Teis Johansen
Scientific support: Robert Hurt
Technical support and testing: Robert Hurt, Zolt Levay, Bob Fosbury, Richard Hook and Aaron Anderson.

Acknowledgements

FITS is an abbreviation for Flexible Image Transport System and has been a standard since 1982 and is recognized by the International Astronomical Union.

The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator uses NASA’s CFITSIO library.

Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

We kindly ask users to acknowledge the use of this plug-in in publicly accessible products (web, articles, books etc.) with the following statement: "This image was created with the help of the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator".