The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator v.2.3

 

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

A screenshot of the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator v2.2.

"The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator" has been tested in the Softpedia labs using several industry-leading security solutions and found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components.

May 26, 2010: FITS Liberator 2.3 does not work with Photoshop CS5. We are currently investigating how large updates are needed to make FITS Liberator 2.3 work with CS5. October 30, 2009: The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator 2.3 been released today. Read more.

The release of version 2 of the popular ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator image processing software has meant that it is even easier and faster to create colour images using raw observations from a range of telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESA’s XMM-Newton Telescope.

Version 1 of the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator was completed in July 2004 by imaging scientists at the European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory and NASA. FITS stands for Flexible Image Transport System. This single file format archives nearly all images of stars, nebulae and galaxies produced by major telescopes around the world. Before July 2004 this file format was primarily accessible to scientists working with highly specialised image processing tools.

More than 60,000 laypeople, educators and amateur astronomers have started using the Liberator since the release of v.1 in July 2004. The FITS Liberator has also become the industry standard for professional imaging scientists at the European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory and NASA.

Stunning images such as the iconic Hubble image Pillars of Creation (Figure 1) can be created in a matter of minutes using version 2 of the FITS Liberator. Versions 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 had several notable improvements over v.1.0:

• FITS images with up to 4 billion greyscale levels can be processed (32-bit support).
• FITS images with up to 500 million pixels or more can be processed (100 times larger than standard images from a digital camera).
• An improved user interface and a re-designed order of operations simplify the overall process – for example, the plug-in now remembers previous settings.
• New options for advanced Scaling and Stretching to fine tune images for optimal results.
• A whole section dedicated to inputting metadata, i.e. information about the image and what it shows. Metadata will be an important tool for future efforts to make archives of ‘pretty pictures’ more accessible.
• User access to a text version of the original FITS header. 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 antisymmetrically 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.

Version 2.3 of the FITS Liberator include the following new features:

• Full support for Photoshop CS4 (on both Mac and Windows).
• Significant performance (speed) enhancement through the usage of multiple CPUs and CPU cores as well as an improved memory management strategy (helpful especially for large images).
• Support for planetary images through the PDS image format.
• Metadata editing support for Photoshop CS4.
• Options has been added including the histogram markers stretched mean, stretched median, peak level and background level.
• It is now possible to change the default initial guess between three different modes (a specified percentage of the histogram for the black and white levels, the mean +/- the standard deviation or the median +/- the standard deviation).
• The World Coordinate System (WCS) coordinates are now given when the user sweeps the image pixels with the mouse pointer.

Get more information about the FITS Liberator on this podcast from Adobe.

Requirements

The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator works on Windows PCs (Windows XP or newer) and Macs (OS X 10.4 or newer) and is optimized for Photoshop CS4 and CS3 (32 bit support). The plug-in also works in Photoshop CS2, Photoshop CS (only 16 bit support), Photoshop 7.0 (only 15 bit support), and Photoshop Elements. Note that Photoshop Elements 3 and above only support up to 16 bit images and Photoshop Elements 2 only support 8 bit images. Note, on Mac, The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator only supports Photoshop CS3 or above.

Supported Photoshop versions

	CS4	CS3	CS2†	CS†	7.0‡
Windows XP	•	•	•	•	•
Windows Vista	•	•	•	•	•
Windows 7	•	•	•	•	•
Mac OS X Tiger (Mac OS X Tiger (10.4)*	•	•
Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)*	•	•
Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6)*	•	•

*	Version 2.3 only supports Intel-based Mac computers.
†	Only 16-bit support.
‡	Only 15-bit support.

See full release notes.

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.

Further information

For further information on the FITS Liberator, read the PDF article "The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator 3: Have your say on new features" published on the Communicating Astronomy with the Public 2007 conference proceedings

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".