I dumped my editing presets and my astronomy shots got way better

Gavin Smith · 2026-03-06T11:31:28.914478+00:00

I was tired of my photos looking like everyone else's. Those presets just wash out the details. Now I tweak each image by hand. The difference is night and day. Stop being lazy and learn to edit properly.

keith9007mo ago

Yeah my friend went through the exact same thing... he was using those popular presets for his Milky Way shots and everything just looked kinda flat and same-y. He finally got fed up and spent a whole weekend just starting from scratch on one good raw file, tweaking sliders until it looked real. The next batch he posted actually had depth, you could see the dust lanes and weird colors the camera caught but the presets just killed. It totally changed how he shoots now because he knows what to expose for in the field. He says it's more work but feels way less like pushing a button and calling it art.

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victorh817mo ago

Ngl that "pushing a button and calling it art" bit kinda changed my view.

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pat_jenkins6mo ago

What's the biggest thing you learned from scratch?

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robins837mo ago

Doubt it's worth all that fuss, @keith900.

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