NightScape Labpresented by Milky Way Planner
About

Built by a photographer who got tired of the round trips

NightScape Lab is an astro-landscape darkroom for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, made by Eric Brown, a landscape astrophotographer. It exists for one reason: he wanted to stack and finish a nightscape without exporting the same image through three different apps.

The origin

It used to take three apps to finish one image

A single good nightscape used to mean a stacker for the frames, a second tool for gradients and stars, and Photoshop to actually finish it, with a lossy export at every hop and the color quietly drifting along the way.

Eric shoots the Milky Way and he lives in Photoshop and Lightroom. He didn't want a one-click "done, don't touch it" result. He wanted to do the work himself, on data he trusted, without leaving the apps he already knew. So he built the darkroom he wished existed: three pieces working as one. A Photoshop panel is the control surface, a local engine does the heavy lifting, and a Lightroom Classic plugin sends a night's frames to stacking and brings the results back to the catalog.

  • ✓No more app-hopping. Stack a night of RAW frames, finish the result, build star trails, all inside Photoshop and Lightroom Classic.
  • ✓Data you can trust. Every stack lands as a 16-bit linear ProPhoto base image, with nothing baked in to undo.
  • ✓Local by default. The engine and every AI model run on your own machine; your images never leave your computer.
Milky Way arching over a lone dead tree

"I wanted to go from a night of frames in Lightroom to a finished nightscape in Photoshop without exporting to three other apps. So I built the darkroom I wished existed."

Eric BrownPhotographer
The Milky Way core rising over a still, dark landscape
"Presented by Milky Way Planner"

The byline, explained honestly

Milky Way Planner is Eric's parent brand, the name he already makes tools and content for photographers under. NightScape Lab is presented by Milky Way Planner the way a book carries its author's name: it's the byline, not a bundled feature.

We keep that distinction on purpose. NightScape Lab is the product on this site; Milky Way Planner is the person and brand behind it. We won't dress the byline up with claims about what any other tool does. The product stands on the workflow described here.

The mission

A clean base image, and control kept in your hands

The mission is small and specific: give the hands-on Photoshop editor a clean base image and the tools to finish it, with no exporting through three apps, no baked-in look, and no learning curve from another world.

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Keep control

Results come back as new layers and documents on a linear base image. You decide the white balance, the curves, the grade. Nothing is finished for you behind the scenes.

✎

A different audience

The one-click, "don't touch it" crowd is well served already, and those tools are good. NightScape Lab is for the photographer who wants to do the work themselves, inside Photoshop.

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We don't overclaim

As good a stack, delivered the way a Photoshop editor needs it. On raw stacking metrics the margins are modest and we say so. The edge is the deliverable and the workflow, not "we out-resolve everyone."

Our honesty ethos. We respect the competition, we cite one-scene numbers as one-scene numbers, and we lead with the workflow and the base image, not noise charts. If we can't demonstrate it, we don't claim it.

Built for the way you already work.

If you finish your nightscapes in Photoshop and want to keep control, this was made for you.

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