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Where NightScape Lab fits

These are honest comparisons. Most of these tools are good at what they do. NightScape Lab is built for one specific person: the landscape astrophotographer who wants the whole nightscape darkroom in one tool inside Photoshop. That means calibrated stacking with foreground handling, star removal and declutter, a foreground sky merge, star trails, and a Lightroom Classic round-trip, all working on a clean linear base image the whole way. Here's how it stacks up against its real peers. Haven't picked a tool yet? Start with the honest roundup of stacking software first.

The landscape-astro field

Every tool below, side by side

Capability	NightScape Lab	Starry Landscape Stacker	Sequator	RC Astro bundle	StarStaX
Price	$129 once	~$40 once	free	$189.80 bundle	free
Platforms	macOS & Windows	macOS only	Windows only	macOS & Windows	macOS & Windows
Calibrated RAW stacking	✓ pre-demosaic darks, kappa-sigma	stacks TIFFs you convert first	RAW in, basic calibration	✗	✗ JPEG/TIFF trails
Foreground handling (sky + ground)	✓ dual-stream, editable mask layer	✓	✓ freeze ground	✗	✗ whole-frame blend
Star removal / reduction	✓ Star Removal + Declutter	✗	✗	✓ StarX + StarShrink	✗
Foreground Sky Merge (color-reconciled)	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗
Star trails	✓ five looks	✗	trails mode	✗	✓ its specialty
Lightroom Classic round-trip	✓ auto-import to catalog	✗	✗	✗	✗
Runs inside Photoshop	✓ panel	separate app	separate app	✓ plugins	separate app
One-time or subscription	one-time	one-time	free	one-time	free

The combination is the point: calibrated stacking with foreground handling, the star tools, the Foreground Sky Merge, star trails, and the Lightroom round-trip, in one tool inside Photoshop, for one one-time price. No single tool in the row offers all of it. Prices per August 2026 public price lists; RC Astro singles run $39.95 to $89.95 and their Photoshop bundle is $189.80.

The comparison people ask about

vs Starry Landscape Stacker

SLS is a mature, excellent one-click stacker for the Mac. Genuinely great for the "stack it, done, don't touch it" workflow. If that's you, it's a fine choice at about $40.

But SLS hands Photoshop a file in ROMM with a premultiplied (associated) alpha channel. In Photoshop, that breaks white balance: your color adjustments don't behave. It's concrete, verifiable, and we can demonstrate it.

NightScape Lab delivers the stack as a clean 3-channel linear ProPhoto base image that Photoshop color-manages correctly, imported into your Lightroom catalog automatically. On the raw stacking metrics we're essentially a tie (a small edge on star tightness from one test scene), but the decisive difference is the deliverable, not "we see more."

Full SLS comparison →

Crop from a Starry Landscape Stacker stack — Starry Landscape Stacker

Crop from a NightScape Lab stack — NightScape Lab

Matched crop, one scene (10 lights + 10 darks). Modest margins. We say so.

The rest of the table

Each peer, in a paragraph

Every tool in the table above, what it's genuinely good at, and where NightScape Lab differs. Each links to a full honest comparison.

vs Sequator

Free, fast, and a great first stacker on Windows: freeze-ground compositing, sky masks, a basic trails mode. NightScape Lab adds pre-demosaic calibration, a deterministic stack, an editable sky-mask layer with a restack loop, the whole finish, and the Lightroom round-trip. And it runs on Windows too, so this is now a real choice, not a platform default.

Full comparison →

vs the RC Astro bundle

Excellent single-purpose Photoshop plugins ($39.95 to $89.95 each, $189.80 for the four-plugin bundle, all perpetual). They finish; they don't stack, merge, or build trails. NightScape Lab covers the star work plus calibrated stacking, the Foreground Sky Merge, and Star Trails in one $129 tool. Their gradient removal remains a fine complement.

StarXTerminator →

Also: GradientXTerminator · NoiseXTerminator · StarShrink

vs StarStaX

The free star-trails classic: gap filling, comet mode, six blend modes, fast on long sequences, from JPEG/TIFF exports. NightScape Lab builds trails RAW-native with calibration, in five looks (Solid, Comet, Meteor, Fade, Vortex) over a noise-rejected foreground, dispatched from Lightroom or right in the panel.

Full comparison →

Looking for a different kind of tool? PixInsight, Siril, DeepSkyStacker, GraXpert, StarNet++, and Starry Sky Stacker solve a different problem (tracked deep-sky imaging), and Topaz is a general-purpose single-image denoiser. None of them do what this table compares, so they sit outside it. Each still gets its own honest page below.

The full index