NightScape Lab is three pieces working as one: a Lightroom Classic plugin sends your frames in, a local engine stacks them into a clean 16-bit linear ProPhoto base image, and a Photoshop panel finishes it. Every result is a normal Photoshop document with layers, and nothing ever leaves your machine.
Select a night's RAWs in Lightroom and choose Stack in NightScape.
The engine calibrates, aligns, and stacks into a linear base image.
The panel takes over in Photoshop: Prepare, Stars, and the full toolset.
Select a night's RAW frames, lights and darks together, in any order, and choose Stack in NightScape from Library → Plug-in Extras. Then:
Because delivered base images live in your catalog from the moment they exist, everything after that behaves like native Lightroom: edit in Photoshop, save, and the file in your library is current. The workflow you already know, with a stacking darkroom in the middle of it.
You never hand-mask. When it's time, the AI automatically separates sky from ground at full resolution: the stack uses it to align stars and landscape independently, and the same mask feeds the star tools and the foreground sky merge. When the stacked image opens, you land on the Stack tab with a confirmation banner, and that sky mask arrives as a real Photoshop layer: hidden by default so you see your image, one visibility toggle away when you want to inspect it.
A guided, numbered flow for the steps that make a stacked nightscape sing. Each step lands as its own layer.
Neutralizes the color cast using sky-background star sampling, applied as its own layer so you can pull back its opacity.
Purple and green chromatic fringes, SCNR color-cast cleanup, and star-color neutralization, with star cores protected. (Fix lateral CA in your RAW developer first. We don't pretend to.)
Capture any sequence of steps with your exact settings and replay it on the next image with one click. Recipes run step by step, each producing its own layer.
The shared sky mask. A full-resolution AI segmentation mask, dark-foreground-aware (it carves tree branches and rock spires back out of the sky), feeds every tool that needs to know where the sky is.
Two tools that treat your stars as something to keep, shape, and control.
AI-powered, delivering a starless layer plus a separate Star Map layer (Linear Dodge) so the stars remain a first-class, editable ingredient rather than gone forever.
Flux-sculpted culling that dims faint clutter by prominence, while Constellation Guard protects the bright, round stars that define your sky.
Combine a foreground and a sky, same scene or creative composite, with edge-aware matting and statistical color reconciliation. The result is a layered, editable document: foreground, sky, and mask as separate layers. And it's fully signed, so every Lab tool works on the merged result too.
There's no denoise button, on purpose. Stacking real frames is the noise reduction: twenty measured exposures beat an AI's guess about one. If you want a cleaner image, stack more light.
The same one-click dispatch as stacking, tuned for trails. Select a night of ground-fixed frames in Lightroom (or pick them straight from the panel) and choose a look: Solid, Comet, Meteor, Fade, or Vortex.
One honest guardrail: trails need a fixed camera. Feed the engine tracker-aligned frames and it refuses politely, and tells you why.
The through-line is true sensor color, scene-linear math, and results that stay editable. (Why that matters: the case for a clean linear base image.)
LibRaw demosaic (AHD) directly into linear ProPhoto RGB: wide gamut so deep hydrogen-alpha reds and OIII teals survive, linear so the math is physically meaningful.
Master-dark construction with temporal outlier rejection, applied pre-demosaic at the Bayer level. Real sensor-space calibration, not a layer trick.
Star detection, triangle matching, RANSAC, then thin-plate-spline warping. Parallelized and byte-deterministic.
Two-pass Welford + kappa-sigma rejection with dual sky/ground accumulation driven by the AI sky mask: the sky aligns on stars while the ground stays put, in one pass.
Sky segmentation and star removal run as ONNX models on your machine (Core ML accelerated on Apple Silicon Macs).
16-bit TIFF, correct ICC profile embedded, signed, non-destructive, and delivered where your workflow expects it.
Installs as a dockable UXP panel through Creative Cloud's standard extension mechanism. No developer mode required.
Mac (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Windows, each with its own installer that sets up the panel, engine, and Lightroom plugin.
Everything runs locally. No upload, no account for processing. Your images never leave your computer.
The plugin adds Stack in NightScape and Star Trails to Plug-in Extras. Without it, the panel stacks from disk or open layers.
Send a night of frames from Lightroom, get a stacked base image in Photoshop, and finish it without leaving your apps.
30-day money-back guarantee. If it's not for you, email for a full refund, no questions asked.