Content Creator's
Toolbox

• About the Toolbox
• Hubble Model Builders
• Photoshop FITS Liberator
• Simple Science Calculators
• Astronomical Color Swatch File for Adobe Photoshop

If you are reading this you are probably an admirer of the beautiful color images produced year after year by the Hubble news team. Until now it was difficult for anyone other than a trained astronomer to create images like these from the original grayscale Hubble data. That’s because Hubble data is stored in a special “flavor” of the FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) data format that has been nearly impossible to open in common photo editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.

Now, thanks to a collaboration between ESA, ESO and NASA, a free software plugin is available that enables anyone with Adobe Photoshop CS (and, to a limited degree, other versions of Photoshop and certain other image editors) to open Hubble (and other) FITS data and process it to create finished, conventional-format digital images.

The FITS Photoshop Liberator is available for download from this ESA Space Telescope site.

An article by our master Hubble image processor Zolt Levay explains how to create color images using this tool, step-by-step.