Full Moon Mosaic - Sep 17, 2005 - I'm Learnin'

[RapidEye]

OK, I'm still learning, but I made another pass at the moon with my Digital Rebel and 10" F/5 GS Dob :cool:

Particular settings:

Celestron Shorty Barlow required to reach in-focus
Digital Rebel (D300) at prime (F/10+)
ISO 800
1/400 second
RAW format
Composite of 9 images, processed with AutoStitch
Post processing done with GIMP and the RAW reader and HighPass filter plugins
Used a Hartman mask for focusing - Man that made that easier and more accurate!!! :thumbsup: Much better focus on this one than on last month's.
I used the processing tips IceMan gave me on my last shot, and I was pretty happy with how it came out. I'm still not in the same league as Ice is, but I'm learning :D

I'll probably upload the full 5000x5000 to Shutterfly and get them to process a 8x10 for me that I can frame and hang up.

Dang - this is FUN stuff!!!

Thanks IceMan!!!

[Lee]

Really an awesome result.... I would touch it with a bit of contrast or unsharp mask in photoshop - make it pop... The 5000*5000 image (big!) is prob fine though.... I'll need to play with HArtmanns to help mine I think....
COngrats again....

[iceman]

Very nice RE, great shot!

[RapidEye]

I tried to duplicate what Ice showed me on the last one:
Ran a HighPass filter on a duplicated layer, pulled the transperance down to %30 or so, then flattened. Hit it with an unsharpen filter, converted to greyscale, then bumped the contrast up and brightness down a bit.

I'm sure the settings on the filters could be improved - it took a bit of trial and error to get it where I liked it.


Man, its the best 30 cents I've spent in a long time :love: . I did up a printout using Visio, ran it off on the laserjet at work, cut stuff to size, laid it over a posterboard, traced it, then cut again - took all of 10 minutes.

It easily saved me 10 minutes of trying to tweak the focus :whistle:

I didn't even have a bright star nearby to use, but just using it on the moon helps a ton. You can really see when you've got focus nailed just by watching the edge of the disk.

I can't recomend it enough! :thumbsup:

Thanks for the feedback and help fellas!!!:cheers:

[iceman]

Did you change the highpass filter to "hard light" before changing the opacity to 30%?

Also don't change the brightness, just bump up the contrast.

Anyway, all processing is a personal preference.. some prefer a smoother look while others like to bring out more detail. You've done a good job on your 2nd attempt :)

[iceman]

Here's my processed version again - probably a little overdone because I was working off your already processed version, but it shows what I was talking about anyway.

Oh I also reduced it to 800px to keep the file size down.

[RapidEye]

Hmm - it works differently in GIMP.
I can change the layers light setting to "Hard Light", but the only settings I have on the HighPass filter are "Radius" and "Brightness".

For that one, I used a radius of 100 and brightness of 128.

The Unsharp Mask settings I used were Radius 5.0, Amount 0.5 and Threshold of 0. I fiddled with that some, but only made things worse.

I need to take the time to read up on what each of the settings do in ALL of the filters I have available.



I tried that, but it was too washed out - must be from not getting the highpass filter and or desharpen filters right.

That one you touched up really hits it again. Like you said, its all a matter of personal preference and that one looks just a tad overprocesseed, but it is still great how you managed to pull that detail out of the both the brighter and dimmer areas.

Any suggestions on tweaks I can do on the High Pass or DeSharpen?



Thanks - I'd like to get it a little bit better like yours. Any guidance you can give me on the settings I used would be appriciated. Here, I'll upload the original (the orientation isn't right - needs -40degree rotation) so that you can see how much better my so-so processing made the shot :scared2:

It may not look as good as yours, but I did make some improvement :D