[alexch (Alex)]

Hi All,

This is the last image from my recent trip to Phillip Island.

I recently started using the fancy interval timer that allows me to go beyond 30 seconds and thought I'd do the single 64 minute exposure at ISO 200 to save time in post-processing avoid stacking. Oh dear, was I wrong!

The noise in the image was so horrendous that I decided to give up on it and re-take it some other time as a stack of 4-minute exposures. But yesterday I downloaded Photoshop CS5 trial and gave it a go on this image. It took a few hours to learn the new tricks in CS5 (been using CS2) and clean it up. The result is not great, but good enough for web presentation and up to A3 sized print.

I used "Select-Colour range" then the very cool content-aware healing brush and finally colour noise reduction. I must admit I am impressed with CS5 speed and new features.

Below are 100% crops of before and after processing in CS5 as well as the final image resized for web.

Cheers,
Alex