Processing the Moon

AstroJason (Jason) · #1 28-10-2012, 03:57 PM

A couple nights back I was playing around with my 60D. Moon was out so thought I should snap some shots. Used my 70-200mm f4L IS lens. Shot at f4, 1/400 exposure, handheld. This is a 100% crop of the original (went for that arty off centre look).

First shot is unprocessed and straight out of the camera (apart from it being a 100% crop). Second shot was processed in Gimp.

Have I pushed it too far? Noticing that darkening/brightening of the lunar limb. Also the sky seems to get noisy when adding contrast and adjusting the levels even though this was shot at ISO 100.

Larryp (Laurie) · #2 28-10-2012, 04:28 PM

Looks good to me Jason

AstroJason (Jason) · #3 28-10-2012, 04:37 PM

Cheers Laurie

iceman (Mike) · #4 28-10-2012, 05:19 PM

It's pretty good. A 100% crop on a 200mm lens is only JUST enough resolution and I think you've done a good job.

The limb brightening is an artefact of the sharpening, and there's not much you can do about it unless you get tricky with masking out the limb when you do your sharpening.

I show that technique in my article How to create a colour saturated moon photo.

The brightness of the blue sky doesn't help either, it'd be easier to take when it's against black sky so you can clip the sky levels back to 0 or pretty close to it.

AstroJason (Jason) · #5 29-10-2012, 11:03 AM

Thanks Mike! I just had a read of the article and will give this a try tonight. Unfortunately I did not take many shots when I took this photo, just 4 or 5. So I wouldn’t be able to do anything about the signal to noise ratio.

Good tip about shooting against a black sky rather than blue as well. I noticed that if I pushed the sharpening too far that the sky got very noisy. Looking forward to trying your processing tips out tonight!

Thanks again mate.