I’ve never been happy with my shots of a full moon. I’ve gotten good results with non-full moons but nothing I’ve liked with a full moon. Last night I decided to try to follow Tony Northrup’s instructions to see what I got.
I was shooting my Canon M6 on manual. ISO 100, 1/60 second f/8.0 with a Tokina 400mm lens, tripod mounted shutter fired by remote. Manual focus.
I stacked seven images using Registax and Tony’s wavelet presets. My first attempt at stacking the results didn’t come out like I wanted.
Nothing too terribly exciting. I decided to try the stacking with some old non-full moon shots I’d liked and got much better results.
It was easy to see why it looked much better. Figuring I’d blown out the full moon a bit I did some Lightroom editing. I dropped the exposure -1.07. Dropped the contrast (yes dropped) -43. I dropped the highlights -7 and whites by -31. I upped the shadows +29 and blacks +33. I re-exported things and restacked the images. Getting better but still not quite there.
I then edited the seven images in Photoshop to add a high pass filter (4.1) as linear light. I exported the edited images and stacked them again. Now I’m fairly happy.
