First quarter moon

I'm fiddling with paint shop pro and I think I'm getting somewhere. Initial full frame:




And after sharpening and reducing noise with Paint Shop Pro. I've also added a mask to enlarge de frame:



Pentax K-x with SkyWatcher 127 mm telescope (1500 mm f/11.8 )
1/200s, iso 800

The sharpening produced an unpleasant bright rim on the right edge of the moon. Is there a way to remove it?

Bon soir Francois,

A couple of things that may work for you:
- Shoot in RAW (DNG works fine)
- Do as much of your post-processing in RAW format, before you convert to jpg.
- Do the sharpening as the very last step in your RAW post-processing, before you convert the image to jpg
- If you wish to shoot in jpg, do the sharpening last anyway!
- With sharpening as with most things, there's no such thing as a free lunch : expect to make value judgments about tradeoffs between increasingly visible artefacts and increases in sharpness

With this particular image, to eliminate the sharpening artefacts that have appeared as a halo on the bright edge, you may have to experiment with a slightly reduced amount of sharpening.

I have not used PSP, so cannot comment on what tools you may want to use to achieve this (ie, amount, radius, masking and detail etc).

Your work on the image has certainly pulled out the detail and contours on the moon's surface! And the additional space around it works for me too.

Looks fantastic to me! Yes the sharpening is strong, but not unusually so for a moon shot.

I don't know if I completely agree with i-Berg about the white halo. I get the same white rim/halo in most (all?) of my moon shots, before I've done any PP at all. It is pale grey before PP, but goes white once you up the contrast. I'm not sure if reducing the sharpening will have any effect on it.

Here's one I took a few days ago (with a Tamron 500mm mirror), showing the same halo. Mine is much noisier than yours!:

I was under the impression that the white halo is due to CA - I find I can usually tone it down a little by fiddling with the CA parameter in the RAW

Thanks i-Berg for the advice. I really need to know what you experienced folks do! But since sharpening increases noise a bit isn't it better to reduce the noise after?
Thoughton, nice picture what were the settings?
nass, being new to digital photography I don't know what ca is, can you light my lantern please. In my picture the halo appeared right after sharpening so I'm pretty sure that's where it's from.

Best regards to you all.

My shot was around 1/160 I think, the lens is a fixed f8. ISO 250 to boost the shutter speed a bit (it was handheld propped against a fence).

Regarding noise reduciton I seem to get my best results with just sharpening, no NR. The NR after sharpening just makes it soft again, better I think just to do less sharpening to begin with. Mind you I am fooling around with a cheap mirror lens so the IQ isn't fantastic to begin with.