The moon

No blown highlights on my screen.

Thanks Mark

What I tried to do with this one was to limit all the settings to keep the highlights becoming overblown. Inclusive sharpness. With ever setting I was manipulating I kept coming to the levels to make sure it wasn't blowing off because it was too easy to just overdo it.

Interesting then if you open the final jp in your editor if the levels would show clippings. Did you try it?

Hi Amin,

Funnily enough I was also taking pictures of the moon last night!!! However I was using my £20 Tamron 80-210 both with and without a £10 TC

Needless to say your shot has more detail than mine!

I got the inspiration to do it after reading this post on DPS recently, I think you've already figured out the technique, but perhaps this guy might have a tip or two you hadn't discovered yet.

It was part of DPS's recent "21 great shots and how they were taken" series. Some very interesting stuff in there I can't wait to try out!

I will post my crappy moonshot this evening when I get home. It's not on Flickr yet so I'm not able to post it from the office.

Cheers!

so John, on the big white feature lower-right, can you see tones throughout the area? with no continuous white?

If you pass the eye dropper over the area there are two distinct blobs of 255,255,255 white covering enough pixels to appear noticeably clipped. The next tone I see is a yellowish halo around the white.

I'm not at all bothered by these areas, but as Amin has asked...

Oops sorry people, perhaps I ought to mention that this shot wasn't taken yesterday. This is one of my previous shots back in April when there was a huge moon craze going around here in the forum and myself along with some other members were quite involved in getting some shots of the moon. It was back in April. So today I dug out the RAW file again and decided to have another crack at the post processing hoping that my skills have improved a little bit with time.

Sorry didn't intend to mislead you all. Although the moon phase yesterday would have looked more or less like this one

Mark, I think you are right, I hadn't checked after converting from PSD to JPG. Only after you mentioned it now I realise that my PSD file is no where near the clippings that its showing.

So why is it doing this? When working with the PSD file this is what I was taking a lot of care in controlling and then when I was happy with the image I flattened it and didnt look back. And now you mentioned the moment I check it it lights up like a Xmas tree, and this wasnt there with the PSD file

Hi again Amin,

Here is my crappy moon from last night! (uploaded to Flickr just now thanks to the wonders of VNC remote access)




As you can see, yours is quite a lot brighter, larger, and generally better

PS Amin, I also had issues with the large white area being clipped. I found that reducing the exposure but increasing the brightness helped with that.

[Edit: the large white area in mine is bottom left, yours is bottom right.]

Wow Craking shot, nice and sharp Nothing more to say really. I like it.aminstar i have to ask what was the full process and time take to get this image? What settings did you use. Thanks

I haven't measured the tones in PS, I'm just saying what I've observed.

Would some 255 pixels be acceptable? I'm coming round to the view that they might be if the context is appropriate. Nothing is set in stone and all rules are up to be broken....

Having said that, I'm not suggesting that blown out areas would be OK, just that out of 14.6 million pixels I could overlook a handful here and there!

That's a pretty decent shot Tim. I just notice a bit of noise, what iso did you shoot at?

It was shot at 400, but since I had to crop it so much there is quite a lot of unsharp masking going on there!

Now there is something new I learn again. You see? I always take in something new as time progresses from this forum. I had been struggling at times controlling the tiniest details of highlights and clippings etc thinking that if the image crosses these boundaries then it will not look good. Now John you just made me realise that I shouldn't go overboard with these things and little clippings where it cannot be avoided are still ok.

Thank you again for that lesson learnt.

Having said that, Mark, thank you also for the input. If you hadn't mentioned I wouldn't have noticed that the conversion from PSD to JPG is doing that. This is why I like to post into the forum so experienced members like you all can lead me the way and point to certain things.

So the issue again, is this normal when converting from PSD to JPG? Do I need to keep an eye on it and is it image dependant?? Up until now I would just finish editing and then just flatten the image and forget about it, assuming that its as it was in PSD. What's the general rule? What do you do?

Many thanks

I'm sticking my neck out a bit here but...

JPEG is a set of procedures to compress the image. Amongst these, I think the two culprits here are averaging and perceptual sacrificing.

I'm a little unsure about the details. But averaging attempts to combine or group as much data as possible. Causing the characteristic blocking - just watch something on Sky to see this at work

And perceptual makes decisions about what the human eye will or won't notice and discards as much 'useless' data as possible.

Feel free to correct me

It is curious - that area does look blown to me.

Compare it with this wikipedia photo - there's a lot more detail visible there.