Merging Moons
Joe called me last evening and told me that I have to take a look at the moon rising over the Sangre de Cristos mountains. I took the camera and snapped away …
… however things are not always easy with this damned bright disk in the sky. The first one I took was this one (leaving it up to the camera to decide on the exposure):
Nice, but the moon is way too bright washing out all the details on the surface.
So I took another photo, this time reducing exposure by about 2 stops:
This shows the detail in the moon, but I can’t see the mountains any more. I need something “in between”, but as hard as you’d try to take the picture there’s just too much contrast and you won’t get it right.
I end up loading both pictures into Photoshop at the same time, putting them into layers over each other (the darker one on top of the lighter one). Then I instruct Photoshop to get the “brightest” information from the dark photo and use that to overlay the rest of the darker picture. The “brightest” information is of course the moon and after properly aligning the layers I end up with this:
Better, isn’t it? One could argue about the composition, but that was not the point of this post …