The digital noise is still pretty heavy, especially in dark and near-dark areas. Some of it could be JPG artifacts but I doubt it. There probably isn't much you can do to fix that besides turn down your ISO or use a better digicam.

Immediately to the right of that golden tree with the fetching black hat is a fifth edit. I don't see the sixth, even boosting the gamma on my monitor. My guess on that is that it was a light surrounded by a fairly large patch of black, so the edges were better hidden after the clone. I don't see any obviously repeating patches of noise, either.

I can see very faint blurs that look like "/" in the sky, which I'm guessing were the stars, but I wouldn't have noticed them if Doug hadn't suggested looking for them.

What stood out for me were a) the edges, and b) the dissimilarity in the colours. For the bright light under the islet, it was clear you cloned part of the river over the light (and my guess is the patch of river to the right of the first distinguishably single tree). The gray didn't belong in that spot, which was all black or red/yellow/orange. The same with the hat wearing tree -- it was a orange and black blob (with round-brush edges) pasted into the middle of a blue-white light.

To fix (a), the best option is to use a brush with feathered edges, rather than a hard edge (i.e. has greater transparency around the edges, than in the middle of the brush), so that the edges of the covered area are blended into the surrounding pixels. To fix (b), I'm not sure what to suggest, other than making a better choice in your clone source.

Also, on the things you just want to tone down the brightness of, try dodging them instead of cloning over the top of them.

Yeah, nothing I can do there. Keep in mind that this was a 40-second exposure in the dark, and that pushes the limits of the CCD sensor. Perhaps a better camera (SLR with much larger sensor) would help, but I'm not going to spend $1500 just so I can get better pictures in the dark!

tanstaafl.

Yes. There should be nine of them, and I am astonished that you can see them. These weren't covered by cloning, I just copied a small rectangle next to each one into the clipboard and pasted it over the offending star, which indeed look just like a "/". Seems odd that you would be seeing "/" and not a rectangle.

The fifth edit you mention is the orange house that I cloned to cover a light. That one isn't too bad.

tanstaafl.

Would that I had such a thing. My editing tools are quite primitive, consisting of a program called paint.net, which is similar to Microsoft Paint but with a few added features.

I can draw lines, squares, and circles, do cloning, cut and paste, pick and paste colors, and not much more than that. Hmmm... there is one more tool called "Gradient" that might be useful, but I don't know how to use it. Worth looking into, I guess.

tanstaafl.

I don't think I have a tool to do that. I am using the Paint.Net program you pointed me towards whem my MSPaint program died, and the toolset is limited.

Is this something that Paint.Net will do that I just haven't figured out?

I have purchased a copy of Photoshop Elements, I should have it next week. Then figure about a year to learn how to use it. Or, is Elements just a toy, a come-on to lure people into the full multi-hundred-dollar Photoshop program? I only paid $22.95 for it, so my expectations are not overly high.

tanstaafl.

Or you can make it a high dynamic range photograph. Essentially doing the same thing, but without the pasting.

Let me be more specific. If you're already having fun doing photos from a tripod like this, HDR is truly your next level of experimentation and could be quite fun. I highly recommend trying it.

Basically you just take a few different exposures from the same tripod spot ("Bracketing", like one might normally do anyway), and just run them all the resulting exposures through a piece of processing software.

Looking at the website you linked, I dunno. I get the impression that HDR is for reasonable dynamic range differences, to pick up detail in shadow areas or in an underexposed highlight. I'm looking at 12 f-stops difference between the moon and the foreground... that's more than 4,000 times brighter.

One other difficulty would be that the moon simply was not in the frame when the photo was taken. I would have to zoom out to widest angle and still cut out part of the foreground if I wanted the moon in the frame. The shot would be almost all sky with just a sliver of lake showing because the moon was actually much more overhead than it appears in the picture.

tanstaafl.

Sigh... that is so much deeper than I have delved into this program. I just wanted to get rid of some of the distracting lights in the foreground. I guess I am going to have to bite the bullet and learn how to use layers.

Being a glutton for punishment I have reworked the picture once again. I'm sure you sharp-eyed wizards will be able to find the edits, but without zooming in, just viewing it as a full-screen picture, are they still all that obvious, and if so, are they objectionable? I left one really bright light in the picture because I simply can't get rid of it. I know it can be done, I just don't [yet] have the skill. No doubt one of you wise guys will effortlessly take care of it just to show me up and when you do, please describe in excruciating detail how you did it so I can try to duplicate it in the full-resolution version in my computer.

tanstaafl.

edit: I thought I did well with the OXXO sign (just below the islet).

You can always try GIMP as a (free) alternative to Photoshop. If you had a Mac there are also a couple of wonderful programs in the $50 range from indy developers.

At least with better software you can do a better job of blending the two photographs together. Not that I thought the moon stuck out as a bad edit to begin with.

Or just use a cheap film camera. For night photography film is a good way to go. You might have to deal with reciprocity failure with film but all that means is increasing your exposure a little bit more, which doesn't matter on a tripod. This is coming from someone who is still crazy enough to use a Large Format View Camera though..

That doesn't solve the problem with the moon being too small. To make the moon large enough to see detail you need a mildly telephoto lens. So in this case it could not be done without changing his composition drastically.

Although the examples at that web site mostly conform to narrower dynamic ranges like you say, I believe that much wider ranges can be done with the same technique.

An acquaintance of mine did that sort of thing for a college thesis project, the results were quite impressive.




Yup. That's a completely different problem, separate from the dynamic range issue: The perceived size of the moon in photos versus when you look at it with the naked eye. When you look at the moon in the sky, especially near the horizon, your brain interprets it as being much larger than it really is. Usually, when someone tries to photograph the moon over a landscape, the moon ends up being a tiny dot in the frame. And thus, usually, if you see images of the moon over the landscape where the moon looks big, (like this), odds are they also pasted the moon into place, just like you tried to do. (Of course, they were using better tools and had more experience with pasting in images.)