A photo I am pleased with

Attached is a photo I took a few days ago during the full moon. I am pleased with how it came out.

For reference, the lights on the other side of the lake are about eight miles away.

Caveat: the photo is fairly large at about 1.7 megabytes.

tanstaafl.

Nice shot!

What's up with the edits around the moon?

Aaarrggh! You weren't supposed to look that close!

You must have a better monitor than mine, because I can't see the sloppy paste job until I zoom in so close that the moon is all pixelated. I guess I'd better fix that before I send the picture in to the photo exhibit that my camera club puts on each year.

As you no doubt surmised, it is a composite shot, has to be since the moon is 4,096 times brighter (12 f-stops!) than the lake. The lake was shot at f3.2, 5-second exposure; the moon at f4.5, 1/250 second. I zoomed in on the moon to pick up as much detail as I could, then re-sized the image to 40% to scale it to match the lake.

Hmph! Damn smart-aleck kids with their sharp eyes and good equipment!

tanstaafl.

edit: Okay, is this better? See attachment #2.

I sure and heck can't see anything but I just looked at the image and didn't zoom in or anything.

Edit:

Ok I downloaded and looked at the full size of the first one and I totally see it now. Can't see it at all with the picture being re-sized to fit my browser.

Now the edges are pixelated. Most noticeable on the left edge.

Edit: go back to the first and use the clone tool to copy the sky over the black touch ups.

Boy, you guys are a tough crowd!

OK, here's version #3. I think it's getting better.

And FWIW, I really do appreciate the criticisms. I don't have any fancy graphics software, I am using a freeware program called Paint.Net (suggested to me by Bitt Faulk) and it is touted as being a slightly more capable version of MSPaint.

tanstaafl.

edit: OK, the moon is still pixelated. That is happening when the picture is added to the bbs, it is not pixelated in the original picture. Ah! View the picture full screen and the pixelation goes away.

It wasn't because of sharp eyes. It was because I just have the brightness on my monitor is turned up a bit. The CCD noise of the background sky had been clearly painted away. That's why you edit with a clone brush and check your edits at the extreme brightness ranges.

You might want to look into High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, with tone mapping.

Great composition but I do notice some unsharpness in the landscape. I think your tripod might have moved slightly during the long exposure or maybe it's just digital noise.

Yeah, I noticed that too. I don't think the tripod moved, it was on a tile deck made of 16" thick concrete, and I used the self-timer to make the exposure. More likely I just did an inept job of focusing, it's hard to do in the dark, I don't remember now if it was auto-focus or manual focus.

Next time there's a full moon I'll repeat the process, much more carefully. This was just a snapshot that turned out better than I expected. I think a three-shot panorama in portrait mode with more zoom, smaller aperture and better focusing will do the trick...

Hmmm... shooting film you get what is known as reciprocity failure with long exposures. Does this happen with digital photography as well?

tanstaafl.

Here is a night shot I was quite proud of...



I didn't get a clear sky really, so made it more about the building I had in front of me. You can read a post about how I made this shot on my blog.

You want to shoot f8 above if you can. The camera needs to be dead steady, and I mean dead! Use a longer exposure and lower ISO. You also need to make sure you sky is darker, unless you have some cool cloud formations to play around with.

Looks like a great location for a shot, with a bit more practice I think you will get once awesome shot from there!

Cheers

Cris.

All your "point sources" on the far shore of the lake are identical little triangles. I'm pretty sure that means something moved. Tiptoe more -- 16in of concrete is little help if it's on a "bouncy" substrate such as clay.

The edits in the foreground (near shore) are better in #3 than in #2 or #1, but the one below the red (far-shore) light and the one below the central islet are still pretty brutish.

Peter

Did you decide you liked the fisheye look, or did straightening it make it look weird? It's a great shot either way, and it's a cool story about the lighting.

You are right! Good catch! I am quite confident that the deck did not move (steel-reinforced concrete pillars sunk five meters into very rocky ground), but at that time of night there are frequently wind gusts severe enough for my Sunsetter awnings to automatically retract. They didn't on that night, but there may have been breezes enough to vibrate my somewhat flimsy tripod.



I know those were brutish edits, because I did them in a very ham-fisted manner. But as God is my witness, even though I know exactly where every edit was made (they were done to cover up distractingly bright lights in the foreground) I cannot see a single one of them on my monitor so I figured they were OK. Now, my monitor is nothing great, an Acer 22" LCD that I bought from Tiger Direct for about $200. And during the day (as I write this, and as I made the edits) I have a lot of bright ambient light I can do nothing about that may be obscuring some of my sins. Obscuring to me, that is, but not to you sharp-eyed devils!

So, I am attaching picture #4, uncropped, and unedited except for sticking the moon into it. You can see why I cropped and edited the previous versions. And, a tiny triumph for me, I bet none of you noticed where I edited out the antenna just to the right of the island in the first three pictures! And I think I have got the moon added in reasonably well although as in the other edits there may well be egregious flaws which I cannot see and am blissfully unaware of.

I really, truly appreciate these comments and criticisms. I have learned quite a bit here, enough to make my next attempt at this picture a great deal better.

tanstaafl.

I have heard that some graphic artists and other print industry professionals will refuse to use LCD displays at all. Analog CRT's are quickly becoming a rarity, and a lot of these people are snatching them up and hoarding them.

Yours is one of many varied examples as to why this is the case.

Problems such wide variations in color definition and brightness are one thing, but even more troubling is posterization of some displays: Where two different nearby RGB values in Photoshop will render as the same color on the LCD display because of a limitation in the per-pixel, per-component bit depth of a given display.

Analog CRT monitors can have those kinds of problems, too, but at least they can be more accurately calibrated across the analog spectrum. (Graphic industry professionals always calibrate their displays.)

I like the unedited version. Why alter the moon? An altered moon against original everything else is distracting. An altered moon would look fine if the rest of the picture was sharpened or saturated.

For free, online image editing, try Aviary.

In college, a friend doctored a house party picture before posting it online. He thought he edit was a solid black spot, but at full brightness, it looked like crayon scribble masking the music department audio mixer we'd "borrowed". It helps to check.

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. It's probably just a case of him not pixel-peeping at a high enough zoom level.

The triangles are quite visible at full zoom on the LCDs here.

Cheers

Because the moon was not in the lake picture at all. It was too bright to include in the frame, and had to be photographed separately at a reduction of 12 f-stops.

tanstaafl.

Oh, I can see the triangles indicating movement of the camera during the exposure. What Peter was referring to are the edits where I copied a section of black and pasted it over some bright lights I felt were distracting. The pasted areas look exactly like their surroundings on my monitor, but apparently are quite visible with better equipment and/or better eyes.

tanstaafl.

That's just a gamma setting that's out of whack. With adjustments to the display's contrast (or what we muggles would "mistakenly" call brightness) it ought to be visible.

New, improved version.

tanstaafl.

You should really try to get a real one with the moon in it somehow. That pasted in moon always sticks out like a sore thumb.

I love that it's basically one lunar month since the last go. For maximum coolness you can do one of these next: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050713.html

Peter

It wasn't the moon that stuck out for me, this time (although there are some jaggies around the top edge), so much as the weird scribble edits in seemingly random locations, that make it look like Doug was practicing with the clone brush.

Not possible. The moon is more than 4,000 times brighter than the surrounding terrain. I can expose for the moon and end up with a nice round circle in the middle of a solid black photograph... or I can have a little bit of detail in the foreground with an absolutely blank ragged white overexposed circle up in the sky.

The moon has to be pasted.

tanstaafl.

I am impressed that you noticed. Obviously I have to wait for the next full moon to get the photo. The current picture was taken with the moon one day short of full. Last night I shot with the full moon, but the pictures were unsatisfactory because of too much haze (farmers burning their fields) and the other side of the lake and the mountains couldn't be seen at all. I'll try again tonight if conditions are better, then I'll have to wait another 26 days before the next attempt.

tanstaafl.

Damn! You guys are a tough crowd! But I love it. I'm learning a lot here.

As God is my witness, with my monitor and my viewing software, I really cannot see the edits after I've done them. Probably its just that I am a total klutz with my primitive editing tools, but darn it, I really thought I was doing pretty well with them.

The edits aren't random... they are my clumsy attempt to ameliorate some very distracting and very bright lights in the foreground. This was a 40-second exposure at f8, and the street lights and that damned OXXO sign are practically blinding. I betcha you can't see where I had to get rid of about 20 stars that had turned into streaks in the sky because of the long exposure.

You're right, I tried (clearly ineffectually) to use a clone tool to cover those lights. Some of them were not well done, but I thought others were OK. I worked over six different places, do they all stick out? How can I do this better?

tanstaafl.

I can only see four: the grey patch below the islet, the oddly-repeating golden tree directly below that, a reappearance of the golden tree with its friend the smoke-monster from Lost in the very front at the middle, and the golden tree again, this time with a fetching black hat scribbled-on, on the right directly below the rightmost patch of lights on the far shore. I've listed those in increasing order of obviousness, the final one being I'm afraid really hopelessly obvious.

Peter

Pretty good!

All you missed was the orange building just to the right of the "hopeless" edit (I concur with your opinion on that one); note that the windows are at different levels but a wicked bright light was done away with there; and there used to be a cell phone tower sticking up just to the right of the islet.

That grey patch below the the islet is the OXXO sign... tough to deal with. I tried just toning down the brightness by cloning the moonlit lake onto it, but it looks too flat.

I'll play with it some more, I know I can make it better. And I really do appreciate the help and suggestions. I am a rank novice when it comes to photo editing (I like to think I am better than average at the actual camera work) and this picture (and the similar one from last month) represents my first attempt at it.

tanstaafl.

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.

Faking Soft Brushes and the Blur/Dodge/Burn Tool

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.)