Exposure stacking of a moonlit landscape - a challenge in Photoshop

 

You may have tried this yourself, trying to photograph a nice landscape with the moon during the twilight hours in the evening or morning. For a landscape like this you need a tripod and a long exposure time. The moon being many times brighter needs a very short exposure time. In cases with such brightness differences you normally make an exposure series as shown here (with tripod!) and use high dynamic range techniques and exposure stacking which is nowadays quite straightforward to use. However with the moon and a bright planet (Mars, or Venus) below the moon this does not work for several reasons:

• The long exposure gives 'stripes' for the stars, planets and the moon as well, because the earth moves
• Even more problematic for the same reason is that the moon, stars and palnet change position across the image between exposures
  
• The exposure difference is too extreme. Even stacking the cropped moon alone with over 10 images does not yield a nice image

As I will explain here, there is a 'dirty' solution to this problem, which is not as realistic as exposure stacking, but gives a result that is quite true to the experience of the viewer. In short: the washed out moon needs to be cleaned (and not as bright), as well as planets and stars visible as stripes. From the end of the exposure series you copy in a layer and set it to blend mode 'lighten'.

Advanced Photoshop technique for image restoration: remove erratic backgroud structures

 

This new Photoshop technique will allow you to remove any erratic, chaotic background patterns, caused by old printing machines ('random dotted pattern') or visible paper structures (fibers, depths), with the least possible blur. Note that there are various methods for recovering halftone prints from newspapers or color magazines (with the fast fourier transformation method) covered elsewhere. The images have in common that they show at the highest zoom a kind of chaotic leopard pattern. What you would like to do is to lighten the spots, and darken the background, so that they merge to a uniform color. The difficulty is to get a selection that is exactly right.