Wednesday, October 28, 2015

New approach to processing moon photos.




I took a series of 20 shots of the moon with my DSLR the other night.  Normally I choose the best 'one' and process it.  I have known for a long time that picking the top of the set, say X% and stacking them in Registax or AS2 would give much better results.  I've always struggled to do so.  I'm not sure if it's because I used the Canon raw (CR2) file format or because DSLR have massive resolution, but stacking has never worked well for me.  This time in particular I really struggled to get the photos to line up as I kept moving and recentering.  I took a cue from fellow CN'er zAmbonii (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sTcrONM24w)  and added a few of my own twists.


  1. Open photos in Adobe Bridge all at once and crop all, painfully and individually.
  2. Save as tiff with no compression
  3. Use Adobe Bridge to open all tiff files as layers in single image
    1. Select all cropped photos
    2. In Bridge select the menu "Tools -> Photoshop -> Load Files into PS Layers"
  4. Auto align using
    1. Select all layers
    2. Edit / Auto-Align Layers / Auto
  5. Then after some waiting most all the layers are 'really close' to being 'stacked'  At this point you can either
    1. Set all layers but the bottom to 50% opacity and call it day.
    2. Export as tiff using
      1. File / Scripts / Export layers to file
  6. Once exported as uncompressed tiff you can open them in Registax and have a MUCH easier time stacking as you normally would!
  7. After saving a stack of 14 and another of the full 20...
  8. I sharpened in AstraImage
  9. Opened in PhotoShop again for
    1. Denoise with Topaz
    2. High Pass Filter with contrast
    3. Saturation
Thanks and enjoy some new tricks!

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