2024 Solar Eclipse Photography Processing: Maximizing Detail with HDR Techniques

the eclipse is over and now it's time for all of us to process our photos of totality and ideally get something like this this is an HDR edit of the photos of totality I took on April 8th 2024 in a previous video I used jpegs from 2017 to show you three different ways you can do an HDR edit of totality and the third method I covered was the pellet method that's been around for over 25 years and that method was by far the most popular and today I finally have my own raw data from 2024 and I'm going to apply the pellet method once again to show you just how much detail you can get out of your images with just these tactics and in this video I put a little bit of a twist into the pellet method and kind of double stack it and we'll see the results at the end so during my Imaging I took a bracket of 14 images during totality over and over again over 3 and 1/2 minutes and the exposures range from 1 2000 of a second to 4 seconds and they were all taken from northern Vermont and I saw all of your comments from the last video and in this video we will be aligning on the prominences since they are very prominent and I also use just one reference frame unlike the last video where I kept switching reference frame and that is bad practice and the one thing I'll mention and one thing that you'll notice is that aligning on the prominences get harder and harder the longer your exposures are because the whole thing gets washed out by the corona getting brighter and brighter but we'll deal with that in the video so let's dive in these are all of my images from my at60 and T5i combination uh I shot in raw and jpeg so there are doubles of each of these but there's CR2 and JPEG files and these are all of my totality shots that range from here which were taken at uh 726 p.m. UTC time all the way to this last one 7:30 so it's about 3 and 1 12 minutes of totality for me and if we look at a couple of these so if I open one of these first ones here this one 1,000 of a second we zoom in we can kind of see the two prominences on this side there's another prominence here that looks pretty cool some more here here looks really nice and the promin that everyone saw and has been talking about is this bright one and that shows up in one of the later sessions here so right before C2 so if I look at one of these pull that over and you can zoom in here you can see that the prominences on top here have disappeared because the moon has moved up and left on my screen and it has it's blocking those but these prominences here then become visible and because the moon has moved if you want to Stack your totality images from beginning to end you might find it a little bit challenging aligning the moon and the prominences together because it may not make a lot of sense of because you they appear in some not in not in others so that's something for you to work out and because the moon moves across the Sun and prominences appear and disappear aligning totality images from you know 3 minutes of totality can get really challenging so the best way to do this is to take one bracket of exposure so I for for example I have exposures here let's say from here which is 1/ 2000 of a second all the way to here which is one or 4 seconds I can take this and just process this as one bracket and the moon wouldn't have moved as much to give me that much of a trouble when I'm aligning and that's what I'm going to show you today and I Mo curated bunch of them into this folder here called HDR they range from one 2,000 of a second so I'm rename them so that they're easier to read all the way to 4 seconds if you look at our 2 and 4 second exposure we can see that it is extremely blown out and I'm going to try and get some Earth shine out of this later but for this video I'm actually going to leave these two out and only stack one or one 2000 of a second all the way to 1 second um the ordering is just a little bit messed up because of the title but of the because of the names but we're going to open up Photoshop we're going to load just these 12 frames and you'll notice that this is double the number of data that I stacked in the last video so we're hoping oping I can get some good details so open up Photoshop and then we're going to go to file scripts load files into stack I'll go browse and then I'm going to select my one or half second to 1 2000 of a second and then I will load that or to one second and I'll load that into my stack here and press okay so this opened in this order um so I'm going to spend a second to reorder these so I reordered these from the fast shutter speed to the slowest shutter speed because it'll make aligning a little bit easier for me because the prominence that we'll be aligning on this one here is the brightest on the 12000 of a second exposure it's uh looks brighter on the 1000 because the corona is also brighter it kind of washes out a little bit so 12000 is actually really good for me and you'll notice that when I zoom out that it is off center this was a a little bit of a disappointment on my solar Quest because it did lose where the sun was for a few seconds and instead of tracking it took the eclipse off center so before we do anything else I want to crop this because we want to make sure that the eclipse is at the center of our frame because when we do a radial blur later on we want to make sure that this is centered otherwise we will have slight issues not the end of the world so do do as good of a job as you can doesn't have to be perfect and press okay so we're working with a kind of a square image now we're going to align this really quick quickly so the trick to do it as I showed you last time is if I select all of these layers and then change the blending options from normal to difference we can see slight differences and you can see that unlike the last one the alignment is actually a lot better because my solar Quest did end up doing a good job of tracking the sun once it was eclipsed after it had lost tracking for uh few seconds but you can see that it's it's pretty well aligned but there are still some imperfections so I only have to move some of these a few pixels and the way I'm going to do it and the way a few of you H have recommended that I do is make sure that I have just one reference frame so in my last video I kept switching the reference frame and that was not a good idea I agree and so this one I'm going to keep my 12000 of a second frame as a reference frame so this is what every other frame will stack into and instead of stacking on the moon itself I'm going going to do my best to stack on the prominence instead One Challenge here is that once you get to The Brighter exposures here you can't see the prominence anymore so at that point we're going to have to do our best to guesstimate where the prominence is by aligning a little bit of the moon so and on the 1 second it's really gone I think like around the 60th second no not even like in one 250 second is the last time we actually see the prominence before the corona just gets too bright and washes out the prominences so those are the challenges and I'm going to do my best to align this and I'm going to just make these two visible in my 21 2000s I'm going to make this like 60% opacity and then I'll just use my arrow keys to align it and I'm going to make sure that you know 1 2000 of a second stays put I'm going to select the 1 1000 of a second the bottom layer and I'm going to just use my arrow keys to align it and I think this is good so if I there you go blink on and off you can see that it it's a little bit better and now I'm going to uncheck this do this one for 1500th of a second again make sure the right layer is selected going to move it over a little bit and after some slight adjustments I'll check on the other prominence I think it looks pretty good okay I'll come here and then I'll blink this on and off yeah it looks pretty good okay so now I'm not going to make you to through me aligning all of these so with the magic of editing I'm going to skip to the end all right that took me a few minutes to do and this is now the final result of difference in all of them there's some artifacts around the area but I think we can work those out when we stack these so I'm pretty happy with this I'm going to select all of them and change them back to normal and now we're going to while they're all selected right click and click convert to Smart object once we're there now we want to Stack this so we'll go to layer smart objects and then stack mode and then we're going to do mean stack again an average of all the pixels and then this is the stack de so if you saw my picture that I posted a few days ago uh the edges of the Moon looked a little bit wonky because it wasn't really aligned but now if we move in closer you can see that it's much smoother and the prominences look much better and this is a pretty nice HDR stack if I zoom in you know the prominences here are not really visible we can see that there are some like stacking artifacts here and that's because I had to move the moon down a little bit so that we can align on the prominence itself and not the moon so there's there's some stuff there but it's not going to be really visible once we are done editing this so we have this and now I'm going to save this as if you guess OG you guess right and before we continue we want to make sure that we are working with a single layer not a smart object because we'll need it in order to apply our subtraction and multiply images later on so we're going to right click we're going to click on rasterize layer and that turns it in just flattens it and we want to make sure that we save it so that we have our og. PSD again probably should have done the flattening before I saved it as OG but it's okay we can do that at any point just want to make sure you do it before you save the blur so now we're going to do is click on filter we'll do a blur radial blur and the best option I found that works for me is nine between 9 and 10 the quality is best and once this finishes you'll notice that the spikes here are going to kind of disappear and just blur out and it's kind of like creating a kind of a synthetic flat and okay so we have that now we want to make sure we save as blur. PSD okay right so now we have blur now we want to open our OG back so we have that with the spikes and now want to go to image apply image bring that here make sure our sources blur and instead of multiply blending we're going to subtract blending the scale I'm keeping at one opacity I'm keeping at one and the offset I found Works between like 40 and 50 so I'm going to keep it 50 for this one you should play with your settings and see what you like uh I think 50 works for me so press okay and now we're going to do save file save as we'll call this subtract it and now we will do file open and then we'll open our OG one more time so now we're going to apply our subtracted image onto this so we'll do image apply image make sure the source is subtracted instead of subtracting we're going to multiply leave opacity at 100 press okay now this looks kind of familiar to uh the end result of our last one and if we zoom in we can see pretty cool like fabcy features here like around the Moon around the eclipse here it looks pretty cool so now we're going to make some edits to this we'll do filter camera raw filter okay once that's opened up the I'm just going to start adding stuff here so I'm going to do exposure so I'm going to do exposure I'm going to do like two and a half a little bit of contrast not too much highlights it'll be around the Moon open up the Shadows a little bit just moving everything a little bit to the right and Photoshop literally updated and Camera Rock literally updated like an hour ago after I did my test run and now they moved the texture editing to here so now it's in effects great so now I have to open that up and now I can do Clarity I'll increase the clarity so we can see more of the coronal Loops here a little bit better not that much I'll do like say 62 increase the texture a little bit you can see it starts to look a little bit better and admittedly I could have done a little bit better of a job aligning the frames here but it's okay it'll still work so far this looks okay I'm going to go into detail I'm going to do a little bit of noise reduction not a lot like 10% and if we preview on and off I don't know if it translates into the video but for me uh some of the grain here is is gone and it looks a little bit better to me okay and the prominence also looks good then one more thing you can do is where do they move it to so yeah so now temperature is under colors no longer on top we going to move the temperature just a tiny bit make it a little bit Bluer so that it kind of matches what we saw in the sky this is this is the kind of color that I remember so just leave that you can up the Vibrance a little bit if you want or the saturation a little bit if you want not too much okay looks good and then I think this is good for this press okay so this is before and this is after if we go into history we can go to apply image we can see the before and after we can go all the way to the beginning so this is before just a regular stack applying our subtracted layer and then camera raw looks pretty nice and the trick I've been doing so before I move on I'm just going to click you know file save make sure I have that saved so trick I've been doing is kind of kind of double stacking the blur and subtracted method so I'm going to duplicate this layer so you can right click and duplicate or you can do contrl J and it'll duplicate the layer and I going to save this one more time I'm going to hide my first layer and on this layer here I'm going to do filter blur radial blur pretty much the exact same thing I did before once that's done I'll save as so I'll do blur level two and then I'll open up OG we're still working on the same OG file but this time it has two layers and now I'm going to do image apply image so it's going to be blur LEL blur level two is the source and I want to subtract so I have that you can see it's looks a little bit more fabcy I'm going to keep the scale and offset 1 and 50 press okay so I have this and now I'm going to do file save as subtracted level two great and now I'm going to open up OG one more time and then I'm going to do apply image apply image select subtracted level two because this is my second stack and instead of subtract I'm going to do multiply press okay so I have that on my second layer here so this is the first layer untouched this is my second layer I'm going to do filter camera raw going to increase the exposure just a tiny bit less than before increase the contrast again I'm just increasing all of these a little bit by a little bit and then I'm seeing the details here popping out temperature actually I'm keeping the temperature the same um under effect I'll do a little bit of clarity a little bit of texture under detail I'm going to do a little bit of noise reduction so I see a ton of green here so I think what we can do is we can go to color mixer I think this is just some stacking artifacts I can go to green saturation all the way down all the way down so now we have like zero saturation on the greens there and it's not as important because I'm not going to apply the whole layer so I'll press okay so this is our second layer and now I'm going to set the opacity to like 50% 50% so this is before after we see some stuff there and then what we can do is we can adjust the brightness and the levels a little bit so I'll go to layer I'll create a new adjustment layer because it's easier to uh change later on to manipulate on so I'll do adjustment layer levels let's create a new level Slayer I'm just going to bring the white Point down a little bit so that it's a little bit brighter great we have some stacking artifacts there so I will crop down a tiny bit but make sure the sun is still centered great and we can do here is select the top layer here we can do image adjustments we can do a brightness and contrast adjustments there we can do increase the contrast a little bit increase the brightness a little bit just a tiny bit okay there we go so now we can you know remove the levels layer if we wanted to and then we have our first layer our second layer and our levels layer and I think this looks pretty good uh again if I were to redo this I would make sure I stack it a little bit better so I don't have these artifacts around the prominences uh even being careful with the stacking I it's it's it's it's pretty hard especially with the uh the brighter exposures but you know zooming in you know there are a couple of stars here uh someone pointed out that there's a something here this ended up being thermal noise not any kind of other artifact there there's a star here already said that I think there will start here as well and I think this is good all righty and then I just added my little footer note there and I think this is complete so if you have any thoughts about my double stacking method here I am interested in hearing it I am really like happy with the fabric stuff here I'm I'm going to redo this a separate way uh without the pressures of recording a video and see if I I can get this without the green artifacts there but this is it this is what we have and I'm pretty happy with it and and those of you asking like what if you triple stack it or quadruple stack it will it get better uh I've tried triple stacking it it it gets a little bit harder to to mesh everything in but if you can do it then by all means feel free to do it I would recommend you know creating a different layer and working on that you know save your files make sure you don't override what you have speaking off I will save my file crl s and then we can export this as a PNG and it is ready to be shared so I was able to clean up some of the color fringing by redoing my stack with a little bit better alignment but even then there was still color fringing around the prominences so in order to fix that I kind of cheated a little bit and used the Clone stamp tools to fix that area but I made sure that I stuck around just in that area and it's not something that looks really weird even when you zoom in and I absolutely love just how much the promin to stand out both in color and saturation and as you saw from the video is that I didn't really do any kind of special edits to the prominences themselves I just made sure that that my 1 2000 of a second layer was on the very top and then when I stacked it the stacking process and the blurring process and subtracting process all just kept the prominences where they were and the color differences just made it look a little bit brighter and I absolutely love how it came out so keep the comments and questions coming I'm loving all of them and I'm also working on a video where I want to highlight photos taken by people like you so if you have a photo that you want to showcase in one of my future videos let me know below or join our Discord server and we can you can message me and I can give you some more information uh such as what image you're using how to credit you your social media profile Etc uh we can discuss those details later if you are interested the eclipse was an amazing experience and I am totally ready for the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Naztronomy

Views: 11,613

Keywords: astronomy, astrophotography, nazmus, naztronomy, astronomer, science, space, space pictures, telescope, celestron

Id: iwCxuDQ2Los

Length: 22min 48sec (1368 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024