Hey everyone, Nico here. It's April 25th when I'm
finally sitting down to record this. I had a very successful Eclipse, but right after the eclipse
I had to prepare to both give a presentation and deliver a workshop at an astroimaging conference
that's held every year in New York called NEAIC and that always happens right before NEAF which
is the big astronomy trade show held at Rockland Community College. So this is actually the
first moment I've had to sit down and reflect on the 2024 total solar eclipse and make another
processing tutorial. If you're only interested in the tutorial I did add timestamped chapters
to this video so you can skip ahead, but before I get into processing, I'll briefly talk about
my experience for anyone interested. So my plan was to drive to Texas, but like everyone I was
watching the weather forecasts in the week leading up to the eclipse. And 6 days out, 5 days out, 4
days out, the forecasts were pretty consistently showing that the Northeast where I live was going
to be mostly clear and that Texas was actually going to be a little bit more iffy. So I kept just
delaying the start of my drive. And at the same time I was waiting to see how the weather would
shake out, I got hit with a freak April snowstorm that dumped a few feet of snow and you can see
me shoveling here. I was trying to interpret what this meant from the weather gods... Is this snow
a sign I should get out of New England? or stay in New England? And then to add to that confusion I
lost power and internet because of the heavy snow on branches taking down power lines. It's pretty
common on my road and I don't have cell service at home because I'm in a weird dead zone so a
few days out from the eclipse I'm cut off from the world. I don't know what's going on with the
forecast, but it became increasingly clear to me I guess I'm staying in New England. So I had
been planning to meet up with Sarah Mathews, another Astro YouTuber and we were going to both
meet up in Texas and we'd been collaborating on using smart telescopes for the eclipse so
yeah I was snowed in. The road had been plowed, I had to hike in the snow and to get cell phone
coverage so I could message Sarah and tell her, you know, it looks like I'm going to end up
in New England, what do you want to do? And she decided you know she's going to drive all
the way out because Vermont was looking really good! So Sarah and her husband Jason stayed here
at the house with Maggie and I and then we drove up a couple hours to Northern Vermont for the
eclipse. And where we ended up specifically was a farmer's field in Newport Center, Vermont.
The farmer was this very nice guy named Shea, who was sugaring, making maple syrup while we
were setting up and he brought us out some very fresh maple syrup to keep our energy up and a
number of my local Astro friends joined us so it sort of turned into a small star party. This is
Drone footage from my friend Haythem and it was cool to be on a farm field for the eclipse for a
number of reasons. Two that stuck out to me were: One we could observe the farm animals during
totality and a number of cows were booking it one way right before totality and then went right
back the opposite way right after totality. So I thought that was cool. Another reason that
this snow covered field was nice is that it was perfect, a perfect surface to observe
Shadow bands which are these really fast moving ripples of shadow and light that happen right
before totality starts and right after it ends. Unfortunately the shadow bands were too subtle
to show up in my video here but you can hear us talking about them. [voice]: Yeah right there.
[Solar Eclipse Timer App]: 90 seconds observe for shadow bands. [Voices]: wow look at the snow
wow yeah wow yeah look at the snow without your glasses. [Nico, in studio]: since I'm playing
this video let me actually rewind it a little bit because I want to show you just how dramatic the
light differ shift is in the 30 minutes leading up to totality here's about 30 minutes before
totality and now I'll speed it up and here's totality now I will say the video camera is not
as adaptive as our eyes are to changing light conditions so it didn't look quite like this in
person it was it was more like a Twilight this looks a little darker but it still should give you
an idea of just how crazy this is to experience a 4-minute sunset or 3 minute sunset during the
day um Maggie was telling me she felt like it threw off her internal clock and then when it got
bright again it felt like experiencing morning in the mid-afternoon and I I want to emphasize uh
before I go into the photography details that no photograph or video does the eclipse Justice
it's one of those things that you really have to see in person to understand the Majesty of it
the otherworldliness of it and you know once you do see totality with your own eyes I would be
prepared to be become an eclipse Chaser because it just never gets old I saw the 2017 eclipse from
Tennessee but 2024 was completely different and even better in some ways it was like I wasn't
prepared for how amazing it was even though I'd seen one before okay on to the photography setups
I ended up with five setups taking photos and three setups taking video most of it was automated
was it too much uh you know maybe but I knew that this was going to be my last opportunity in a long
time to drive to an eclipse and take as much gear as I wanted because I was driving because for the
next 20 years every Eclipse I will be able to go to would be one that I'd fly to so I'm going to
be much more limited in what I can bring in the processing tutorial that's going to start in
a moment here we're only going to look at data from the Canon RF 800 f11 lens with a Canon R5 on
a Sky-watcher star Adventurer and with the RF 800 I was more concerned with getting close-ups and
very fine detail on the prominences and Baily's beads which I had more confidence that capture
Eclipse was going to get right with the timings and also because um if you use a Canon camera and
lens with capture Eclipse you could do some cool things with Focus right from the software and that
all worked out perfectly I only ran into two small issues with the rf800 kit neither catastrophic
the first issue was I stupidly put this kit too close to the guideline of the canopy that I was
using and in the mad rush to remove solar filters I of course tripped on the guyline and bumped
the star Adventurer so my shots were slightly off center but luckily it didn't affect focus and
then second with this same kit my brighter Bailey bead shots have a greenish reflection artifact
and I'm not sure if this is because the sun ended up off center in frame because of me bumping
into it or if it's just an unavoidable internal reflection with this particular lens but in any
case I'll show you how to minimize that reflection artifact in processing which we can jump into
right now so I'm starting here in Adobe bridge this is all of my Eclipse 2024 data and with
the Canon 800 my focus was the well I captured everything with it but my focus was the Bailey's
beads prominences so let's find those I can see there's the diamond ring so they should be right
there let's go to film strip mode yep there we go okay so uh the Bailey's beads started out really
promising with this kit you can see there's like a single bead and then if we go to the next
one it looks really good right there's like a there's like four beads right there but then
later on we got this effect this big greenish uh reflection Halo thing not uncommon with many
lens and telescopes and different things Bailey's beads are really hard to capture without some
kind of internal reflection so uh it's not that this is unusual really um but I don't want that
in my final composite of the Bailey's beads so I'm going to do some tricky things here um that's
going to help uh minimize that showing up in the final result the other thing that I'm showing
here is we're going to take this Baily's beads Sequence and make one photo from it um sort of
showing the progression of the Baily's beads this is a very common Eclipse photo these days if you
did capture the Baily's bead sequence but um some of what I'm going to show uh could be helpful
for any kind of eclipse composite that you want to do um I'm not going to show the the basic
Eclipse composite of uh you know totality and the partial phases I'm sure there's something out
there that shows that um but it's pretty simple you would just you know cut out each partial phase
you want put them on a canvas and Photoshop and and you're done so Baily's beads though the way
at least I'm going to do it is going to be a little bit more work it's not needless work I've
gone through this a bunch of different ways uh both with my 2017 data and with this uh data set
and the way that I'm doing it there are reasons I'm doing it this way but I I'm the as the name
suggests this is an advanced tutorial so there's going to be sort of a lot of uh steps and things
that I'm doing here okay with that caveat out of the way let me grab these what is this six files
yes well we might want that one too um we no I guess let's get that one now so it's seven files
cuz the Bailey's bead starts there okay so I'm going to grab these seven files just I'm going to
I to do that I just clicked on the first one and then shift clicked on the last one and then I'm
going to right click and say open in camera raw to open all seven at once and the first thing that I
want to do is I want to get the beads without this green reflection and I also want to underexpose
them because even at a fast shutter speed it's it's easy to overexpose the beads a little bit
so I'm going to turn down the exposure quite a bit something like that um so just to show you
before after so just doing that uh you know really kills the reflection uh but then it also of course
killed our prominences but we'll bring those back in uh separately so I turned down the exposure
I'm going to edit the color temperature and the saturation to taste um part of what's guiding
me here is I have this ground truth of this video that I took with the sear so I'm I'm sort
of editing uh with that uh look in mind um and because I really liked how that looked you can
of course edit this however you want but at this point again I'm just focusing on the appearance
of the beads so whenever I do something with one of these photos I'm going to want to do it with
all of the others and the way to do that here in camera raw is I've edited this one I can now
shift click to select them all and then click this little uh button right here let me zoom in on that
so you can see it a little better it's this little button right here here and it has like a little
recycle symbol with the sliders that's telling you you're going to apply the settings from the one
you just edited to all the rest so I'm just going to click on that and click okay and then each one
of these now has that same change to the settings the lower exposure the change to the white balance
and the change to saturation right okay so this is exactly what I want to see just the change
in the beads right and I'm not caring at this point what is happening with the prominences or
the corona or anything else I'm just looking at what's going on with the beads and by lowering
the exposure changing the temperature this looks um just how I want with as much detail as
possible in the beads and showing their changing appearance okay so that's done what do I do now
so now what I want to do actually is save these changes uh into the raw files you can't do that
exactly what Adobe does is it actually makes uh what sidecar files called the XMP files but that's
fine so I'm just going to go ahead and click done and now if I go to finder you can see it's created these. XMP files
with these six uh or seven files that I opened out of bridge so now what I can do is I can go to uh
Photoshop here go up to the file menu go down to scripts and then go to load files into stack and
where it says browse I'll click that I'll find those six files they're easy to find in my file
list here because of the XMP files I'll select those seven files click open they load as the into
this list right here as the source files I'm going to make sure that attemp to automatically align
and create smart object are both turned off and then click okay all right great so now I have all
uh six Bailey beads shots as layers here in one Photoshop document and I'll just go ahead and save
this I'll save it as beads. PSD save okay next what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back here
to finder I have these seven files still selected I'm going to doubleclick to open them back up into
camera raw and I'm just going to reset everything so I'm going to go back to white balance as shot
and I'll just zero out these other two settings that I changed so this is back to normal and then
I'll just apply that to everything okay then what I'm going to do next is I want to focus in on the
uh prominences and so I'm going to Zoom way in here I'm going to go into 200% and the two things
that I want to do with the prominences since this is going to end up being a fairly um zoomed out
shot with many different pictures composited is just make them as prominent as possible so I'm
going to increase saturation I'm going to increase Clarity and I'm going to bring down exposure a
little bit bit until it hits a nice balance with these I think that looks good oh I had them
all selected so I was changing that uh to all of them at once but if you didn't have them all
selected you could just click one shift click to select them all like this and then just do this
again just click that little synchronize button and it synchronizes the settings on all of them so
now we're going to do the same thing we did before we're going to click done go to file scripts load
files into stack browse select the files open okay and it opens all seven into a new
Photoshop document all right done so now I'm going to save this Photoshop document
as proms Pro short for prominences now we're going to do that one more time I know
it's a lot of work okay so I'm going to go back to my finder open up that those same
seven files one more time once again reset everything okay and this time I want to focus
on the everything else but basically the corona the the interconnecting uh sort of glow you know
material here that's uh going to sort of connect everything back together and I want to slightly
overexpose this um we can always the nice thing about I mean I don't want to go that far but the
nice thing about slightly overexposing it is um I can always sort of tame it back down once we get
into the composite um but if you're underexposing it and then you try to bring it it up uh later
outside of adobe camera raw that's not going to look as good so I'm just going to bring it up
a little bit um Beyond where I had it so I think 0.8 and I'm going to leave all the other settings
alone and then I'll just apply this to everything and you can see as we get into the Bailey's
beads that Corona is sort of Disappearing um cuz we're moving the Moon is moving off the Sun
this is at C3 okay after playing around with it I decided I wanted this actually at 1.5 and then
I'm going to click done and just load these into a stack and save that okay so now we've saved off
three stacks of different aspects that I want to preserve in this final composite this first one
is how I want the Bailey's beads to look this second one is how I want the prominences to to
look and the third one is how I want the corona to look so we're now going to try to combine all
of this data 21 different um images in a sense 21 different layers into one final composite of
the Bailey's beads sequence so the first step in that is I want to group like pictures and we can
just use the file names to do this so basically I'm just going to hit uh edit copy or it would
be command C on Mac contrl C on windows with this top layer uh 79 and then I'm going to go to
the beads uh stack and go to paste special paste in place which would be command shift V on Mac or
control shift V on Windows and so now I have if I zoom in on this you can see I have two copies of
this uh same file but edited differently because this one is for the beads and this one is for the
proms okay and then I'll do that again with the corona so command C command shift V okay and
now I have three copies of that same file we want to do this for for each uh of these seven
layers so we're going to we're we're going to expand our layer stack from 7 to 21 because
there's going to be three copies of each um photo but processed differently and then uh once
you have all of that in what I want you to do is Select each grouping of three and group them
and you can rightclick and choose uh group from layers from the rightclick menu or you can press
command G for group on Mac or Control G on Windows and then I'll just uh give each group a name so
uh this first one I'll say bb0 because that was actually this is actually before the Bailey's
bead starts and then I'll go down to this next one and I'm going to do the ex exact same
thing for this next file down paste in place go to the corona shot command C command shift
V to paste in place and I'll go over here to the layers panel and just like before I'm going
to click and shift click to select all three of the same file names and then press command G or
Control G on Windows and I'll rename this group bb1 okay I'm going to speed up this uh part of the
video now uh but I'm now going to just repeat that exact same process for each thing until I have all
of these different photos that I've created into one Photoshop document it's going to get a bit
insane in terms of a single Photoshop document we're probably going to have to save it as a
large document format um and it'll be several gigabytes uh in size but that's just how it goes
with this kind of processing okay so I'm going to speed up this part as I just get everything in
here okay I've now organized everything into these seven groups each group contains three images in
the order of uh Corona Proms and then beads okay so I'm going to go ahead and save this as a new
file so go file save as and as I mentioned this time instead of the format being Photoshop I mean
it saves it as a large document format because I'm sure it's going to be over for gigabytes and
I'm not sure but probably and I'll just call this beads composite and this will be our main working
file as we come back to this image okay that took a while to save but I think it's important
once you get to this step of having all the data loaded in to go ahead and save so then if you
mess anything up in the processing you can just go back to at least uh this stage in it uh okay so
the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate the entire image because this was on the
star Adventurer and I didn't have any ability to rotate the camera sensor um and so I want this
to look more how I saw it with my eyes and uh from Vermont this big triangular prominence was
actually down here where this one is um if you're you know if you're imagining looking at it with
your eyes uh from the earth so I'm going to rotate everything so it looks like that so I'll just go
to image image rotation arbitrary and I'm going to do 90° counterclockwise is going to take a while
okay that looks more how it uh looked uh when I was actually looking at it and then the next thing
I'm going to do is I'm going to expand this canvas a little bit uh I'm going to expand it in this
direction I think so I think I want my composite to go in a diagonal like this I've done straight
up and down and this is already sort of set up to do that so we could just do the composite
straight up and down I think it looks pretty cool I'll I'll drop in an image here of what it
looked like in 2017 but just to do something a little bit different I'm going to go in a diagonal
in a square I think so I'm going to expand the canvas I'll go to image canvas size and I want
to expand it in this direction instead of doing relative I'm going to do absolute and I'm just
going to expand the WID width to the same as the height okay recenter that okay so now we have this
extra room to make our uh composite in but you can see this is uh transparent um so I'm going to go
ahead and make a new layer you can just click the new layer button down here next to the trash can
and I'll fill that layer with black there is a keyboard shortcut but instead of telling you yet
another keyword shortcut I'll just go ahead and go to edit fill and fill with black that way okay
and so this is now a black layer you can see it covered up our images because it's on top but I'm
going to this is actually a useful layer I'm just going to call it black um and I'll be moving this
around so for now I'm going to move it right under bb0 so here's my group of three images bb0
and then I have my black layer right below that all right and then depending on uh how
patient you are you might save again at this point but uh I don't know how often I'm going to
remember to remind you to save but when you're working with a document this huge with this many
full-size layers I will warn you every time you save it it does take a while even if you're using
fast storage and a fast computer like I am okay I'm going to close these other two documents so
now we just have beads composite and we're ready to start working with the layers so I'm going to
start with this top group here bb0 this is right before Third Contact sort of the final shot
of just the Corona and I'm going to start at the bottom with uh just the beads I'll zoom in
pressing command plus I guess this isn't quite the beads yet but you can see that uh the moon
at this stage doesn't completely cover up uh this little edge of the Sun so you're seeing like
a little tiny glimmer of of sun there and that's what I want to select so uh what basically doing
now is just selecting the parts that we want to show from each of these layers so I'm going to
go select by color range and I'm just going to select this just this little sliver
of white here okay and if you change the selection preview to gray scale you can
see the selection that's can be useful just to see how much it's picking up and I'm just
holding down shift and clicking to add more samples to the selection I'll check gray scale
again okay that looks good I'm going to hit okay you can see it makes a selection outline
around there I'm then going to expand it slightly and feather it I'm going to go select modify
expand by two pixels and select modify Feather by one pixel all right and then I'm going to click
the add a layer mask button so if you look down here in the layers panel at the bottom it's this
third button over from the left if you hover it over it it tells you what it is as soon as you
click it it takes your selection and turns it into a layer mask so you can see now all that
we have showing is that little thin bead of sunlight all right and you can see now this has
this mask right okay and then we're just going to continue with that same process but this time
with the prominences layer so I just turned the visibility of that on over here on the right and
then I'm going to go select by color range and I'm going to start uh clicking and shift clicking I'm
now holding down shift and I'm just clicking all over the prominence here to add more and more
samples so that it selects all of this stuff here okay and you can always check
it hit by going selection preview grayscale just to see what it's selected
it looked good to me I'm going to hit okay and this time I'm going to go select
modify expand I'm going to expand a little bit more I'll do three pixels this
time and I'll Feather by two pixels okay and then I'll make the layer mask and
before I make it let me just point out I know that there's this tendril right here uh that
we do want to keep um but don't worry about it CU it's going to be included in the next uh one
uh so don't worry that that's not included here okay so now if I zoom back out this is what we
have so far just the beads and the prominences and but next we're going to get all of this
stuff and you might be wondering why do it this way why not just accept this as the layer
itself well you can see because we wanted to bring out the uh Corona the prominences and
the beads get completely blown out so it's about doing this kind of HDR compositing I
know that there are other ways of doing this but this is just a very manual way that gives
you a lot of uh control over the final product okay so now I'm going to do it on this layer
so I'm going to click on this layer select by color range click all over the corona
turn down fuzziness a little bit here let's check it looks pretty good you can see that
little tendril is included here I clicked on it okay and I'll go ahead and modify expand
I'm just going to expand by two pixels and then I'll select modify and I'm going to Feather
by five pixels the final step here is a little bit of manual cleanup where we have these dark
edges so I'm just going to grab my paintbrush I'm going to turn the opacity down to something
like 70% I want the hardness set at zero% and I want to paint in white um because we want to bring
back some of this Corona where it's missing okay so then I can just go back in here and bring
some of that back in where we have those dark edges you can vary the size of
the paintbrush with your bracket keys and you can switch between
white and black with uh the X key and basically uh you want it you want the
foreground color to be white wherever you're adding back in the corona where it's missing and
you want it and you would want to use black as the foreground color wherever you want to uh
remove Corona if you maybe overshoot a little bit okay I'm just going to take a look here and
I'll Zoom back out and take a look and yes I think that looks good this looks very close
to how it looked in my eye with that uh huge prominence being you know the most visible Okay
so we've hdred this first layer we now want to that with each group and then let me show
you something interesting here which is if I close back up this group and I hold down the
ALT key on my keyboard and click this eyeball that makes it so only this group is visible
and what we've just done is we now have just the edge effects of all of this and we we need
to do that for each group to make this composite work um so it's a lot of work uh but in the
end we'll have something pretty cool let me go ahead and turn back on all the visibilities
so what I'll do next is I'll turn off this no I'll leave it on for now I'll move this black
layer down under BB one Bailey's beads one and I'll start working on that layer but to work
on it I'm going to have to move it out from underneath this layer so let me click on
that layer grab my move tool which is at the top of the toolbar or you can press v as in
Victory and I'm just going to grab and move it out like this you know what I'm already realizing I'm going to undo that I want the
uh the diagonal to go uh from left to right because all of these interesting prominen are on
this side now so um let me go ahead and just crop off like this and I'll go down here I just
use the crop tool just to change where our square is cu I I realized I want to
make the composite going this way and I'll fill back in our black layer with black
just edit fill black there we go and now we're ready to go okay so I'm now going to move this uh
bb1 layer diagonally like that and uh while you're moving it you'll see that these little percentages
come up on screen so it says I've moved it to the right 4.6% and down 6.1 so it would be a good idea
to write those down remember them I'll go ahead and do that can always change your mind later
but let's say I wanted to do each one in that same way so they're equally spaced I could use
that to do it but of course you'd have to double those uh each time because you're going twice as
far so next time instead of uh 6.1 down it would be 12.2 and so forth we'll see if that works if
not we'll we'll devise something else but let's go ahead and go on to bb1 here and do the sort of
same kind of treatment of HD ifying this so I'll show this whole process one more time but then
probably for subsequent layers I'll just uh fast forward because it's the same each time you select
by color range uh for the beads I'm going to select modify expand that by two pixels select
modify feather RIP by one add a layer mask turn back on the next layer which is the prominences
for this go ahead and select those by color range okay okay and then for this next
one I'll turn it on this is the Corona for this layer I'm going to want to turn off
this top group bb0 so that we're just seeing this and then I'll do the same thing select
by color range add a bunch of points in the corona okay and I'm going to select modify
expand by by six and select modify Feather by four add the layer mask okay just to so
we don't confuse ourselves I'm going to turn off all of the other groups so we're
just having bb0 and bb1 there we go okay and then I'm just going to sort of
try to match uh what I did up here here with down here with the manual cleanup
and remember this is just take your brush opacity at around 70 to 80% soft brush
set to White and then you're just going to bring back in some of this Corona where it's
interacting with the uh edges of the prominences okay so we're at this is where we are so far
um it I should mention you know this has this sort of seethrough effect composite this is one
actually way you could go with this um there's lots of different options here uh this is really
just a creative exercise to how to present the sequence um I think I usually like to fill in this
first one so I could fill it in with real data of course I can go back here to uh this layer and
just fill back in with real data by painting this part of the Moon white so on the mask of course
so I'm just going to turn my opacity back to 100% And I mean filling with real data means
basically Al just making it black again but it is nice to know I'm not just painting in Black
I'm actually using what was actually captured there okay so let me Zoom back out and see what I
think yeah I think this is going to work um just trying to I'm just trying to judge if I like that
spacing or if I want something different I guess let's keep going and then I'll I'll decide uh a
little bit later on okay now I'm going to move BB Two Out From Below these two top layers I'm going
to click on it and when I start moving it here it is we want to go 12.2 down and 9.2 to the right where did I get those
numbers I doubled the last two numbers we used there we go and that does look right let me Zoom
back out see if I like how this is looking yes I do only thing I'm not quite happy with is uh
the appearance of the corona looks a little bit uh artificial so I might try to feather
that a bit more but uh that's fine we can work on that as we go all right now we're
ready to hdfy BB2 same way we did the first two in this case this reflection uh artifact
is intermingled with the corona um I do have all of this on its own layer so on this side
of the moon I can just U Paint It Black to get rid of the reflection artifact but on
this side I can't do that so what I'm going to do instead is I'm first going to add
that curves adjustment see how much this helps okay so that helps a little bit but
then I'm going to have to do something with this color CU I don't want to leave that
in so I'm going to very carefully select it and I'll feather that selection and then I'll add a saturation adjustment layer clip
it to there and I'm going to desaturate the green and see how that looks yes I
think that looks pretty natural so then let me turn back on the
other ones and see how this gels yeah I'm liking how it's looking so we go on okay so that was uh more hours I thought it
was going to be I actually had to take a dinner break cuz it was so intensive but I've put in all
seven groups now and uh now we're on to sort of final cleanup it's you know 96% there but the we
we need a few little touches just to make sure it all looks great and part of that cleanup
is you know when I'm just doing this sort of General um masking uh there's little mistakes
so for instance if you look at the prominences here they're all saturated if you look at the ones
here you can see um my desaturation mask to get rid of the optical artifact has extended there and
so I need to go in and find that mask here it is the saturation mask and then just go in and paint
in Black uh to bring back the saturation here so little cleanup like this um will will
be a definite thing you want to do so go ahead and just you know examine your whole uh
composition that way looking for any problems with the [Music] mask then the next thing is if
you look at how um these are overlapped there's certain places where I think it would look
[Music] better if the ring um from the last one continued a little bit uh more elegantly
into the the next copy so for instance you know right there that looks sort of unnatural I know
that this is a completely unnatural composite to begin with but just trying to make everything
look sort of seamless uh is is the goal here and so uh the way you can deal with this stuff now
is you can actually just um go in find the the layer that it would be so uh this would be the
second to last layer right yeah second to last layer and actually on the entire layer group
you can add a layer mask and then uh grab your brush I'm going to make it 100% hard now and I
would want to paint in Black over this little part that I noticed okay so here's before if
I disable the later mask you can see there's just a little black thing there and then if I
enable it it fills it in a little bit I'll leave it up to you if you want to go to this level
of uh OCD on this kind of thing um there's some more uh kind of things where I just think
it would look a little bit better if uh if we deleted some of those so I'm just going to go
in and try to get knock these out let's see I'll give myself 20 20 30 minutes see if I can knock
them all out uh rather quickly and uh all right on once you know which one you're which layer
you're supposed to be working on it actually goes uh pretty quickly but it's very easy let
me show you what I just did it's very easy if you're not paying attention to what you're doing
to do that that's what you don't want to do right so the the point of this is a is just a very
subtle touch up to have the the more have it be more seamless between the layers you don't want
to accidentally delete any uh data while doing this okay so I think I actually
did it in like 15 minutes not bad so that's it um basically uh
the last step here is just a crop um so I'm just going to grab my crop
tool let's see if Square still looks good I think it does but I'm it's bothering me
that there's like a little bit more space on this side than there is down here um
so I'm going to try a crop and rotation okay I think we're almost there I'm going to get a little bit obsessive about
this I mean we've already put hours into it so why not I'm going to try to
get exactly the same spacing everywhere okay I think that looks good okay so there's
our final result hopefully it was worth it if you stuck with me through this and if you
did stick with me all the way to the end I think you'd actually be the perfect match
for my patreon you're seeing the names of my patreon members now on screen the nebula
photos patreon is a crowdfunding mechanism it's a way to support my work here on YouTube
but it's also grown to be a Vibrant Community of over a thousand dedicated astrophotographers
and there are many perks for signing up you'll get a monthly Community Zoom call occasional
exclusive videos direct messaging support with me a monthly Imaging challenge organized on my
Discord server and that's only open to patreon members and all of these things I just mentioned
I'll start at just $1 a month and then there are additional perks at higher tiers for in at
$7 a month you can watch all new videos add free on patreon at $25 a month you I'll send
you a signed print of my work if you'd like and so if you're interested in any of this
you can go check it all out on patreon.com nebula photos and I appreciate any support you
can give I do this fulltime now and patreon is my primary source of income so thank you to
all existing patreon members I really really appreciate each and every one of you. Till next
time. This has been Nico Carver. Clear skies!
