How to Stack Moon Photography

hi everybody and welcome back to another esther exploring video in this video i'm going to be doing a tutorial of how I stack and process my moon photography welcome to my laptop this is the file of all of my Moon photos that I took of the full moon a couple of weeks ago if you've seen the video of how I captured those images and this is a follow on to show you how I actually came to the the final image that you saw at the end of that video and if you haven't seen that video I will put a link to that video in the description so this is a single exposure of the moon and the reason that it looks pink is because I used my astro modified camera so the red channel is overexposed so we can we can very quickly get rid of that in Photoshop so that is not a problem so this is the quality of image that we are starting with and by the end of this video we will have something that looks more like this that's roughly where we're hoping to end up by the end of this video but this is where we're starting so it's a single exposure so the first thing that we are going to do is we are going to open up the program that I just closed we're gonna open up pip now I've got all I've got a full guide on my website Astro exploring comm of this of this whole process so pip pip stands for planetary imaging preprocessor and it is essentially a way to stack planet images and moon images deep sky stacker clues in the name can only do deep sky objects so we use pip to stack any sort of planetary imaging so what PIP is gonna do is it's going to take our raw moon photos and it's going to convert them to TIFF files and we're also going to select a different size of the image so it's going to crop it down for us so that we're dealing with a smaller image later so there's a couple of ways you can do this you can add image files here or if you're already in the folder like I am you can just drag and drop them into straight into pip like that and we can hit OK on there okay so now that we've got our images in pip the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to click solar lunar full disk and then we are going to go to the processing options tab and this tick box here that says convert color to monochrome we are going to uncheck that basically essentially what that is gonna do is it's going to leave the RGB channels for us so that when we are in Photoshop later we're actually dealing with a full commit a color image rather than a black and white image so it just makes it a bit easier to process the moon does actually have some really nice colors to it so it is better to work with a full color image than just a black and white just gives you a lot more options when you're trying to process your your image later so make sure we unselect the second thing that we are going to do on this page is we're gonna go over here and ensure that the cropping box is ticked and I've got mine set to 1200 by 1200 you could set it to to whatever you like I shot this image with my Sky Watcher 72 edy that has a focal length of 420 ml so cropping it 1200 by 1200 works really well for me the next thing that we are going to do is we are going to go over to the quality options tab and we're gonna tick only keep the best quality frames so what what pip will do when it's doing its processing is it will actually give each image a school as it processes it and it will dump all of those images into a subfolder and it will have in the file name it will have a percentage against each image and it will it will it will rank them so the first image that's in that folder will be your best image and then it will gradually the quality of the images will get worse as it goes down to the bottom so you're looking at some anything sort of over anything over 85% say I would say it's absolutely fine but if you've got a whole load of images that are all in the 90s then that that's fantastic the way up the way that I choose to do this there's one of two ways you can choose to select so I've got 293 frames you could select to keep the best say 250 and that will obviously get rid of 43 images the way that I do it is that I actually keep all the images and when we go into our stacking software auto stuck at a later I will actually only choose to stack the best sort of 90 or 95 percent of these images so you can you can choose whether or not you want to process them all or not I always do someone is going to leave that at 1200 and keep that one ticked output options you want to ensure that you are outputting as TIF files and you want to ensure that the create subdirectory is ticked and you can give this whatever name you like I just leave it as the as the standard pip the next thing that we are going to do is we are going to go on do processing and we are then going to start processing and there's 293 frames this will take maybe five minutes to run it doesn't take doesn't take very long at all so I'll pause the video here and we'll join back up once this has finished ok so pip has finished processing all of the images now so if I open output folder so what's that what that's done as is its created a supporter within the original folder of all our RAW files which are here so here's just a floor the front pip and here is all of the images and you can see that it has ranked them in terms of quality so each file name has a percentage at the end of it so I get down to 84 point three so that's not too bad so what we are now going to do is we are going to take all of these TIFF files that have been processed and cropped and we are going to put them into Auto Stuckart and again there's two ways to do this you can click on open here browse to your folder or you can just control a and drag them over okay so this is one of the TIF files that it's dragged in and it opens this in it in a second window within auto snacker we don't need to really do anything in here what this software is going to do is it is purely going to stack our moon images and it does that really quickly only takes a minute or so but the first thing that we need to do is we need to come over to this window where where our photo is and we need to click on place a P grid and what that is going to do is it's going to create loads of little squares and reference points on the moon and it's going to use those reference points to stack each image and align them so that you end up with a really clean crisp image and not one with a moon sort of going all over the place so the smaller the grid the more CPU intensive this process is going to be and the longer it's going to take if you don't have enough of these squares then you'll end up with a lower quality stack essentially so what I have found is that about a hundred seems to be okay I can I've got a fairly decent laptop so I can I can go lower I and I will get lower on this but about about 100 seems fine if your if your squares look about the same sort of size as this then that will be absolutely fine I'm just gonna take my down to about eighty a hit place a P a grid again and you can see that that they are now smaller and from there the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to go back to our original window where we dropped the image files into I'm going to move over here to the right hand side now frame percentage to stack I'm fairly happy with all of the images that I've taken so I'm gonna stack at the top ninety-five percent now if we go back to what we did in pip if you only process the best quality images then it might be that when you come over to this software that you might just want to stack every single one of those images because you've already filtered out once all quite as good of quality all to ensure that you really do only have the best images you can still choose to stack's a ninety ninety-five percent of them but for the purposes of this tutorial we're gonna choose ninety-five percent and then we just click on stack but it's gonna run its process and it's only gonna take about a minute so we'll catch back up again once this is finished so that has finished stacking the images now and that only it didn't take about a minute to to complete that now what this does is it outputs one single stacked image much like deep science deep sky stacker wood for your deep sky rivet ography and it puts that into a new folder within your pip sub folder so in here is our stacked image okay so all we are gonna do now is we're going to take that stacked image and we're going to drag that into Photoshop so I use Photoshop for all of my image processing you don't need to use Photoshop you do have to pay for that so you could use any any freeware like that will work equally well I'm just for the purposes of this video I'm gonna be using Photoshop and it doesn't really matter what software using because they'll all essentially do the song the same thing it's just the the layout and the look and feel of it will be will be different okay so we've got our image into into Photoshop so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust the levels and you will see that that then gets rid of the red effects on the moon so I'm gonna do that by adjusting each Channel step by step and you'll see that the movement is gonna go funky colors so for those not familiar with Photoshop so all of this black here is your data on the tone each channel so this is the red channels all of this black data here is the data or and the rest of this there is no data at here at all so I'm not actually losing any data by by moving these sliders so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move these sliders up to where the data starts and you'll see once I've done the blue level that this will go to a normal color there we go that looks a bit more like the moon now doesn't it now I do want to point out that I'm not a Photoshop expert this is just how I produced my final image that you saw in my previous video there are loads of people out there who are experts on Photoshop so this is just how I produce my final image and to be honest image processing is all down to your personal preferences anyway so I'm gonna process this how I like to see my final image which might be completely different time you like to see your final image and that's okay it doesn't it doesn't matter how you know it's your image so however you want it to look is how you want it to look so after we've done the levels the next thing I'm gonna do is a curves adjustment and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold down control and I'm gonna click on a dark part of the moon and still hold in control I'm gonna click on a lighter part of the moon and you can see that that's plotted two places on the on the graph so the left-hand side is your black point and the white hand side is your right point so I want to make the dark parts darker just for a higher contrast so I'm gonna take that and move that down as I move it down you can see the a contrast coat and I might be slightly too aggressive about the minutes and then I can move the light points up so there now I think that will that's probably a bit too much but we'll we can we can always change it change it again later once we've done that we can change the brightness and contrast I like to take the brightness down to about minus 10 just to make that a little bit darker because a full moon is so bright and the contrast that said doubts about minus 15 you can see that was only a subtle difference but it has made quite quite a difference and the next thing that I am going to do is I'm going to go to filter sharpen unsharp mask now did you see the difference that that means already as soon as I as soon as I did that so if I cancel that you can see it change back to a slightly more blurry picture if you're like so filter sharpen unsharp mask you can see the difference that has made so the default for a Photoshop seems to be about 200% now you can whack up all the way to 500% if you like which is what I did for my previous image that's what I'm gonna do again I like how that looks you may look at that and think that looks horrific but I like how that looks on us that's fine so I'm gonna go ahead and hit OK there and then going to go to image adjustments shadows and highlights and you can see again it gives you some some defaults so if I take that back down to where it was I quite liked it maybe at about 10 that's bring some highlights of slightly maybe to 5 see how that looks yeah so I quite like that and you can play around with this for hours I mean not this has only taken 5 minutes you can you can play around with this for hours which on a on a rainy Friday Saturday Sunday which we seem to have this week this is great and again I'm just going to do another curves adjustment just to see if that looks makes it look any better or any worse these only need to be slight adjustments that's way too much I don't like that but you can see if I drag that all the way down you can see how how much of a difference it takes I'm gonna leave that I'm gonna leave that there so that was a really basic and I've I think I've taken that too far to be honest but that is a really basic tutorial of how I got to my final image from before and apart from the color being slightly different I think that's a pretty similar image to how we got there before so you can follow that process on my website as I've said that it's Astro exploring dot-com there are all sorts of other things that you can do with this image but I just wanted to do a very basic tutorial the other things that you can do is to get to get a true color moon image what you'll what you'll need to do is you'll need to adjust your hue and saturation by creating quite a lot of layers underneath this and making small adjustments at a time and then flatten all those layers down into one layer and adjusting that back onto the top of this image with there's a luminance layer that's probably way too advanced for this this is just a really simple tutorial or I might do another video on how to do that so leave a comment below if you'd like to see me do a video of how to do a color moon tutorial because believe it or not the moon does have some really beautiful colors that I have not done justice in this image at all and with that if you like this video give it a thumbs up make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit the bell notifications so that you never miss another another upload my name is Nick and this is vanastra exploring thanks for watching

Channel: AstroExploring

Views: 68,610

Keywords: moon photography stacking, moon photography editing, how to stack moon photography, how to stack moon photos, how to edit moon photos, editing moon photography, pipp tutorial, pipp tutorial moon, autostakkert tutorial, autostakkert tutorial moon, autostakkert 3 tutorial, as!3 tutorial, how to, tutorial, astrophotography, astroexploring, moon editing photoshop, photoshop tutorial, full moon image editing, processing moon, processing moon images, post processing moon photos

Id: HuONUWoIVeM

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020