I see the bad moon rising...

[ffutures]

Actually quite a nice one. Last night there was a full Moon in a sky that for once looked absolutely clear, so I thought I'd have another bash at some Moon photos with the D50 and 500mm F8 mirror lens. To minimise shake I used 1/500th second and adjusted the brightness afterwards. Apart from that I've applied a little sharpening and cropped the image, but haven't otherwise mucked it about. This is about the best of a half-dozen pictures, but there was very little in it. Annoyingly, just as I was going to bed some clouds drifted across the sky and framed the Moon beautifully, but by the time I got downstairs and got the camera the Moon was actually covered. So it goes.

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Was it really that colour?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The yellow seems to be a problem with the way the Nikon (or the image processing software) handles low light levels; I didn't want to mess about with the colour beyond brightening it, but it should be much closer to white.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I've seen low harvest moons a few times that were close to that colour. But never quite with that... sinister hue.

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

Possible atmospheric haze and/or white balance issue?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm really not sure - it didn't look that yellow to me; I was using a fast shutter speed to minimise shake, which means that colour saturation would normally be a little low. I think that in boosting the brightness I've got the colour balance a little wrong.

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

Ahh... I've just taken it apart in Photoshop and I see what's up now - think you're right about the brightness boost having odd effects. If you look at the colour channel histograms separately, the red channel is clipping in the highlights. That would be one cause of colour casts. The other is a really weak blue channel - perhaps a result of the low initial exposure? - scaling the blue up with levels and then curves seems the easiest way to make a difference.

I tried to bring it further towards a more neutral colour, but the red clipping made it hard to avoid magenta haloes around the brighest spots - you'd probably have more luck on the original. (The only way I found of controlling the red clipping was to wallop any unduly magenta bits with the Sponge brush set to a mild desaturate, which did quite nicely at making the red levels curve off towards the top rather than clipping solid, but it's hard to do evenly).

Can you not bump up the ISO in-camera rather than scaling up your exposure in postprocessing? I doubt it will be any more noisy (and the only obnoxious noise is colour noise, which is easily squashed) and it might be easier to get the colour right.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's probably possible - I'm still not as expert as I should be with the camera settings.

[w00hoo.livejournal.com]

I'd assumed the colour was one of the reasons you took the picture as I was out on the road last night heading Easy from Henley and the moon looked pretty close to that colour (and very low in the sky) to me.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately not - see other posts, it's a little complicated.