My subjects often include extremes of light / dark. In this photo, I think I nailed the ETTR capture technique, so this was a fun file to play with. RAW and DT noob, so I’d appreciate feedback. Let’s see what you can do…
my edit (DT4)
I used multiple instances of Tone Equalizer to pull the extremes towards middle gray and to enhance detail. The white balance is a little off and the moon glow has a brownish cast to my eye. I struggle with denoising, in general, so I didn’t even try.
Hi, I know your original post is requesting editing suggestions, but I downloaded your image, opened it in DT and took a look at the camera settings. I am surprised how much detail your camera has captured because you have in my honest opinion over exposed the moon a lot. The moon is at least as bright as the earth is in daytime. You have used 200, ISO F11 and 1/8th of a second. You wouldn’t do this for a sunlight landscape on earth so you shouldn’t do it when photographing the moon. Here is my suggestion to take shots like this. Use a low ISO to minimise noise (which you have done). Use a shutter speed like 1/125th and bracket your use of aperture to try maybe from f8 to f22 to see which captures the most detail of the moon. BTW, the histogram will be near useless for a shot like this. Good luck and well done recovering the details of the moon the way you did.
I actually shot many with different settings to try to get one usable one . One of my other shots was closer to the settings you suggested. As-opened, the moon wasn’t very bright (look at the histogram below).
The one I picked for the original post had the highest exposure without having the raw over-exposed. I read a little about ETTR exposure, but haven’t tried it on many shots. By dumb luck, it worked because there was enough light to pull detail out of the sky / background.
I would edit this image over the other image. Filmic would do a great job with it. You would probably have to tweak the sliders yourself as filmic may make the moon too white. ETTR can be a contentious issue with some people on this forum. I generally like the idea but I would ignore the histogram for astrophotography. Others may express a different opinion here and I would be interested in anyone’s view of how to use the histogram in a useful manner for this sort of shot.
. One of my other shots was closer to the settings you suggested. As-opened, the moon wasn’t very bright (look at the histogram below).
