Photography: How to take a WOW photo of the Moon

1. Introduction: Hello everyone. In this video we will talk about this photo from a T-cell. I will show you all the steps, how to take the camera settings, the editing part, everything you need to know how to take a photo like this, but also you can download older raw files and follows the steps. In this way, you will learn much quicker. I have another couple of courses already. All of them has the same structure. We go through. All the steps, all the stages you need to know to take death kind of photo, all the techniques you will learn can be applied on other images. Of course, it's not just moon photography, so it will be super useful for you in the future. See you in the next video. 2. What Gear Do You Need?: First of all, you will need a camera and it coming or will do, but keep in mind, you will need to use higher ISO so it needs to handle it. Then it will need a long lens, let's say 600 millimeters on full frame or even higher than last but not least, you will need a really steady trifle. There is no chance you can take it and held. And of course you will need the moon, this course and the software. I will use Photoshop. 3. Camera settings: Settings, which is relatively easy and quick topic. This is the end result. This is not a single image. It made out of 11 photos. Ten of them was taken of the Dark Side of the Moon and one of them is of the bright side. You can download all the images. But first, I open Photoshop, they are our raw images. You can download everything and follow all the steps here in this way, you will learn much, much quicker and much more. I guess. We're just download everything and highlight them, bringing them into Photoshop. Let's start with the bright side. On the top right corner you can see the settings I used. So I use ISO 200, which is the lowest native ISO I can use on my camera around 300 millimeters and bear in mind I have Olympus camera, which has really tiny sensor. So the equivalent of 300 millimeter on a full frame, these about 600 millimeters. So I suggest you to use at least a 600 millimeter focal length or more if you have. And I used a relatively high aperture, 6.7. Again, I have a smaller sensor camera. I have a bigger depth of field. So probably if you have a full frame or APS-C sensor, may be, you should use a higher number of these. Just experienced it, take a few photos of it on F8, F11, F16. Just make sure everything is in focus on the bright side of the moon. It, it really, really easy. As you can see, I have a one to 100 of the shutter speed, which is really, really high. The moon is moving, the Earth is rotating. So actually we need to be careful with the shutter speed here, but on the bright side, even in the middle of the night, you will have enough light to take. Take a nice and detailed photo of the bright side of the moon. It shouldn't be a problem. It's really different on the Amaris other images on Dark Side of the Moon. As you can see, I changed the exposure and I took to cover image where the dark side has some details. I turn off this so as you can see, the bright side blown out. The settings are, I assume 10000250. So I had to raise the ISO as I wanted to relatively sharp image of The Dark Side of the Moon. So I couldn't use it really, really long shutter speed because the moon is moving, the Earth is rotating, so we cannot use really long shutter speed. The focal length is the same, 300 millimeter and the aperture is the same, 6.7. But our shutter speed is 0, almost, almost a second long, which is a little bit long. If you have a better camera, better, much better with higher ISO, I suggest you to use a much quicker shutter speed and a higher ISO. But with this small sensor and this cheap lens I used, I decided to use this 0.8 seconds long shutter speed. And the, of course I took different online. For example, this one is only 0.6 seconds, so I took different images. And you can experience with this, It's not a big science and I still took rocket science when you go to your settings, if you need to do is take, take a series of images. So just size it. As you can see, when I got my final settings, I took ten images after each other. And as you can see, the moon was moving all the time. So between images, there, some time passed. And as you can see, the moon is always on a different position because I didn't move the tripod at all. I just took an image after image after image after image, and I did it ten times. 4. Preparing our files in camera raw: Hey everyone, In this video we start editing our image. Before we do everything, just go to the bottom and make sure this is on pro photo RGB and 16-bit. If not, just click on it and change the settings to profile to RGB and 16 bits per channel. And this is really important in this way. We will have much, much more details to work with. Start with the bright side. I think it's a little bit underexposed. So bringing up exposure by one, stop. That's it. That's all I do here. On the basic tab. Go to the details. This is a raw image sharpening applied, which course some noise usually. So just press Alt or Option and hold it and just bring the slider to the right until all these nanoparticles here around the moon just disappears. And we only sharpen the brighter side of the moon. For me, it's around 40. It looks okay for me. Go to uptakes and press chromatic aberration. I'm not sure whether we have. But yes, we have some doesn't look really right for me to be honest. You can click on this differential. Click on that green, green part of the edge of the moon and it looks much, much better for me. That's all, that's all I do on this image. Let's go to the next one. Here, t's. We need to zoom in a little bit and start with this B2C tenant images of the dark side beakers be real, denoise it in a much better way. So of course we can, we can use this noise reduction slider. But the problem with this noise reduction on slider is we lose details as well, so it's not the best thing to do. So I showed you what what usually professional use to denoise their night images of the Milky Way or factory or any kind of night images. We will use the same technique here. It's not difficult, it's a bit time-consuming, but let's start with the basic basics here ever again. So all we need is some shadows, let's say 50 and clarity. I tried to bring some details out of the moon. I don't care too much about the noise, so don't worry. Of course we sharpen and then they bring out the noise as well. But don't worry about it at all at this point of the editing process. Let's go to the details again. Press Option or Alt and hold it. I didn't know. Let's say I use 4040 again. We sharpen the noise as well, but don't worry, don't worry about it at all. We can denoise a little bit, but not too much. Let's say noise reduction on. I apply ten goto optics, checkout chromatic aberration. As you can see, it's really, really noisy. Click on it just in case, but there's no chromatic aberration on this image. I think that's it. That's all I do on, on this image. So now you need to highlight all the other lines. So press on the top, go to the bottom, press and hold shift and click on the bottom line. In this way you highlighted all of them. Here are these three dots or you can press right-click as well. Sync settings, check oil. And okay, now we applied the same settings to all images. Now you can open them in Photoshop, so on. You need to highlight everything. Click on the top fund, press Command or Control a and press open. As you can see all the images, are it opened on the top? Now we need all these different tabs, on the same, same tab on different layers. Or you need to do is go to File scripts and load files into stack. Now you can see all the different images are here in different layers. So now we can close everything else. So just right-click here, close others, and always press down saved on Save on the bottom right you can see we have all the layers and in the next video, we will reduce the noise of the Dark Side of the Moon. 5. Noise reduction with stack modes: Hey everyone. In this video we will reduce almost 100, let's say night, at least 90% of the noise here. And it will be really nice and detailed much better than just reducing noise in camera raw filter on an already in Lightroom. So how we do it? As you can see, I turned I turned off the bright side image, so we don't need that at all. And I turn off almost everything else except the, the bottom two layers. So go to the second one from the bottom, change the blending mode to, to, to difference. The difference shows you the differences between the images, of course. So let's, as you can see, the second one from the bottom is highlighted. So I can move it around and just try to move it on top of each other around. All these, these bright, bright edges disappears. That's the best, that's our goal. And as you can see, it's not always perfect, but do your best. You can use your keyboard as well. Let's just move it around. The layer you work with. Then change back to normal. Done on the next one, highlighted difference. Move it on top of the other two images. Let's say like this one and go back to normal. We have to do the same with all the images here. So go to difference, move it, because it's really, really boring. I guess I speed up this process here. Done. All the images are on top of each other. I go to the Crop tool. I just want to make sure I don't cut off any of these nice glowing. Next step, highlight all the images of the dark side. So click on the top foreign, press and hold shift, click on the last one, so everything is highlighted. Right-click and convert to smart object. So what happens here is all the older layers we'll be in, let's see, a folder, but it's not the father, it's a smart object. But the smart object contains all the images just to be edited, all the dark side images. So if you click twice here, when a new tab it will open. All are ten images, so what the smart object contains, so we don't need that Actually, I just close it. So now we have this smart object, because this is a smart object. Now we have a new menu available. So go to, go to layers, smart objects, and stack modes, and choose median. This is pure magic, so I zoom in just to show you. And this is the before. This is the after. So this is the before and this is the after. As you can see, 98% of the noise just disappeared and we have really, really nice details on The Dark Side of the Moon. So you couldn't do that just to reduce noise in camera roll or in Lightroom or any other way in Photoshop. 6. Blending Our Images: In this video we will start blended are images together. We have an image of the bright side, and we have an image of the dark side, we need a third lung. We don't need these smart objects anymore, so you can right-click and rasterize this layer. It's just easier to work with. I rename it. So this is just dark side then this is the bright side. We need to duplicate the dark side image and I call it glow and bring it to the bottom. We have three different layers. So let's move the bright side layer two on the top of the dark side. So again, I choose the the difference blending mode, and I move it around here and zoom in a little bit. Use the cursors to move it around. If it's not perfect. That's gay. But do your best. And I think it looks, looks good to me. Good to me like this. I changed the blending mode back to normal. We need to edit our dark side and the glow layer start with the dark side. So I press Shift Command a or you can go here, filter and Camera Raw Filter. Zoom in a little bit. I need more details of the bright or sorry, the dark side. So I need more clarity, much, much, much more clarity. I don't need this match off the exposure, I guess maybe some contrast, maybe some whites. As you can see, I just try to bring more details out. So this is the before and this is the after. So it's much more contrasty, punchy. Maybe I can you some dehaze here as well. I don't care about the bright side and I don't care about the globe. All I care is the Dark Side of the Moon. So now we have some nice details of the dark side, but it's a little bit, little bit noisy. Steel, so Reduce Noise. Let's say 2015. I don't know. Maybe fifth Dean is enough. Let's say, let's say 20 and I sharpen it. Let's say 50 and I mask it again, so press and hold Option or Alt on a PC. All I wanted to sharpen the details here. So this is the before, this is an after, it's a little bit better. I press. Okay, cool. Now we do the same with the globe layer. Go to Filter camera at all, filter. And we don't need anything else, actually, just the glow. And as you can see, we still have some noise here. So just bring all the way up the noise reduction and we have a really nice smooth glow, glow effect and grabbing a gradient as you can see it, it's perfect so I press Okay, I don't need anything else here. First step, we need to blend these two layers together. So how can we do this? The first, we need to select the moon, we need to cut out of the moon from the background. So I choose this elliptical, a tool and just draw a random circle. Right-click, Transform Selection. Move it, let's say to the top here. Try to cut out of the moon. So there is a really important thing here. Mooney is not a perfect circle. The moon has a rough edge. I showed you, I showed you. I zoom in and as you can see, the moon has this rough edge. These are creators and maintain, so it's not. Not a perfect. It's really rough and we cannot keep this roughness unfortunately, because that will cause, or debt will produce a black outline around this part of the moon. So we cannot do that. So all we need to do is just the cutout of the Moon, but without this rough edge. So I do the same again. So I draw circle, Right-click transform selection. I try to select our moon. You can zoom in. And what you need to see is here the edges. So we need to select the moon, but inside, inside of the edge thing, on the top, it looks okay on the top and on the left on the bottom we go out a little bit. So if you press and hold shift, you can you can move it separately. Just decides just come inside or this corner. It's too much. So something like this. Okay. So now we can maybe hear a little bit more. Now we can turn on this layer and you can see the right side is just two weeks. So again, right-click, Transform selection, press and hold shift and move this around. This one as well. Just too much. On the top, we become the top just a little bit. On the right. It looks kind of okay, but just to be on the safe side, come in a little bit. So we have a nice selection of the moon. All we need to do is put these two in a folder. I call it moon. And with the selection I make, make a mask. So just press on this mask. And as you can see, we have a really nice mask around the moon and we have the glow just behind the moon. Let's zoom in checkout the edges. Looks perfect. No black edges at all. Cool. As you can see, we have no details on the dark side. And I think in this way, this moon picture is already awesome. If you don't want more details on the dark side, that's fine. I think it looks amazing like this, but in the next step, in the next video, I showed you how to bring out the details on the dark side of the moon. 7. Bring Some Details Back on the Dark Side: Next step is to bring some details back on the dark side, I liked the image like this. We really don't need it, but I prefer some details on the dark side. And actually because it's harder to do, less people do it so it's easier to stand out. The moon is always on the sky so arrogant. Everyone can take a picture of the moon. It's not a big deal. It's really hard to stand out with your image. That's why I tried to teach you this HDR moon photography techniques. We need to move the dark side layer to the top first. And there are multiple ways to do this. I start with the easier, easier one and then I show you the most, more precise and then the difficult one. I think this is the tricky and the hardest part of the tutorial, but it's not, not really difficult. So let's start it. All right, create the mask here, it's white mosque. Go here to this gradient tool and choose the black to one kind. The mode is normal and opacity is 100%. Let's draw. It looks good right away, I think. So in this way you can edit just this moon in Camera Raw, for example, and bring some details and contrast back here. So it's not perfect yet, but it's a nice blend for sure. And you can, you can just experience with the tau to how to do that. What's the, what's the one you liked the most? And that's a good starting point, but still, you will need to edit the moon itself. First, I show you the other techniques. So I delete, delete the mask here, and I go to the channel. So just turn off the glow here. All I want to see is the moon. Now I go to the channels and if you don't know what these channels layer are, it's not a big problem. I won't explain it here, but I always use it in my other tutorials. You can reach it for free here. So I really recommend you to go there and use it because this is the holy grail of landscape photography and actually any kind of photography if you really want to go into these editing process. So just a short explanation. We need to select our Dark Side of the Moon. But the easiest way is to select the bright part, actually an invert the mask. So just press and hold Command or Control. Click here on the RGB. Now we have a selection of the bright part. And if you come here and press, press this icon with it from the selection creates a mosque that we need to invert it soak Command or Control I. And we have an inverted mask. Or in another way, if you have the active selection, like I just showed you, just control and command. Press here on the RGB, we have an active selection. And if you press and hold Option and you press this icon, we have an inverted mask right away. Okay, Now it's much more precise mask as you can see, but it's not perfect. It's not very nice. So we need to virtually first things first, we need the, we need to edit these dark side layer. Again, I create a curve layer and I make a clipping mask. If you press this icon, as you can see, there's a clipping mask and all we can effect is the dark side and not everything else. What do we need to do is to darken this middle part of the moon on the dark side. So I just bring down the curve until it looks better here. I don't care about the left side, I just care about this middle part. Actually. Let's say something like this. Now we have the mosque right next to our curved layer. What we can do is use this gradient to draw or gradient like this. Let's see. As you can see, it's much, much more than natural, but it's not perfect yet. The next step is to open Camera Raw Filter again, on this layer, just press Shift Control or Command a. And we need to darken little a bit. But we need to maintain the details here so we need a lot of clarity, maybe some of the haze contrast. I think that's it. It's a little bit too yellowish, so I cooled it down just a little and I press okay, much, much better. We still have some really nice details here. I turn on the globe so we can see it much better. But now we still need to work on this, the middle part of the moon. So the next step is to create a new layer. Me though fix. Let's say I need the brush tool, brush tool, black color, and I need a really big brush like this one. Hardness on 0 and opacity is really low, let's say ten or 15%. Let's say 15. I just, oh, I need a clipping mask again. I don't want to darken the right side of the moon as you can see, only the left side and only in the middle. So I need a clipping mask again, if you press and hold Option or Alt on this layer, move it to the edge on the bottom part and click. We have again clipping mask and I cannot do anything on the right part. As you can see, nothing happens. So come here and crash with a black. Brush again. Brush again. Click. Smaller one. Go through again. Kind of natural already. So choose a really small one. And on these rough edges just fix some, some blending problems. That's it. The edge, it looks good. The left side is too bright for sure. So again, bigger brush. Just go through a couple of times here until it's natural and much, much more natural. You can change actually the blending mode to overlay. I think it's more natural. Reservoir. Good. For me. Good. It looks really, really good. It's really nice and really detailed. This is how we can bring some really nice details back here. I think that just reduce here little bit more. You can play with this. I don't want to spend too much time here. You understand the concept. Just play around and try to create something natural, something that you're on. 8. Final Touches: The next step is to edit our images a whole. So I need to create a separate layer that contains everything. The easiest phase to press Shift Control Option or Alt. And E. As you can see, we have a heavier layer here I call a Camera Raw Filter because we're going to go to the Camera Raw Filter. Again. You can come here Filter, camera Raw Filter. Now we need to edit our image. So I think we need more contrast. For sure. We need some clarity. Again. Little bit of the haze, not so much, just a little. Let's say to your free, you can go to the detests. And you can sharpen again if you need. But always create the mosque here. Only sharpen departs. That needs to be sharpened. I think that's it. I don't want to do anything else. Only thing I showed you you can sharpen here I want, because I have a two that we are sharpen. My image much, much, much better so I don't touch the sharpened here, but you can press. Okay, I crop my image, so I press and hold Option or Alt, and I crop the parts I don't need. Let's say I want some some dead space around it, but they don't want too much. So I want the moon on the, on the middle. I think. Looks good to me. I press Enter. Next step, I create a new layer. I call it Orton Effect. It's not the mask. I really like it. I always use it on my images. This is a 100 ways to do auto effects. I show you the easiest one and the one I liked the most. So choose the lightened blending mode. Go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. I really use, let's say 15 here. You can play around 1515. I'm happy with I reduce the opacity for sure until, let's say 15 or 20% have these really nice glowing effect. As you can see. It's not really strongest, really subtle, but it looks looks really good. Maybe just 12. Yeah, 1212 is fine for me. The last one, press Shift Option Command E. Again. I call it Topaz lab. Because I have the only, only plugin I use here. It's called the Topaz denoise AI. And it's pure magic. I think I bought it for $60 on a sale. I use usually the standard or the low light. Let's start with the standard. Zoom in. You can see this is the origin, this is the sharpen and denoise, the variation, I think the normal looks great here Let's check out the low-light. The low light is even manner? Yes. Yes. For sure. Low-light. Okay. So alike like it on auto, I just press Apply. And we have a sharpened and denoised, beautiful moon image. 9. Exporting and Preparing for Web: Finally, this is the last step which is to prepare our file for the net and exported probably you remember, at the beginning we choose the pro photo RGB color profile. And if you save, save the image in this quarter of profile on the internet, it will look awful. What we need to do is to go to File, Export, export for web. I choose JPEG, and usually it depends on you. You can use 100th person the quality just to save some space. I usually use eighty-five percent. I don't see too much difference to be honest. The most important part is to check embedded color profile and convert to SRGB. It might make sure you click it on it. As you can see, this is high. It would look like if you upload it to the web roughly. And this is how it should look like. So just to make sure you click this one. And I use Internet standard RGB. And I usually keep all the metadata as well. The I save it, and that's it. That's how you make an HDR image of the moon. 10. Other Courses / Good Bye: Thanks for watching. I hope you learned something new and useful and you will be able to use these techniques on your photos in the future. My plan is to take you to the professional level of landscape photography. So don't forget to check out my other courses and there is more to come. Thanks again and see you in the next course.