 This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Happy Eclipse Day, everyone. I'm releasing this on April 8th, 2024, but recording it ahead of time using my 2017 data. I just wanted to give a few processing tips more sort of on the basic side. I might get a little dip my toe into things that are a little bit more advanced, but I wanted to start here with just the power of processing raw images, single raw images with something like Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. If Lightroom is more your jam, a lot of these sliders are the exact same in Lightroom. I'm just doing this with the Adobe Camera Raw add-in here that's part of Photoshop when you open up a raw file. Okay, so I have a variety of different shots here with different features of the Eclipse. And I just wanted to show some of the cool things that you can do with just this basic section over here in Camera Raw. The first thing is it's useful to jump back and forth between the fit view, which is showing you the whole picture and a zoomed in view. And the default is 100%, but I'm gonna change it to 200% just to get us an even closer in view here. And what I like about this zoomed in view is you can see this is, on one hand, a shot of the sun's inner corona, its atmosphere that you can only see with a special space telescope or during a total solar eclipse, but then it's also showing off these prominences, these filaments or loops of plasma shooting out from the sun's surface. And I thought in 2017, this one especially was really beautiful. And what I find really interesting about solar eclipse processing is you can make multiple different interpretations of the same photo to highlight different features. So for instance, if I wanted to highlight the prominences, I could do that by diminishing the role that the corona is playing in this photo. So to do that, for instance, I could take down the exposure slider quite a bit, bring up the contrast slider, bring up the clarity slider and look at that. Here's before and there's after, right? It gives you a very different look. I think with this shot since so much of the photo is black, I would probably crop it. And you can do that right here in Camera Raw. The second tool down here is the cropping tool. And I'm gonna choose a 16 by nine. That's sort of the standard monitor ratio if we wanted to fill a whole monitor with this. And I'm going to go way in here on the sun, do something like that. Okay, so that's our first image done, right? Just a few changes here to the sliders. We brought down the exposure up to the contrast, up to the clarity and cropped to 16 by nine. And we could save that off. So I'm just going to click Convert and Save Image. And I'll save it as a JPEG. Okay, save, done. So processing can really be that simple. Let me show you another example here. So here's a, you could still call this inner corona, you might call this mid corona. It's one 100th of a second, but we're seeing a bit more of the extent of it. If we zoom in, let me do 200% again, you can still see those prominences, but they're quite a bit harder to see. Even if we brought down the exposure, well, now if we really brought down the exposure on this one, they become a little bit easier to see. But you can see here, over here, they're much more blown out, right? Compared to this one, where we could see them a lot clearer and they retain their sort of red color. Well, here, they're blown out, even if we bring down the exposure to negative four. And that's just a result of this exposure to begin with was four times as long, one 100th of a second versus one 400th of a second. Okay, so this one is obviously more about the corona than the prominences, but no part of the corona is blown out, right? Even here, right along the edge of the moon, you can see this isn't pure white. If I bring down the exposure, that's even more evident, right? So there's still nothing is completely blown out here. Now, let's say we wanted to make this quite a bit brighter and show the larger extent of the corona. You might be tempted just to take this exposure slider and bring that over to the right. But if I go too far with that, you could see what happens is we get a lot of camera noise, this vertical and horizontal banding. And that's typical of digital cameras, especially like a Canon camera like I was using here. Some very new cameras might have less of this, but they're probably still gonna have it if you really push the photo like this. With one 100th of a second, it's just not picking up enough information in these shadow areas to combat the self-noise of the camera. So that's why we take these longer exposures is to get the full extent of the corona without all of this noise that comes out if you try to push it in post. Okay, but let's say you did want to see a little bit more of the corona in this shot. Let me show you a really simple way, which is just the clarity slider. Let me zoom in a little bit here. Okay, so here's before. Now I'm gonna up the clarity slider to 100, plus 100. Look at that. Here's before, after. By doing that, you're seeing a lot more detail in these streamers, right? You're seeing all these little striations in here and here. You're seeing a lot more detail in here. If I go back, that's how it was before, that's how it is after. Now you're also starting to bring out some noise though. So what I find is if you just want to do this one adjustment on a single photo and be done, I found that going up to about plus 50 on clarity is a good balance between bringing out a lot more detail in the corona, but not bringing out all of this noise that you start to see in the darker areas if you push it all the way to 100. So if you just want to sort of do one adjustment here on your corona shot, pushing the clarity to 50 or 60, I think is pretty safe and it makes for a more dynamic shot. And that might be all that I do with this one. You could crop to a specific size here with one of these ratios if you were gonna print this. So for instance, a good print size might be eight by 10 inches. So I could choose that and just center the eclipse here. I could zoom in or crop in if I wanted to and done. I could now save this off as a TIFF file and it would be ready to print. Now, next, what I want to show you is if you want to take this technique of bringing out the detail in the corona, one step further, there's a bit more of an advanced technique in Photoshop proper that I can show you next. There we go. Now, I just sort of eyeballed the center, but for this technique to work, we're gonna want to get much closer to the true, we wanna center the moon here a lot better than just eyeballing it like that. So what I suggest is turn on your rulers. This is control R on Windows or command R on Mac. Right click on them and change the option here to percent. So right click on either ruler and change it to percent. And then drag out guides. You just click and drag until you're at 50% with both the horizontal and the vertical. And so now we know where these two intersect. That is the center of this photo. And you can see that the moon, the eclipse is currently off center here. So let's just take our move tool and move this. And when we do that, it says, this is the background layer. You can't do that. Let's convert it to a normal layer. That's fine. Okay. And there we go. I think I'm just using my arrow keys to nudge this into place and I just wanna make sure that that is right in the center. Now we have this transparent area down here at the bottom and on the left. What are we gonna do with that? What I would do is I'm just going to add a new layer here and put it below the eclipse layer. And I'll fill that with black. So I'll just do edit, fill and I'll fill with black. Okay. And then I can just combine these two layers together by clicking on one, shift clicking on the other. And then I'll say merge these two layers together from the right click menu. Okay. So that's it. We've now centered the eclipse in the shot using the rulers at 50-50 and these guides. And then we filled in the black area and merged those two layers back together. We're now done with these guides. So we can go view guides, clear guides. Get rid of those. And again, what we're doing is we're trying to enhance the detail in the corona. This is a multi-step process, so bear with me. The next step is we wanna make a duplicate of this layer. So we're gonna right click on it and choose duplicate layer. And let's call this duplicated layer blur. Okay. And then what we're gonna do with this, as the name suggests, is blur it. And we want a specific blur here, which is the radial blur. So if you go to the filter blur menu, choose radial blur from that menu. And what we want is the blur method, we do want spin. And you can see what that's gonna do is the further that we get out from center, it's gonna spin the image to blur it by an amount of 10. I'm not sure if that means 10 pixels, but 10 I found works pretty well. And we want the quality to be not good, but best. Okay, and then you can go ahead and click okay. Okay, and you can see it did a good job of just basically blurring the corona. And you might be wondering, why are we doing this in order to bring out detail? And you'll see in a second here, the basic idea is you take a blurred version of the part you want the detail from, you subtract out just that detail so that you can then put that detail back into the image and sort of have more control over how you're adding that detail back. So that's basically what we're doing here. So the next step is we need to separate out the detail from the blur. And to do that, we're gonna go to image calculations and for source number one, we're going to choose the layer that is blur and choose channel gray. For source number two, we're gonna choose layer, layer zero. And again, choose channel gray. And then for blending, we're gonna change that from multiply to subtract. And if yours doesn't immediately look like mine, it's probably because I think the default offset might be one. So if yours looks like this, instead of like mine, just change this default offset to 128. And you should get this pretty bright gray image, but then here, all along the, in the corona, you should see this sort of embossed look with all the details of the corona. That's what we want with this. And I'm gonna save the result as a new document. So right here, it says result, just choose new document, click okay. Okay, and then if you're going on to more sort of advanced processing of combining multiple images, you would wanna save this off, so you have it. It might be a good idea to do anyways. I'm not going to just cause this is a more basic processing, so I'm not gonna save this, I'm just going to copy it back into this one. So to copy it back in, we can just do select all, edit, copy, and then edit, paste. Okay, so we have this. If we look over here at our layers panel now, we have layer zero, that's our base layer. We have the blur. We don't actually need this anymore, so I'm gonna turn the visibility of that off. And then we have this layer one. And I'm gonna rename layer one, difference, because this is the difference between our base layer and the blurred layer. And what we wanna do with this is we wanna change the blend mode from normal to something like overlay or soft light. And I often have difficulty deciding between these two, so I often actually do a combination of both. And I'll show you how to do that here in a second. But let's start here, I'll just pick the one that I think looks better, which in this case I think is soft light. Okay, and now through the video, you might not have seen exactly what happened here, but if I turn this off and back on, hopefully you can see that it's a subtle difference, but there's a lot more real detail here now in the corona. And here's the really cool thing. You can amplify this effect by just duplicating the layer. So you can just press Command J on Mac or Control J on Windows. And each time you duplicate that layer, you get more and more of the effect, right? So here's the original now and here's after I duplicated the layer four times. You can see the extent of the corona is going out further, but we're also getting a lot more detail in these striations and these streamers in the corona. So for instance, just look at like this part right here. If I go back to the original and then go back to this one, we can see those striations a lot clearer after we do this. But just like with anything in Eclipse Processing, there's no free lunch. The more that you bring out these kinds of details, the more the noise will start to appear. Now, even duplicating that difference layer four times, when I zoom back out like this, I'm actually not seeing a huge amount of noise even in the dark areas. So if I go back to the original and then once we've added all those, you can see, I think it does a pretty good job of really bringing out that corona. Now, I mentioned that sometimes I like a mix of the soft light and the overlay. So one thing you can do is if you've duplicated this difference copy a few times here, you can have some of these be difference overlay and some be soft light. So I'm gonna change that, this one to overlay and I'll change this one to overlay and you get just a different kind of effect that way. So play around with that, play around with the blend modes and hopefully you get a really nice detailed eclipse picture this way. Okay, so what's next? So far, we've only been looking at how to edit single exposures. I want to in this video at least introduce stacking multiple exposures together. The benefit is you can reduce noise and you can also bring in more features like you could bring in earth shine and the outer corona with the inner corona and do all that very elegantly. It is difficult though. So I'm only gonna introduce it in this video and then hopefully do a more advanced processing video later with my 2024 data. So to start here, we're gonna go file, automate, no, sorry, file, scripts and load files into stack and then just pick the pictures that you wanna use. I'll just pick a few here and leave these options off. You don't wanna automatically align or create a smart object yet. We will do that in a second here but first we want to manually align our images. So click okay, all right. And then you have these four images over here in the layers panel and we want to, I actually like putting the brightest picture, the outer corona on the bottom and work my way up that way. I'm not sure why I like it that way but that's how I do it. And then you can just turn these off one by one. Okay, so here's the bottom picture. We're gonna do that same thing we did with last time of bringing out our guides from the rulers to 50 and 50 to find the center of the picture and then manually align each photo that way. And then once you've done this sort of basic centering, what you can do to more precisely center is click on the top three. So you can click on this one and then shift click to select all these, everything but the bottom layer and change them all to difference. And this is going to show you compared to this bottom layer, what differences can you see? And of course we're seeing major differences out here in the corona but what we're interested in are the differences between the positioning of the moon. And this is actually looking pretty good. Now you can expect there to be some difference because the moon is actually moving across the sun during all of totality so it's not staying still. So technically the better way to do this would actually be to align based on the corona but this is a close second. And so now I'm just gonna go one by one and see if I think these images can be better aligned. Okay, I'm gonna turn off that one and turn on this one. I think this one could go a little bit to the left. I'll turn off this one and turn on this one. I think this one can go a little bit down. Okay, and I'm gonna turn back on all four and that's looking pretty good. So I can turn these back now to normal mode and we now have successfully centered all four images. And now we're ready to stack these together into one image to do that in Photoshop. What you can do is click and shift click to select all four layers or however many layers you have and go and then right click over there and choose convert to smart object. It will turn them all into one layer over here with this little smart object icon and then we can do layer, smart objects, stack mode and choose from one of these many options. I'm gonna choose mean, which is just like an average and we get this. Okay, so that looks pretty cool, right? I mean we're now, the advantage of this is much lower noise, right? Because since you're stacking four images together the signal to noise ratio is going up so I'm not seeing much noise here but we're getting the outer corona and the inner corona and prominences all in one shot. And then from here you can do the same kind of processing that we did before. So here was to begin with and here is after duplicating that sort of difference layer a couple of times and if I zoom in it should be even more obvious. So here's before, it's very nice and subtle but it's just a little bit understated and then here is after really bringing out all those streamers in the corona. Okay, and then you can go a whole lot further with this kind of stacking and compositing to bring out all the features you want in a single image. So for instance, another thing you can do is if we look back at my stack of images here if we look closely at this one you can see the corona is mostly completely blown out but that's because the purpose of this one was actually to bring out the details in the moon, right? So this is called earth shine because the light reflecting back from the earth's surface onto the surface of the moon you can actually resolve detail on the lunar surface with a long enough shot. So we could try to bring this detail into composite here. That's one idea. Another idea if you just sort of more liked the black moon is to fix this up because you can see down here just because of the way that stacking works we're getting this sort of like ugly red glow down here. So we could take a single photo from this stack and replace the moon here to get more of like a nice black moon. We could work on noise reduction, further sharpening. So this is really just the start but I wanted to give you what I think are sort of the basics of processing your solar corona images which are sharpening either through the clarity slider in Adobe Camera Raw or through this sort of blur and subtract the detail out and then put it back on with overlay or soft light blend mode. And then also stacking, which again we did through first carefully aligning the images then using Smart Object to open up the stack modes in the layer menu. So after you've spent all this time capturing the total eclipse and processing your image what are you gonna do with those images? Well, what I would suggest is to put them on your own personal website that you control and that's where today's sponsor comes in Squarespace. If you want your photography portfolio to stand out, Squarespace is the perfect tool. They have this new way of guiding you through the design process called Squarespace Blueprint and then the SEO tools, search engine optimization are built right in. So as soon as you launch, you're gonna be well positioned to allow people to find your work online. And then if you wanna sell your photos like as prints, Squarespace again makes that super easy for both you to set up the store that's all built in and for your customers to pay however they want with flexible payment options. You can do credit cards of course, but also PayPal, Apple Pay, Afterpay, all kinds of options that will make your customers happy. So if you're ready to start your own business selling your astrophotography head to squarespace.com slash Nebula Photos for a free trial and when ready to launch use the code Nebula Photos for 10% off your first purchase of a domain or hosting. All right, that's it. This has been Nico Carver, Clear skies.