 Hi everyone, Nico Carver here. And last night there was a total lunar eclipse. I was quite worried here in Somerville, which is right north of Boston, that we were going to get completely clouded out. But luckily there was a brief gaps in the clouds where I was able to take about 30 shots, 30 clear shots of the total lunar eclipse. This is a single shot. And of course the easiest way to process your total lunar eclipse image is just to take a single shot and you can play around with curves and sharpening and things like that. Now the limitation of a single shot is the more you process it, the more you're going to bring out noise. You're not going to be able to take advantage of lucky imaging at all, where some shots may have slightly better atmospheric conditions than other shots. So it's definitely the easiest. You can just quickly sort of see what you have with a single shot and you can see that in this single exposure, I'll just actually remove this curves layer, this is nothing done to it. This is straight out of camera and you can see already we can see a few bright stars. I think this lunar eclipse was really neat and that there were these three bright stars in Libra that formed this interesting line right next to the eclipse. One thing I should note is that my camera was on a Star Tracker so when I was actually looking at the eclipse, it looked more like this, right? So I think in my final presentation I'm going to rotate 90 degrees so that the moon looks like how I saw it with my eyes. Anyways, the rest of this session, rather than just talking about processing a single exposure, we're going to talk about stacking your lunar eclipse pictures. So if you took multiple pictures, like let's say at least 20, you can stack them together and this will help with both not revealing noise during processing but also it will help with once we get to the sharpening steps. You won't stack and immediately see it gets sharper. It might actually even look slightly blurrier after you stack but then once you start sharpening a stack, I found it provides more detail. There is more detail there because you've reduced the noise level. Okay, I've closed out of that. This is just going to be a complete step-by-step tutorial. So the first thing that you'd want to do is connect your SD card from your camera. So if you have an SD card reader of some kind, my monitor has one built in so that's the one I'm using. And then you would want to take out the raw files that you shot of the lunar eclipse and transfer them onto your computer. And I already sort of vetted them on camera, so I looked at the files that I knew I wanted because they were the ones that were cloud free and I only moved those files over. I think that's the easiest way to do it. And in the end, I had 32 images that didn't have any clouds in the frame. So those are the ones and also didn't have any kind of motion blur or any other problems because I was on my deck and I was sort of walking around. So some of them also had motion blur and I didn't use those ones either. So all the good frames I've transferred into this folder on my computer. And this is going to be a fairly drawn out workflow but I'm going to show every step. So if you're really interested in this process, just stick with me. It's mostly going to use free software. I am going to end up in Photoshop, which is of course paid software, but a lot of people own it or something similar. And so the first free software we're going to be using is called Adobe DNG converter. And this is just a software that takes your raw files and makes them into a different kind of raw file that works better with all kinds of other software. So it's a free download. You can get it for Windows or Mac. So the way that it works is you just install it, open it. You're going to select your folder full of raw files. There we go. And then where it says select location to save converted images. I've already made this folder called DNG files. I'm going to select that. And then I'm just going to click convert. And it will go through your files and convert them from CR three or whatever raw file you have to DNG, which again, the point of doing this is it will just work better in the next step. And speaking of the next step, let's move right along. So we're going to open up pip. This stands for planetary image pre processor. And it's again a free download. Unfortunately, this one is Windows only. So if you do have a Mac, you're out of luck with this one. But it's a really nice program for just doing some initial work here on our files. So I'm going to click add image files. I'm going to select all of these DNG files that we just created, click open. It says join mode has been selected. That's fine. And then it pops up sort of a preview here. Over here under optimize options for I'm going to choose solar lunar full disk, because that's the best description of what this is. It's not a close up. It's not planetary, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to change anything in input options. Under processing options, I'm going to change a number of things. Lunar eclipse images are often sort of dim, because it's literally in shadow. So I'm going to apply a little bit of a gain boost. I'm just going to raise that to 1.5. I don't want to convert from color to monochrome. I want to keep it color. Over here where it says frame stabilization mode, I'm going to change it to surface feature. And I am going to enable these things, the surface feature tracking and surface stabilization. And I also am going to enable an area of interest. Okay, and then what this does is it creates these boxes over here. And I'm just going to move those onto the moon. Well, I'm going to move the red box, which is the anchor point onto the moon. And I'm going to move the blue box around the moon like this. Okay, good enough. And all this does is it tells it, well, where are you looking to match up the different images? Because one thing this does is it centers the images for you. And then the other thing is because it's centering, we're going to need to crop a little bit. So we'll crop the frames to the area of interest, that's fine. And we'll just do something like that. And this process will help with everything else we're going to do while stacking. Okay, and so then I'm just going to click on do processing and then start processing. Okay, it's finished. And it tells me it was able to output 25 frames. For some reason, it rejected seven. That's fine. We have, you know, we have enough that that's okay. Let's go ahead and open the folder and see what it did. Okay, interesting. So it seemed to work pretty well on most of them, except for this one, it somehow messed up. So I'm just going to go ahead and delete that one since it didn't center the moon correctly with that one. But everything else looks good, looks nice and centered, can close out of that program. Then we're going to open auto stackert and open these files that we just created in pip. And at first, it seems like it's not, you know, there's nothing there, but it's that's because for some reason, the default is video format. Instead of having an all option. So I'm just going to change that to image files. And I'll select all of these files. This is again in the pip folder. All right. And then the first thing I'm going to do here is make sure that the image stabilization option is set to surface details, which is what you want for lunar, you know, planet would be for planets, of course. And then I'll click analyze. Okay, and you can see the view changed there. I think what it did was it found the image with the best quality and swapped it out. I'm not sure if it did that, but it really did look like the image changed when I analyzed the frames. The next thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to click on manual draw. And I'm going to start drawing in little alignment points where there's good edge contrast, right? So where we have these Maria's and craters. I'm just going to draw in some nice little alignment points. And the way you do this is like it's like a click drag click. They don't have to be very big, I don't think. And you just want to get them in a number of places on the moon. I'm actually going to zoom in and get a few along the edge. Okay, so I've drawn in, let's say 16 alignment points. That should be enough. And then I'm going to stack the best 95. Well, I'm going to stack 100%. So right here where it says frame percentage to stack, I'm just going to choose 100%. We want to TIF, want to save in folders, everything else we can leave off, including drizzle, sharpened, RGB align. And then I'll just click stack. Okay, and then let's make sure it worked. We're going to open up our lunar eclipse folder. And it created this new folder within our PIP folder called AS Autostacker P100. Open that and then open this TIF file that it created. And all that I'm looking for here is just that there is no major alignment errors that it looks just like any other picture in this PIP folder. If it did, then I can be confident that it did stack correctly, which it looks like it did. And we're ready for the next step. So I'm going to close out of Autostackert. It's done its job and open Photoshop. And I'll go into that folder on the desktop, find the resulting TIF file out of Autostackert and click open. And you can see right now it's not aligned properly, like the colors are off, it's too bright, but all of that is fixable. So the first thing that I'm going to do is align the color channels and put in a reasonable black level. It'll fix it up quite a bit. So we're going to go to image adjustments levels. And I'm also going to open up my histogram panel so I can see what I'm doing. And so you can see that the color channels are misaligned. So the first thing I'm going to do is here in the levels, I'm going to align those. So I'm just going to take the blue channel, take this slider called the shadow slider all the way on the left, and move that to the right until up here, the blue channel is aligned with the green channel. And then I'm going to do the same thing for the red channel. Okay. And now that those are basically aligned in terms of the shadows, I'm going to switch it back to RGB. So it's affecting all of the color channels at once. And I'm going to take the shadow slider and move it right up against the edge here of the histogram peak, but I don't want to go in there, or that would be clipping detail. So just right up to the edge, but not into the actual information. Click OK. And so now we have have our stacked image and have aligned the color channels and gotten the black level reasonable. You may be thinking at this point, why did we do all this work and it still doesn't look that much better? Well, the main thing we've done now is this is a lot more noise free. So it's not noise free, but the signal to noise ratio is much better through the stacking process. So when we really push this image, when we really change contrast and do all this kinds of stuff and sharpen it, it's going to hold up a lot better than just a single image. Okay. So the first thing you usually do with lunar imagery like this is try to crisp it up, sharpen up some of the details. So I'm going to do that in two stages. I'm going to start with a little bit of high pass filtering to bring out some of the bigger details and then we'll end with a little unsharp masking to do the smaller ones. So first thing, we're going to duplicate this layer. So go over to your layers panel and choose duplicate layer. And we can just call this high pass one, the first round of the high pass filter. And then I'm going to go to filter, go down to other and choose high pass. Okay. And then I'm going to do something. Let's see. I'm trying to sort of first go for some of bringing up some of the bigger details and making those stand out a little bit. So I'm going to do a fairly large pixel radius here. Be something like that. Of course, this looks very strange. We need to change the blend mode from normal to overlay. And then just to show you what that did, we can see it right here. Now, I'm sure that the first thing a lot of people will notice is that this gave the edge of the moon a glow that we don't want. So we're going to deal with that, but not quite yet. So just bear with me. We'll deal with that in a second. But otherwise, I think this high pass looks good. Let's go ahead and duplicate the background layer again, call this high pass to and put it on top. And we're going to go back to filter, go down to other high pass. And this time I'm going to use a much smaller pixel radius to try to get some of these, you know, medium sized details to come up a little bit. So let's do something like 10, no, maybe even 8 pixels. Okay. And then once again, I'm going to choose overlay. And just to show you what that did. Okay. And then I'm going to turn down the opacity of both of these filters a little bit. I don't want them at full strength. And I'm going to group them. So I'm just going to click on the first one high pass to hold down the shift key on my keyboard and click on the bottom one. And then press Ctrl G to group them. We can call this the high pass group. Okay. And then I'm going to add a layer mask to this group. So make sure I have the group selected. I'm going to go up to the layer menu, go down to layer mask and choose hide all from the layer mask. What this does is it adds a black layer mask. So this is now back to basically the original image because it's hiding everything in the high pass group. But remember, let me just disable this for a second. Remember how the moon has this bright artificial edge from the high pass filtering? We want to get rid of that. And we're going to do that with this layer mask. The way how we're going to go to the brush tool from the brush tools options, we're going to pick a nice big size and 0% hardness. And then we're going to position that brush tool right over the moon and using the bracket keys on your keyboard, which are right next to the P as in poodle key, the bracket keys, we're going to adjust the size of this brush on the fly until it's just a little bit smaller than the ring of the moon. And then we're going to just and then we need to make sure we're set to white in terms of the color pure white position it exactly in the center of the moon and click. And what this did, if we look at the mask, I'm just going to press alt click on the mask, is it made a nice fuzzy mask, you know, a nice feathered mask where it's going to apply most of the high pass filtering to the details in here within the radius of this brush. But then as we get to the edge, it will really feather out those details and and not, you know, give us that that bright ring effect that's so ugly. So let me just disable it to show you there's with it disabled. And here's with it enabled. And now that I'm seeing this, I might raise up the opacity of these just a little bit. So I think we can get a little bit of a stronger high pass effect. Let's see how that looks. Yeah, I think that looks good. So here's now without our high pass group. And with it. And so you can see that it made a lot of nice local contrast adjustments that really bring out the details in the moon. Now we're ready to actually do some traditional sharpening with an unsharp mask. So to do that, let's make a new layer from visible. The shortcut for that is control alt shift E. E is an enter control alt shift E. This just takes what you see on screen and makes a new layer. And we'll call this layer the sharpen layer. And the first thing I'm going to do to this sharpen layer is I'm going to right click on it and change it into a smart object. So go to convert to smart object from the menu that pops open when you right click. What this allows you to do by turning a layer into smart object is when you add a filter, it becomes a smart filter, which we'll see in a second here. So we'll go down to sharpen, go down to unsharp mask. And you can see immediately what, you know, this is a strong effect. You can play around with the radius and the amount mostly are the things that are going to change. I'm going to leave the threshold at zero. And I think I like something like that. You can always turn the preview off and on to sort of see the effect that you're getting. So I'm doing 85% 4.2 pixels. You know, this may be way over sharpened for your taste or under sharpened. It's really a matter of taste. But that's what I'm going to go with and click okay. And once again, if I turn this layer off and on, it did give the moon a slight bright ring. So I'm going to apply this same high pass group filter. I mean, a high pass group mask to my smart filter layer here. The way to do that, I'm going to hold down alt, click on this mask thumbnail and drag it onto. Well, that's fine. Drag it onto that one. Okay, yes. And I really like that effect. I think it's pretty subtle. But it definitely sharpened up the image. So here's where we started. And there's where we ended up after the sharpen sharpenings, both the high pass and the unsharp mask. So if we were just going to go for just the moon, that I would just end with a slight s curve here, right? So just just adding a little bit more global contrast to the image with a small s curve like that. Here's before there's after just adds a little bit more drama to the image. And so you could stop right Oh, we have to rotate right because it's how I saw it in the sky. I'm going to rotate 90 degrees. That's how it looked in the sky. Okay, and so we could stop right here. That's all of the, you know, editing we would need to do if we were just focused on the moon. And of course, the things we did again were, we changed all the raw files into Dngs, we did some rough alignment, initial alignment with PIP, that also changed them into TIFF files, then we opened all those TIFF files into AutoStackert, stacked them with AutoStackert into one TIFF file, brought that TIFF file into Photoshop, applied high pass filtering, unsharp mask and a little bit of curves. And we could call it a day here. But as this video promised, this is going to be a full double stack tutorial. So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go back to our raw files or the Dng files and stack them for the stars and then come composite this moon image that we just made with the star image. So to do that, let's open up deep sky stacker. And actually, before I go further, let me just save this just in case we have a crash, we'll call this moon only. And we'll save it as a Photoshop document. Okay, now we can move on to deep sky stacker. We're going to click open picture files and from this Dng files folder, which again, there's the raw files, there's the Dng files, we're going to select all of these Dng files. And then we need to check all of them. So you just click check all over here on the left. And then we want to click register checked pictures. I'm going to go to advanced. And I've already practiced this. So I know I want a very low detection threshold. But let me just show you what happens if I had it 20%, which I think is the default. It computes the number of stars and it only finds one star. Now you cannot, and I repeat this, you cannot align pictures based on one star, you cannot align pictures based on one star, you need at least two. But ideally you need like five or six. So what you do then is you start lowering the threshold until it can find more stars, you can see it 10%, it found two stars, I'm just going to lower it all the way down to 2%. And at 2%, it could find six stars. So that's as good as we're going to do the lowest star detection threshold for this image. And then I'm going to let it go ahead. So I'm going to let it do an automatic detection of hot pixels. I'm going to let it stack after registering. Let's say that's fine, select the best 95%. We do not have any calibration frames. So it says don't forget to add those, but we don't have them. So we're not going to use them. We'll just click OK. And then it gives you a little preview of what you're doing. We're stacking 32 frames at ISO 800, no calibration frames and click OK. Okay, and now it goes through each picture and it finds as many stars as it can. So you can see on that picture, it found eight stars. I think on the previous picture, it only found three. This picture found eight again. So it goes through, it finds the stars that it can in each picture. And then it's going to register all of these pictures together based on the star patterns, which is very different actually than what we did with the other stacking programs where we were stacking based on the surface features on the moon, because the moon and the stars are moving at slightly different rates. And even in the 10 minutes or whatever it was that I took these pictures, that's enough that you get you get a different result if you stack based on the moon's surface features or the stars. We'll just let it finish here and then pick back up when it's done. Okay, and it's finished stacking. And so now you can really see what I meant by we need to stack in different methods for the stars versus the moon. Because if we stack based on the stars, you can see the moon is quite funky. It doesn't it doesn't work out so well. So but what we're going to do now is we're going to take this image that we just created and try to composite it with our stacked moon image. And this is going to be the hardest part of this whole tutorial. But hopefully we get something good out of it. So I'm just going to use the autosave.tiff file that was generated. Let's just double make double check and make sure it's in there. Yes, there it is autosave.tiff. Let me open it. All right, so here's the autosave. I can now close out of deep sky stacker. No, don't need to save changes. And then I'm going to open the autosave file into Photoshop. All right, and there it is. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I want to stretch everything except for this central region, this moon region. So I'm going to make a, I'll just use the lasso. I'm just going to make a lasso selection. It doesn't have to be perfect around that moon region. And then I want everything else. So I'm going to do select inverse so that everything except the moon region is selected. Then I'm going to go to adjustments levels. And what happens is it, if we look at this mask that it creates, it selects everything except this central part. And if we want to we can, this probably doesn't matter, but we could feather the edge of that a little bit, something like that. Okay, so now we have a levels adjustment here where it's only affecting everything but the moon. So now I can grab this rightmost slider and the middle slider and bring this over so that I can really see what I'm doing here. And you can see it brings out a lot more stars, which is good. This is a very light polluted area. This is a portal eight, nine kind of area, but we were pointed south. So that's really pointed into a portal nine part of the sky, I think. So this isn't going to be easy, but we'll try. I'm going to actually duplicate this layer, the levels layer. And then I'm going to change it a little bit here. And I'm just doing this by eye. So it looks interesting. It's okay to have a little bit of this glow if you want, or you can try to really minimize it. It's really up to you and your processing style. Maybe this time, I think last time I really minimized it, but maybe this time I'll leave a little bit of the glow from the moon in. Okay, so where are we? So next, let's make a new copy from visible. So again, that's control, alt, shift, E. And then next I want to fill this area of the picture, which is a complex area with just a solid color. That's going to help us do the next couple of steps here. And so I'm going to first to just get that selection back, I'll do control, click on this mask. And then this selection is the wrong way. It's inverted because it's selecting the sky. We now want to select the moon. So let's do select inverse. Okay, now we have just the moon selected. And I'm going to do edit fill with color. And then using this color picker, I'll click on a color. Doesn't really matter. Just one of these colors in the halo. Yeah, I like that one. Okay, fine. So it fills with that color. Oh, I think I know what. Okay, so I've been having some problems with this content where Phil, when I didn't went through the practice, I think the problem was I forgot to change to 16 bit. Let's just see if I change to 16 bit if it works any better. Yes, starting to work better, I think. Okay, so maybe that was the issue. Okay, so something like that. We'll see how this, let me just check the moon one more time. Maybe have to do one more addition here. So I'm just going to merge this down, control E, make another selection and do another fill. And I'm not even sure if I'm going to like this, this glow, but we'll see. Because I didn't do my last one, but we'll see how it looks. Okay, then we're ready to bring in this moon. But remember, I rotated this moon 90 degrees clockwise. So let's rotate this image 90 degrees clockwise, recenter. There we go. So now we're ready to bring in this moon to do that easy. Let's just do control Alt Shift E again. Let's stamp from visible. And we'll copy this layer. So select it, control A, control C, and control V. Okay, so now we've copied this stacked moon into our stacked stars image. And we just want to align it correctly. So let's turn down the opacity of it so we can see the moon below. And then we'll line up the edge. Looks like it should be right there. Just turn this back up. And then I'll turn it off and on just to make sure. Yes, that looks right. It's a little bit hard to tell because there was that sort of double moon feature, because it was stacked in the stars, not the moon. So, but just do your best job to try to line them up correctly. I'm now going to put this layer on top, turn back on all the other layers. Okay. And then we need to get rid of this black border on this image. So to do that, we can just use the magic wand and click on it. And we could just hit the delete key to get rid of it. But just in case we need that for any reason, let's make a layer mask instead. And we'll do select inverse. So it's just selecting the moon and not the black part. And then we'll click the add layer mask button down here in the right. Okay. So after all of that, do I like the halo? No. So that's how it goes. Sometimes you do a lot of work to try to keep something in and then you don't like it anyways. So let's change it. Let's go back to well, we can leave this in. Let's actually just merge this down. So I'll turn this off for a second. So I'm just going to merge this down with this layer. I know this has gotten a little messy. Let's just call this stars. And we'll call this moon. Okay. And so what I want to do with this stars layer is I've decided against the halo, I'm going to just get rid of it to get rid of it and just keeping the stars. So what we can do is do select by color range. And I want to sample the highlights, which is the stars. And then I'm just going to move this range slider, and maybe the fuzziness slider, mostly the range, until I see it do that that's too far. Then I'm just going to back off until it's only stars. And I think it's right there. So 51 for this image. Okay, so it's selected the stars. I'm now going to just make sure that I completely select them. So I'm going to do select modify. I'm going to expand by, let's say, two pixels. And then I'm going to select modify and feather by one pixel. Okay, so I've now made a star mask. I actually want the opposite. I want to select the background, not the stars. So I'm going to inverse that selection. So I'm going to go to select inverse. And then I'm going to pull up a curves, no, do levels. And what this now is is it's a levels that's only working on the background. So I'll say background levels. And I'm just going to get rid of that halo by moving the mid tone slider over to the right. And now if you wanted to play around with a little bit of halo, this would be a good way to do it. You could you could play around with it. I'm pretty convinced. I just don't want any halo. I just want a nice clean shot. So I'm just going to get rid of it completely. And now we can turn back on our moon. And so we now have a moon that's in the right place with the stacked stars shot. Now, there's not quite as many stars visible as I'd like. So what I can do now is with this layer mask that we created, I can add a new let's add a new hue slash saturation adjustment. We'll copy this layer mask onto here by holding down alt and dragging, say replace layer mask. And then I want the invert of this. So I'm just going to press Ctrl I just to show you that's the inverse. And then let's increase the saturation and the lightness of the stars. Okay, good. All right, we are almost done. Last thing is I'm just going to do some global curves adjustments just to Okay, I think I'm pretty much done. It's a little bit of a tall picture. So I mean, that's okay if you want to include the whole thing. You could also do a final crop here. So if you're doing this is basically my crop for the thumbnail for this image. But if I was doing for Instagram, I might do four by five. And I think with a clip shot, you got to go centered. But I also want to include this line of stars here definitely. So I think something like this basically want to get as close into the moon centered as I can while also including those three stars. Yeah. So I think that's our final image. So sorry for all of the confusion with including the halo and blah, blah, blah. But I actually think the way we did it there was instructive. If you did want to include some halo, how you would, I just didn't really like the look maybe maybe it's my data, I'm not sure. But yeah, so the idea here was we have everything positioned correctly, it's all from the same data, but we use two different stacks and composited them together one for the lunar details and got that as sharp as possible, and one to bring out as many stars and a stack as possible. So then if I was saving this for Instagram, which is I guess it's where it's going next, I'll just complete this tutorial by saying I always do file export save for web legacy. And early on, I thought that with Instagram, you would just want to keep this as big as possible and let Instagram do the compression. I found out that Instagram's compressor is not very good, Photoshop's is much better. So what I do now is instead I change the image size here, the maximum Instagram can still do in 2022 is images 1080 by 1350. So I changed that right there. And I bring down the quality to around 85% or 85. And this usually will bring my image size down to below 100 kilobytes. And that seems to give me the best quality in terms of Instagram. So I'll save that off. I'll call this lunar eclipse 2022 IG and click Save. And then if you wanted to, and I would suggest doing this, just also do save as and save a copy lunar composite as a Photoshop document. So then if you, you know, if you get it onto your phone and it looks, you know, different than it looks on your monitor and you wanted to change something, you still have all of these layers available, you can go back and fix anything up or change things however you need. But this is the basic idea of a double stacked total lunar eclipse composite image with the best for the stars, the best for the moon, and then everything put together. At this point, I want to thank all of my wonderful patrons over on patreon.com slash nebula photos. And if you're interested in seeing your name in the credits of any of my long videos, any of the videos over 20 minutes, you can head over to this link and support me there. The support of the channel starts at just $1 per month. And then I also have a $3 and a $7 tier. And there are a number of benefits included for signing up on my Patreon. These include a vibrant discord community where people post their photos, get photo critiques, help each other with gear and processing and everything related to astrophotography. And we also have a monthly challenge object that's a friendly competition with some prizes. We have a group project if you want to work on something collaboratively with others. And finally, there are some exclusive videos including a monthly live Q&A that's always recorded and shared right on Patreon. So if you sign up, you can actually already watch 10 of those monthly chats. And then lastly, like I said, you get your name in the credits of any video longer than 20 minutes. So the link again is patreon.com slash nebula photos. I hope to see you there. Until next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.