[jon.partsch]

Hello Folks,

I took 22 photos of lunar eclipse progression of phases over San Francisco last night with my K-1ii.
I also took 12 frames of "close-up" at totality with my K-70.

I want to stack these and end up with one photo for each scene. How do I go about this? I think the process for the close-ups will be simpler, but I have never done anything like this before. Please walk me through this, and perhaps this thread can serve as a tutorial for others.

Some things I am wondering about, in addition to the basics of the process, are how to I even out the exposures of the progression shot (individual frames shot between ISO 200 1/400s and ISO 800 1s), and exposure (brightness of the moon) varies somewhat. Is this done to "even out" the individual frames before stacking, or done to the "individual moons" once the stack is complete. Also, I took additional exposure bracketed shots of the foreground thinking it might be better to do a HDR lower/foreground merge and adding the "moons" above it. How would I go about this?

I shot in RAW+Jpeg, and the examples are of some Jpegs from the camera (close up is cropped, obviously, and quickly edited using basic smartphone photo editor)

Thanks!!! I look forward to your replies.

[Bob 256]

What post software do you have. In Photoshop you can import these into individual layers and stack them as "Lighten" with a dark mask painted over the foregrounds you don't want, and they should stack to let the brighter eclipsed moon show through for each layer (each layer has to be selected as "lighten"). The lightest dark sky will predominate but I assume all your dark skys are on about the same level of darkness. you can move individual layers for alignment before flattening the group into a single layer shot.

[jon.partsch]

What post software do you have. In Photoshop you can import these into individual layers and stack them as "Lighten" with a dark mask painted over the foregrounds you don't want, and they should stack to let the brighter eclipsed moon show through for each layer (each layer has to be selected as "lighten"). The lightest dark sky will predominate but I assume all your dark skys are on about the same level of darkness. you can move individual layers for alignment before flattening the group into a single layer shot.

Thanks, Bob. I do not have PS. I have LR, RawTherapee, PIPP and AutoStakkert (the later two of which I downloaded today. Am I going to need PS or something similar ($$$) to process the eclipse progression over the skyline?

I was able to stack 4 of my 12 close-ups using PIPP and AutoStakkert. I feel the result is noticably improved with respect to noise, but I have not processed one of the single RAW files yet. I was only able to stack 4 of the 12 because there was slight motion blur in the rest, and the results of including any of them in the stack led to softness and processing artifacts. Here is the result of my stack of the "good" four frames (edited in Lightroom):

[Bob 256]

Sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you were trying to develop a montage showing the various phases in one shot as the moon crossed the sky. Now I see that you're trying to get a better result with a single resulting shot of the blood moon using stacking to lessen noise. I think you might be able to do this in LightRoom but I'm not that familiar with LR to say for sure. The four shot stack you posted looks quite good. I know any differences in shots (angular or motion) will lead to less satisfying stacks as you mentioned with your motion blurred frames. You need all the frames to be as identical as possible (that is except for noise which will differ but average out). You have a pretty good result as is

[jon.partsch]

Sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you were trying to develop a montage showing the various phases in one shot as the moon crossed the sky. Now I see that you're trying to get a better result with a single resulting shot of the blood moon using stacking to lessen noise.

Bob, you did not misunderstand. I am trying to do both. Honestly, I don't know where to begin with the montage image. Is Photoshop needed for this kind of thing? Is there a free or cheap software alternative that can do the same job as Photoshop with equal quality? Is there a tutorial online for this kind of workflow?

[Bob 256]

Bob, you did not misunderstand. I am trying to do both. Honestly, I don't know where to begin with the montage image. Is Photoshop needed for this kind of thing? Is there a free or cheap software alternative that can do the same job as Photoshop with equal quality? Is there a tutorial online for this kind of workflow?

Not sure other than Photoshop but LightRoom probably has layer capability. You can try Googling "using layers" and some variations thereof. There might be some YouTube material. Many other programs have layering abilities but I'm only familiar with PS. I think PS Elements has layering.

The actual process is pretty simple. You cut and paste an image which shows up as new layer stacked on top of an existing image. Then you select how those layers are combined. Normally ("normal"), the pasted layer sits on top of the one below it and the top layer is the only one which shows or prints. There's a drop-down which picks the combination option and when you select "lighten", a selected layer is combined with the layer directly below it, but only shows components lighter than the lower layer (if the lower layer has components lighter than the upper layer, they show). Once this is done with two layers, you have an option to "merge down" and the top layer (selected) is combined with the layer below it. This is repeated with successively lower layers until you arrive at just one which has all the previous layer components in it. Lighten works with a dark sky because the moon is lighter than the dark sky below it so it combines with the existing moon image to show the two moon images in a single frame. You can work from the top or the bottom of the stack until you get your final single layer image.

Here are a couple of links that might help: https://www.dpmag.com/how-to/tip-of-the-week/lightroom-shortcut-to-open-files-as-layers/

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=...sU2jrZ92tTa46f

[othar]

LR doesn't offer layers as far as I know.
You could use gimp to show the progressing of the eclipse in one image (it's a freeware)

The stacking of the close up moon shots could also be done with gimp, however I don't think it offers an auto alignment option so you might consider something like registax for those images

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Last edited by othar; 05-27-2021 at 07:12 AM.

[othar]

I just saw you already stacked your 'close up' images so you won't need to use registax anymore.

As for the progression image, you can do that with gimp.
Like with PS you load every image in a new layer (open all images -> copy -> insert as new layer in one of the other images). Afterwards choose 'only brighten' for each layer.
This will work for the images of the eclipse, but the image you took for the foreground will probably have a brighter sky, that might outshine the moon. To insert this image you either have to darken the sky or simply erase everything in the image you don't want to use for the final picture (select the layer you are working/erasing on)

edit: gimp can't open dng-files, you would have to work with tif or jpg files

[MossyRocks]

For the closeup shots of the moon I've had good luck using the tools bundled with Hugin. Alignment and remapping is done using the GUI and then I stack the remapped aligned images using the hugin_stacker command line utility. Here is the result of the last eclipse fully visible to me using this process. I used an old 300mm and didn't know what I was doing so there was a lot that I could have done better for capturing but still managed to pull this out:

[MossyRocks]

In this thread I covered some of my process for stacking moon shots. The biggest change would be in the alignment portion where I now use the hugin GUI to do the alignment and output remapped aligned images that I then stack.