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4 November 2022
We'd gotten news of five new products late Tuesday night so we stayed up putting the stories together for you. It took a while to cull the releases for details, reformat the product shots and put the specification tables together. When we looked up it was past midnight.
So we published the two stories and left the bunker to go to bed. But we were thirsty so we stopped by the kitchen for a glass of Hetch Hetchy water from the faucet. A big glass.
A LUNAR MOMENT
So we took it into the dining room to have a look at the ocean, hoping maybe to spy an ocean liner all lit up. And what did we see? The moon poking dramatically through the clouds.
We put the water glass down and went back to the bunker for a camera. We took a few shots, finally getting what we wanted in manual mode. Our Aperture Priority exposures were overexposing the moon (which, after all, is a sunlit daylight shot) even if they managed to capture the clouds fairly well with some exposure compensation to bring the shutter speed back to a handholdable level (even with our image stabilized lens).
THE PROBLEM
In the light of morning we realized we had managed to make a capture for the shadows and another for the highlights. Aperture Priority got the shadows, Manual got the highlights.
We were going to have to merge the most accurate aspect of each capture to create an accurate image.
MERGE TO HDR
Our first thought was to let Photoshop do all the hard work with its Merge to HDR Pro option.
All we had to do was combine the two DNG files.
But because the camera had been handheld, the moon appeared in different parts of the frame. That confused Photoshop. We did a little Healing Brush magic to eliminate the blown-out moon but we didn't like the shadows in the final result.
COMPOSITE
The next day we tried again, this time opening the image with shadow detail and developing it in Camera Raw to approximate what we remembered seeing. That left a bright white spot in the middle of the image where the moon had been.
So we opened the highlight image and processed that in Camera Raw as well. It didn't really require much work. Then we copied it to a layer of the shadow detail image.
Both images were taken at 170mm but the glow of the moon on the shadow detail image made it a little larger than the highlight image moon. We simply scaled the highlight moon a tiny bit to cover. And we had to softened the soft edge of the moon with the Healing Brush because we hadn't feathered the selection.
We changed the Layers mode to Lighten and had our image.
CONCLUSION
The final image represents quite a departure from the camera captures. As far as image manipulation goes, it goes far.
But here's the intriguing thing.
Neither camera capture was accurate. Aperture Priority blew out the moon completely. Manual lost any hint of cloud cover. The scene's brightness range was just too wide for the camera.
The edits, far from creating a fantasy, depict what we saw from the window that night as accurately as we can render it.