My first outing with telescope

Here is the moon taken with my very first outing with my Skywatcher telescope. I had a go at colouring it too, as I do like to see these. So, would really welcome any comments and pointers for next time. I also saw Saturn ............. So excited!!

Taken with a Skywatcher 120ED and my 7D at 1/60 shutter speed.

Congrats, seeing Saturn for the first time is a great thrill.

The picture is a great first effort too. Pretty sharp, and it appears to be well exposed. So you got the hard parts right.

The color doesn't look like the moon's usual appearance to me... but that comes down to personal preference, and what you are trying to do with the pic. Also easy to adjust if you decide to have another go at it later.

The colours I have normally seen in processed moons have been quite blue - Not sure where the blue went on this one.

Thanks for your comments.

Tiger Roach is right, this is a really well-exposed moon shot, especially for a first effort. The limb isn't blown out so you must have done some PP to even out the brightness from the two sides.

I think this would look great in greyscale.

swag72 wrote in post #10563196
Here is the moon taken with my very first outing with my Skywatcher telescope. I had a go at colouring it too, as I do like to see these. So, would really welcome any comments and pointers for next time. I also saw Saturn ............. So excited!!

Taken with a Skywatcher 120ED and my 7D at 1/60 shutter speed.

This is quite nice! I look forward to seeing more.
-Bruce

Thanks Bruce and Rick - I'll post up the mono version later.

Here's the mono version of the shot above. Fancied a different square crop on this one.

Definitely diggin the second version. Have to agree, it looks sharp!

swag72 wrote in post #10563562
The colours I have normally seen in processed moons have been quite blue - Not sure where the blue went on this one.

Thanks for your comments.

The blue is there, but it's mixed with too much red and green. That green color in the Sea of Tranquility should be a deep cobalt blue, so try bringing the red and green levels down in the midtones.

This is a very sharp, well exposed and well focused image, congratulations on your first astrophoto!

Thanks Don, will have another go at it. I did wonder where that beautiful blue had gone!!

Having a play and can not work out which way the sliders have to go for the red and green channel. Do I need to do anything with the blue as well?

It's probably best to start again with the "mono" version. Even in the JPEG you uploaded there's enough color information to work with, and it should be better in your original, especially if you acquired it in RAW mode.

Try the procedure detailed here by Filipe Alves. Filipe talks about the possible need to color balance before enhancing the saturation, but I didn't find it absolutely necessary with your image. I followed his steps for increasing the saturation, using five steps with the Hue/Saturation tool in Photoshop CS2. The first four saturation changes where about +50, and the fifth was about +25. Be sure to make a copy of the background layer before starting the saturation adjustments, and do the adjustments on the bottom layer with the top layer hidden. Then I used the method from his article he calls the "Easy Way" to smooth out the luminance noise created by the saturation increase, by blurring the bottom, saturation enhanced layer, and setting the blending mode of the top layer to Luminosity.

Here's the result, your image processed with Filipe Alves' method, total time spent in Photoshop about 5 minutes. It's still a little over-saturated in the green and red channels, I think, so tweaking it carefully with the Levels tool by dragging the middle slider to the right on those channels before starting the saturation adjustments should help. I don't think you need to adjust the blue channel, as you can see it's coming out pretty well.

Don

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Wow!

That's much better Don - I was using that tutorial and I found it to be really useful. I did adjust the levels though manually as I found by using the auto control it was blowing out the right hand side. I will revisit and tweak the sliders as you mention. I take it to be only slight adjustments? I was shifting the slider quite considerably, so maybe that was the problem.

Yes, small adjustments. As I said, the image above was made with no color balance adjustments, so your original color balance is very close. Probably just a click or two on each channel.

Don