Tyco Reprocessed
I was messing around with my recent soft-focused “antique” image of Moon’s Crater Tyco when I discovered a Photoshop sharpening feature I’d never used. I reprocessed the image using that setting and got a “better” result: sharper appearance of the crater itself but with more grain. I think I like this new one better than the one I originally posted. Here they both are: Reprocessed Above / Original Below.
Crater Tyco, Sea of Clouds to the north.
Venus, at the bottom of this picture, graces our sky with the Pleiades.
A clear evening sky gave me the opportunity tonight to see planet Venus floating right below the beautiful naked-eye star cluster, the Pleiades (M45). The combination was beautiful through my binoculars, just before 8:30 PM EDT. I decided to make a quick try at recording the scene with my camera and 400mm telephoto lens mounted on a tripod. The problem, of course, is that an exposure of any decent length will cause the stars to form curved lines as they appear to move through the sky. Even my brief five-second exposure was no different… it looked great in the camera’s built-in LCD preview panel but pretty sad on the big computer screen. So I used a bit of crude Photoshop work to round out the stars. The result won’t make the pages of Astronomy or Sky & Telescope magazines but it’s not too bad and saved the shot. This, and a very intriguing result from the nearby Orion Nebula (M42), makes me eager to get out on another clear night and spend some time with the camera mated to a tracking mount or piggybacked on a telescope!
The Photoshop work, by the way, was a duplicate layer used with “blending mode” set to “Darken” and then used as an offset filter. The offset filter is nudged around until the best combination of masking and brightness is found. I found the process described in a forum discussion on Cloudynights.com.
It was a mostly-cloudy and cool day, only about 70F degrees. After a quiet Sunday morning at home, we decided to explore a park we'd not visited before — Plum Creek Park in the Medina County Park District. The park is located at the edge of the sprawling suburban city of Brunswick and immediately adjacent to residential areas. Exploring the earthen paths through the park's woodlands, however, you'd never know you were so close to "civilization." The woods were lovely, dark, and deep, as the poet wrote. We didn't see much in the way of woodland fauna. We did see deeply green mosses, interesting fungi, tree bark of various textures, and enjoyed an invigorating stroll over the rolling woodland floor. She carried her newish Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot camera and I my new Canon EOS 50D SLR for its first outing in the real world.
With the canopy of trees overhead and thick clouds above that, it was dark along the path. I shot a good number of photos and had some good results. Many shots, however, just didn't make it. Between the difficult conditions and learning the new camera, quite a few shots were exposed poorly or were not in good focus. There's much yet to learn, but I know it's me and not the camera! Except….
That darned 17-40mm wide-angle zoom lens continues to disappoint. I won't give up on it til I can try it stopped down to a decent aperture but I'm unimpressed –disappointed, really– with what I'm seeing. I had hoped the new camera body might provide better results than the little Digital Rebel XT did with this glass. Nope. {sigh}
UPDATE: It is beginning to appear the "software" problems I was having were not so much the fault of Photoshop CS4 as they were Photoshop's issues with my video/chipset drivers. I was able to open and edit a couple of photos after updating the drivers (Dell-modified Intel drivers). It's not all cleared up as PS crashed whilst I was saving an edited image. At least it appears we're headed in the right direction. Then there's learning to work effectively with RAW files….
PhotonStopper 