Blue Moon

Anubis1311

Well-Known Member
Despite the fact that I’m a self certified professional cloud magnet I did manage to get a break in the clouds. I have no interesting landmarks to frame the moon with near me so I just shot the moon itself. It also came up from the south and I can’t shoot anything southerly with my telescope so this is handheld with my Canon 7D mkII and sigma 150-600mm. F11 ISO-100 1/250 sec. Processed in photoshop as a mineral moon.
228C4C67-7D36-41FD-9319-5695E28D14FE.jpeg
 
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JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
Awesome work! Love all of the detail in this. I used a very similar setup to capture it too. I used my Nikon D850 and Tamron 150-600mm, and also my Nikon D810 and 70-300mm.

I am really impressed on how you got the mineral look to this. Would it be possible for you to write up a little tutorial on how to get moon to look as a mineral moon? I have tried and tried, seen YouTube video after video with tips on how to do this, and for the life of me, I can't get my moon images to look mineral. I must be missing something, but I have no clue. So if you have a chance, can you write something up on how you processed this to get this look?
 

Anubis1311

Well-Known Member
Awesome work! Love all of the detail in this. I used a very similar setup to capture it too. I used my Nikon D850 and Tamron 150-600mm, and also my Nikon D810 and 70-300mm.

I am really impressed on how you got the mineral look to this. Would it be possible for you to write up a little tutorial on how to get moon to look as a mineral moon? I have tried and tried, seen YouTube video after video with tips on how to do this, and for the life of me, I can't get my moon images to look mineral. I must be missing something, but I have no clue. So if you have a chance, can you write something up on how you processed this to get this look?
Of course I will however it might not make for a very exciting read 😂 I also don’t follow a specific workflow but I’ll detail the steps I took to process this particular image 👍
 

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
Of course I will however it might not make for a very exciting read 😂 I also don’t follow a specific workflow but I’ll detail the steps I took to process this particular image 👍
That would be awesome! Any thing to get me pointed in the right direction that works. :)
 

Anubis1311

Well-Known Member
That would be awesome! Any thing to get me pointed in the right direction that works. :)
ok so I’ll give you a brief run down of what I did.

Open up the image and crop it to the size you want. Sounds obvious but needs to be a colour image

Duplicate the background layer twice.

On one of the layers you want to sharpen it. There’s lots of different ways to sharpen (Camera raw/topaz sharpen/high pass filter method). Then change the layer style to ‘luminance’. (Rename it if you wish) Hide this layer for now.

On the other duplicated layer you want to make an adjustment to the vibrancy and increase vibrance. You should see some blues come through.

Open up camera raw and in the HSL colour mixer select the saturation tab and increase the blue and orange. You can play with the luminance and hue tabs if you want.

Once you’ve pulled the saturation through and can see some nice colour hold Ctrl+shift+alt+E to copy visible.

On this layer adjust the clarity, blacks and white in camera raw until you get some nice detail in the surface

Now unhide the luminance layer and bring it to the top. Adjust the opacity if needed to soften the effect of the sharpened layer.

Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E again to copy visible. Make some curve adjustments to enhance the image (S curve is a good place to start).

That’s it. I then usually sent it to my phone and make some tweaks. The native photo app on the iPhone has a pretty good sharpening tool as well. Just don’t over do it. I usually slide the sharpen slider back and forth so I can see the exact point it comes into sharpness.
 
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JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
ok so I’ll give you a brief run down of what I did.

Open up the image and crop it to the size you want. Sounds obvious but

Duplicate the background layer twice.

On one of the layers you want to sharpen it. There’s lots of different ways to sharpen (Camera raw/topaz sharpen/high pass filter method). Then change the layer style to ‘luminance’. (Rename it if you wish) Hide this layer for now.

On the other duplicated layer you want to make an adjustment to the vibrancy and increase vibrance. You should see some blues come through.

Open up camera raw and in the HSL colour mixer select the saturation tab and increase the blue and orange. You can play with the luminance and hue tabs if you want.

Once you’ve pulled the saturation through and can see some nice colour hold Ctrl+shift+alt+E to copy visible.

On this layer adjust the clarity, blacks and white in camera raw until you get some nice detail in the surface

Now unhide the luminance layer and bring it to the top. Adjust the opacity if needed to soften the effect of the sharpened layer.

Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E again to copy visible. Make some curve adjustments to enhance the image (S curve is a good place to start).

That’s it. I then usually sent it to my phone and make some tweaks. The native photo app on the iPhone has a pretty good sharpening tool as well. Just don’t over do it. I usually slide the sharpen slider back and forth so I can see the exact point it comes into sharpness.
Awesome! Thanks so much! That looks pretty clear, let me try it out later tonight and see if I can finally get a mineral moon. :)
 
Despite the fact that I’m a self certified professional cloud magnet I did manage to get a break in the clouds. I have no interesting landmarks to frame the moon with near me so I just shot the moon itself. It also came up from the south and I can’t shoot anything southerly with my telescope so this is handheld with my Canon 7D mkII and sigma 150-600mm. F11 ISO-100 1/250 sec. Processed in photoshop as a mineral moon.View attachment 64859

ok so I’ll give you a brief run down of what I did.

Open up the image and crop it to the size you want. Sounds obvious but

Duplicate the background layer twice.

On one of the layers you want to sharpen it. There’s lots of different ways to sharpen (Camera raw/topaz sharpen/high pass filter method). Then change the layer style to ‘luminance’. (Rename it if you wish) Hide this layer for now.

On the other duplicated layer you want to make an adjustment to the vibrancy and increase vibrance. You should see some blues come through.

Open up camera raw and in the HSL colour mixer select the saturation tab and increase the blue and orange. You can play with the luminance and hue tabs if you want.

Once you’ve pulled the saturation through and can see some nice colour hold Ctrl+shift+alt+E to copy visible.

On this layer adjust the clarity, blacks and white in camera raw until you get some nice detail in the surface

Now unhide the luminance layer and bring it to the top. Adjust the opacity if needed to soften the effect of the sharpened layer.

Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E again to copy visible. Make some curve adjustments to enhance the image (S curve is a good place to start).

That’s it. I then usually sent it to my phone and make some tweaks. The native photo app on the iPhone has a pretty good sharpening tool as well. Just don’t over do it. I usually slide the sharpen slider back and forth so I can see the exact point it comes into sharpness.

Thank you so much for the detailed steps, I shall give it try.

Oliver
 

kiwiapple

Well-Known Member
Thank you for those tips; I have given this a try on one of my moon images, and no matter what I do, adjusting the Vibrance, and blue and orange HSL sliders don't bring out any of those mineral colours :-(

This is the best I could come up with.
jg-20230831-Canon EOS R5-1006.png
 

Anubis1311

Well-Known Member
Thank you for those tips; I have given this a try on one of my moon images, and no matter what I do, adjusting the Vibrance, and blue and orange HSL sliders don't bring out any of those mineral colours :-(

This is the best I could come up with.View attachment 64893
So I screen shotted your pic and had a play. I had to make an adjustment to the colour balance before starting. I increased the blue and then tweaked the green and red to draw out the blue and orange colours a little so I had something to work with. Then I pretty much had a mess with the HSL sliders to bring out some saturation. Obviously the resolution is pants as it was a screen shot from my phone but a quick 10 min play had some minerals coming out 👍
Untitled-2.jpeg
 

Mike Lewis

Staff Member
"Despite the fact that I’m a self certified professional cloud magnet " - 😄😁😆

Really nice on this one. Also very nice to hear how you go about getting the colors to come out too. I am going to stash that explanation away for the next time I give this a try, as like Jim I have admired this effect on many moon images but have never managed a decent result when trying to duplicate the effect myself.

ML
 

kiwiapple

Well-Known Member
So I screen shotted your pic and had a play. I had to make an adjustment to the colour balance before starting. I increased the blue and then tweaked the green and red to draw out the blue and orange colours a little so I had something to work with. Then I pretty much had a mess with the HSL sliders to bring out some saturation. Obviously the resolution is pants as it was a screen shot from my phone but a quick 10 min play had some minerals coming out 👍View attachment 64916
Wow, I'm going to have to play around with this a bit more!
 
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