Temple of the Moon by moonlight

[Ben Egbert]

This shot was taken late at night on a full moon with the Temple of the Moon foreground and the Temple of the sun background.

I am posting a 3000 wide SOOC (straight out of camera) image for you to download and play with. The other is my interpretation. As you can see, I am still leaning on a brighter interpretations.

150403-2467-5dm3 3000

• Ben Egbert
• Oct 13, 2017

 

[Jeffrey]

I think your processing really brings out the finer points of this scene. Nice imaging, Ben.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Thanks jeffrey. much appreciated.

 

[JimFox]

Hey Ben,

First off, it's really nice we came up with a way to upload higher res photos for critique. It is so much easier working on a 3000pix photo then a 1200pix one.

Here is my work on it.

The basics of what I did,

1.Select the sky area to keep it separate.

2. On the ground layer, darken the midtones down to 70%, brighten up the white a bit, and darken the blacks by about 10%.

3. Then I desaturated the ground layer as adding that manual contrast popped the colors too much.

Then in the sky area, I did successive layer masks of the sky, manually selecting less each time until I had the sky a more even shade of blue.

Then I flattened it.

1. I duplicated the layer twice.

2. I selected the Sky again.

2. Using Color Range on the 2nd layer I selected a star and then adjusted the fuzziness to taste, about 100 in this case.

3. On bottom layer, I now brightened this up to taste, which in turn helped bring out more stars and make them brighter.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Thanks Jim, I like what you have done here. I have tried to normalize the sky brightness but it's a learned skill that is pretty fussy to get right and not look banded. You have it down. The sky looks really nice, but the foreground is a bit darker than I like, but it's a;ways a good thing to get alternate opinions and thank a lot for working this. I am just about out of these images, might have one more. But I will find other images for critique.

But I am going to try that sky business again.

 

[Ben Egbert]

here is my attempt at your process. I noticed I had a dark band in the sky about 1/3 of the way up so it was hard to get it even. I also had a hard time getting it as bright as yours.

 

[JimFox]

Hey Ben,

I realized I had missed a step in regards to the brightness of the sky. In the very beginning, after I selected the sky separately, on the layer below it, I brighten the midtones of the sky so that the upper parts were the brightness I wanted. Then in each of those successive layers I darkened the sky about 12% (midtones) at a time using the Level adjustment.

Jim

 

[JimFox]

Here is what my original layer stack looked like.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Thanks Jim, I will try again. I used exposure to brighten, how did you do it?

 

[JimFox]

Hey Ben,

The only time I use Exposure is in ACR, I personally never use it in Photoshop itself. I just use the Levels adjustment. I have found the exposure adjustment like with the Dodge and Burn adjustments cause artifact issues.

Jim

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ok, another try, I think that other than a few masking errors, this is much closer to your edit.

Using levels as you did was the answer.

 

[JimFox]

Hey Ben,

Yeah, I like the look of this edit of yours. The sky definitely looks better.

Jim

 

[Kyle Jones]

Here's my cut. Some color/contrast adjustments independently to the sky and ground along with some contrast. A slight crop and a little burning of the ground as well.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Thanks Kyle, I like the looks of the Temples here, I hope we all learned something along the line.

 

[lionking]

Here is my attempt, no SAT was added...

 

[Ben Egbert]

Thanks Andrey, I really like the looks of this version.

 

[JimFox]

Here is my attempt, no SAT was added...
View attachment 2422

Hey Andrey, your version does look pretty nice!

 

[lionking]

Thanks Andrey, I really like the looks of this version.

Hey Andrey, your version does look pretty nice!

Too bad this isn't my capture...

lol