Blending Photos Last Monday was a great time for Astrophotographers, we had a Lunar Eclipse fully visible from here in Tenerife which not only gave us some fabulous opportunities to shoot the dark red Moon but also to take shots of the moon with the background stars visible which is not normally possible due to the brightness of the full Moon. The background stars are still fairly faint and normally you would tend to use a long exposure to really bring them out but this overexposes the Moon, so to achieve a good balance I have used a technique called blending, quiet simply I have processed the RAW file twice the first for the Moon and the second to bring out the background stars.

I then copied the Moon image and pasted it on to the star image.  This is effectively laying the moon image on top of the star image thus blocking out the star image I then added an inverted mask.  This makes the pasted Moon Image transparent so that the star image shows through, then all I have to do is use the brush tool to make the actual Moon opaque, thus the stars shine through from below whilst the correct image of the moon blocks out the over exposed moon giving us a well balanced final photo.

All today’s Photo’s were taken by myself from Tenerife.  I look forward to seeing you all on our Astrophotogrpahy 3 day course at Easter.

As usual any questions, just ask Until next time Peter.