12.08.2014 My Monthly Shoots

As you know, friends, yesterday was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. My friends and I had a barbecue and watched the sky together, far from the city center. Luckily, we didn't catch anything :) But we didn't sit idle. We observed with telescopes. Since I'd broken my phone, I started wondering if I could take photos with my tablet and 5MP camera. Because it didn't have autofocus, it would take a bad photo in the full moon's bright light. Then I remembered I'd downloaded a program called Picarts. It's a great program, I recommend it. It takes care of the focusing and, if I thought the full moon was too bright, I'd lower the ISO setting to compensate. I took a lot of photos of the moon. I even took one of Saturn, but it didn't turn out very well. I'm including it anyway. At least you'll know what Saturn looks like when you use a 16.8mm lens.

I then took the photos, but they needed processing. Although Picarts solved my focus problem, I knew that too much light was still obscuring the detail in the image. So I installed a program called Photo Edit. I ran the image through three stages of editing. First, I applied the gamma effect, but lowered it. Then I used the sharpening at the highest setting and the blur sharpening near the highest setting. What was the result? You can see it in the image below.

On the left is the moon photo I took directly in RAW. On the right is the version after reducing the gamma, sharpening, and using blurring effects. Looks like the details have increased so much, right?

Now I'm listing the remaining pictures. Here you go.