Solar eclipse with clouds processing question

[Duckman]

I am wondering if any of you Photoshop wizards can point me towards what you think is the best way to process my eclipse images...
Unfortunately, there were clouds of that day... Fortunately, I was still able to witness and photograph the total eclipse!!! 8)
I took several bracketed shots of the eclipse, clouds are clearly present in all but the shortest exposures I have..

I would really like to make use the brighter exposures to bring out maximum detail and size of the corona/prominences whist mitigating any cloud obscurity.

I have access to Photoshop 6 not CC at the moment. I have at least 21 (3 bracketed series of 7) "usable" low ISO shots. Is this possible? Can the clouds be averaged out like noise using multiple exposures?? I don't know Photoshop well at all but, I know amazing things can be done with it so I figured it cant hurt to ask!

I really want these images to be the best they possibly can for a wall print.

Any suggestion or questions are welcome!
Thanks
-J

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Lightroom has a haze removal tool that might help a little, but you cannot recover information that is not there, just emphasize the haze less.

You can search for information on how to use it. I've tried it and found it easier to use than manually adjusting colors, contrast, etc.

 

[Duckman]

Lightroom has a haze removal tool that might help a little, but you cannot recover information that is not there, just emphasize the haze less.

You can search for information on how to use it. I've tried it and found it easier to use than manually adjusting colors, contrast, etc.

Thanks Mt. Spokane!

I think all the information is there... just spread across the 21 images if that makes sense.
The clouds weren't stagnant obstructing any one area for all the images, there were thin clouds moving across the frame during totality.

I'm imagining it kind of analogous to trying to remove people walking in a scene from a series of shots in front of a building or something?

I should note the framing is different in the 3 bracketed series though...

Thanks,
-J

 

[stevelee]

I think all the information is there... just spread across the 21 images if that makes sense.
The clouds weren't stagnant obstructing any one area for all the images, there were thin clouds moving across the frame during totality.

I'm imagining it kind of analogous to trying to remove people walking in a scene from a series of shots in front of a building or something?

I should note the framing is different in the 3 bracketed series though...

Stacking in layers should work. People who know what they are doing and act quickly bracket many exposures during totality and stack them to get a wider range of corona and such than any single picture could capture. I got off just five shots, and all at the same exposure settings. You will almost for sure need to align the layers manually. Auto align will probably give you an error message. Try different blend options on the upper layers to see what gives you the best effect. "Lighten" might be worth a try. You can use "Difference" or something close kin to help you do the alignment.

I've stacked over a hundred layers of my partial shots to make a time lapse video. I'm going to use the sunspots where visible to help me line them up. I used guides to help me get the images in the ballpark so far and saved the four gig file to work on later.

 

[stevelee]

And I meant to add that stacking is regularly used to bring out more detail in astronomy photos, so none of this would be new to people who shoot pictures through their telescopes. They use a clock drive, so wouldn't have the alignment problems. And they probably use dedicated software rather than Photoshop, but I have no experience with that.

 

[Duckman]

Lightroom has a haze removal tool that might help a little, but you cannot recover information that is not there, just emphasize the haze less.

You can search for information on how to use it. I've tried it and found it easier to use than manually adjusting colors, contrast, etc.

Thanks Mt. Spokane!

I think all the information is there... just spread across the 21 images if that makes sense.
The clouds weren't stagnant obstructing any one area for all the images, there were thin clouds moving across the frame during totality.

I'm imagining it kind of analogous to trying to remove people walking in a scene from a series of shots in front of a building or something?

I should note the framing is different in the 3 bracketed series though...

Thanks,
-J

And I meant to add that stacking is regularly used to bring out more detail in astronomy photos, so none of this would be new to people who shoot pictures through their telescopes. They use a clock drive, so wouldn't have the alignment problems. And they probably use dedicated software rather than Photoshop, but I have no experience with that.

Thank you Stevelee!

 

[Rachael Alice]

You can't recover all effects with lightroom tool. So you have to do some research on it and play manually with color, contrast etc.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Lightroom has a haze removal tool that might help a little, but you cannot recover information that is not there, just emphasize the haze less.

You can search for information on how to use it. I've tried it and found it easier to use than manually adjusting colors, contrast, etc.

Thanks Mt. Spokane!

I think all the information is there... just spread across the 21 images if that makes sense.
The clouds weren't stagnant obstructing any one area for all the images, there were thin clouds moving across the frame during totality.

I'm imagining it kind of analogous to trying to remove people walking in a scene from a series of shots in front of a building or something?

I should note the framing is different in the 3 bracketed series though...

Thanks,
-J

You can try stacking the images, but I do not know that it will remove the clouds. It certainly is worth trying. Stacking is often used to provide more depth of field by selecting the areas of a group of images with more detail to use in a composite image. There may be some assumptions made in programming the software that would affect this situation, so try different software solutions, since they may approach the problem differently.

Most stacking software can do a reasonable amount of aligning images, so crop them such that they are close to being aligned.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/image-stacks.html

 

[Duckman]

Thank you all for the replies...

for anyone that's curious...What I ended up doing, which I'm pretty pleased with, is bringing images into Photoshop as layers.. converting to a smart object and then blending using the "mean" option.
Thanks again.
-J

 

[stevelee]

You can try stacking the images, but I do not know that it will remove the clouds. It certainly is worth trying. Stacking is often used to provide more depth of field by selecting the areas of a group of images with more detail to use in a composite image. There may be some assumptions made in programming the software that would affect this situation, so try different software solutions, since they may approach the problem differently.

Most stacking software can do a reasonable amount of aligning images, so crop them such that they are close to being aligned.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/image-stacks.html

There are lots of uses for stacking. I used stacking for focus when shooting macros since the depth of field is measured in millimeters a lot of time. Also stacking is used for HDR. Astronomers use extreme versions of that to show up things too faint to see in any one exposure.

The point with the clouds is that they are moving. Duckman was right in applying what he knew from a different context. Say you are trying to photograph something with a lot of tourists around. So you take many pictures of it and stack them. The people change positions and move away over time. The lighting might change a bit, but the mountain pretty much stays in one place during that time frame. So you can stack the pictures and often come up with the scene with no people showing up in it. Same way for the clouds. Sure, the sun is moving a bit, but you compensate for that in aligning the layers. The clouds are moving maybe faster and maybe in a different direction. So with stacking, they can go away just like the people did in the landscape shot.

 

[stevelee]

Thank you all for the replies...

for anyone that's curious...What I ended up doing, which I'm pretty pleased with, is bringing images into Photoshop as layers.. converting to a smart object and then blending using the "mean" option.
Thanks again.
-J

Glad that worked for you.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Thank you all for the replies...

for anyone that's curious...What I ended up doing, which I'm pretty pleased with, is bringing images into Photoshop as layers.. converting to a smart object and then blending using the "mean" option.
Thanks again.
-J

Great! Post the image so we can enjoy it.