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I finally stopped cropping my moon shots so tight and the detail jumped out at me
For the first two years I shot the moon with my old Canon and a 300mm lens, I kept zooming in and cropping every single frame as tight as I could, thinking more moon meant a better picture. Last month I was out in my backyard in Tucson around 11pm, and I accidentally left one shot uncropped with a bunch of empty black sky around the moon. When I pulled it up on my laptop, the craters along the terminator looked sharper than anything I had gotten before, and I realized the tight crops were making my editing software work too hard. The extra space gives the software room to figure out what is actually sharp and what is just noise, so the edges of the moon stop looking like mush. I went back through some old files from a trip to Sedona and recropped 8 of them with maybe 20 percent frame around the moon, and 5 of those came out better than my original edits. Your mileage may vary depending on your setup, but if you are pixel peeping at 100 percent and everything looks soft, try backing off the crop first. Has anyone else noticed their moon shots improving once they gave the subject some breathing room?
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hugo_coleman286d ago
Yep, less crop equals more real detail, software can actually do its job. Took me way too long to figure that out too, the black sky isn't wasted space.
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