Best Practices - merging images to correct exposure
I'm looking for the "best" way to combine two images where an element in one image is dramatically overexposed and the other image has a correctly exposed version of that same element. Here its the moon against a background of stars and planets, where one image is long enough to get star/planet exposure and the other correctly exposes the moon itself.
Attached are five images:
One is a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the moon earlier this week. This was a 2-second exposure t
The correctly exposed moon layer doesn't need a mask; simply change its blend mode to Lighter Colour.
Try the Healing Brush Tool to hide the overexposed moon and halo. My screenshot shows the settings and the large source area I picked and dabbed onto a new layer. I erased a tiny spot from the healing brush layer to restore visibility of the quite bright star to the right of the moon.
Zipped .afphoto file (AP beta 1.8.3): Moon Composite.afphoto.zip
