Merging bracketed shots - HDR?

[kdochert]

Hi,

 

I have a series of landscape bracketed shots that include the moon, the bracket consists of 9 shots going + / - 4 EV at the extremes. I'm trying to create a HDR merge that included the details in the moon that is captured in the lower exposure shots, but when I use the HDR feature the moon is blown out / overexposed and there is no detail retention even if I turn say highlights down. I then tried turning the de-ghosting feature off so that when merging I could blend in the moon from a low exposure shot, but when viewing even the low exposure shot by looking at the "sources" Affinity has dramatically increased the exposure of the low exposure shots so the moon is again blown out and not showing any details?

 

How do I merge these photo's and retain the moon details I'm looking for? Is HDR the wrong feature?

 

Attached is an example of 6 shots (in jpeg format to keep file sizes down), the other three shots in the series won't upload, error 200?

[walt.farrell]

I think you could try using HDR to merge the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th of those. Or to merge the 2nd and 6th. But I don't think you could merge all 6 as they're not similar enough.

[John Rostron]

I tried the HDR process in Affinity and also in Photomatix. In Affinity I opted for the Detailed tonemap and in Photomatix, for the Natural map.

Photomatix (above) seems to have produced a reasonable map.

In Affinity, there is a blue cast, and the moon has one distinct ghost, but looks OK otherwise.

I looked at the images in succession, and the moon does seem to move between shots. If you are setting your exposures manually, you will not be able to avoid this. Could I suggest that you go back to your original images, and move  the moon  so that they are as precisely aligned as possible. You will not have to move it much, and you have some rather ill-defined sky in between  which helps. With this kind of shot, with fixed parts to the image and parts which are non-fixed, but are moving, you will always have this problem. There was a recent post of someone trying to merge images of the stars (rotating) against a fixed horizon.

Hope this helps,

John

[firstdefence]

I thought the Affinity version looked awful so I had a go myself, didn't use tone map, and aligned via rotate etc not perspective and the alignment worked better.

 

[kdochert]

Ok I found using less images and selecting which ones to use is improving things, here's where I'm at (this site is only taking low res versions of pictures reliably?).

 

Displaying the details of the moon is really what I'm trying to accomplish.

 

Another other tricks / ideas are welcome.

[firstdefence]

Had another but this time in Photomatrix.