At the time of my presentation, I did not have information on how to post process eclipse images. Further research has solved that.

My presentation emphasized shooting close up still image during totality to capture the ethereal filaments of the corona plus solar prominences and earthshine moon. I briefly covered other types of images.  This post mainly covers post processing close-up stills but points you to information on wide angle stills, time lapse and video.

Some of the information I found is copy righted material that can’t be posted here.  What follows provides you a guide to where you can find each article and what it addresses.

Assuming captures with a wide range of exposures, post processing a close-up corona composite still image involves three challenges: aligning images, exposure blending multiple captures and sharpening. You will not be surprised to learn there are several ways of doing each of these. There’s an implicit fourth item, how to get your images prepared and loaded into the needed software for each of these steps.

As I’ve posted before, Alan Dyer’s “How to Photograph the Solar Eclipse” is easily the most comprehensive source for all aspects of eclipse photography including wide angle, tele, still, time-lapse and video using current generation popular equipment and software and is only $10! http://www.amazingsky.com/eclipsebook.html  Dyer’s eBook provides the most information about that forth challenge – preliminary adjustments and image loading.  But all these references assume some basic knowledge of LR and PS.

Four references are articles from Sky and Telescope magazine. You can find these on-line in the magazine General One File at the Eugene Library web site (Springfield??) if you have a library card or you can go to the U of O library where physical copies are shelved. One article and a video tutorial are on-line.

In the digital era, perhaps the granddaddy on post processing eclipse composites is an article by G. Pellett in the Jan. 1998 issue of Sky and Telescope, p117. It describes the use of an early Photoshop tool, the radial-blur filter to spatially filter corona images. It’s a hoot to read his description of the early history of digital eclipse post processing. Roger Ressmeyer created the first digital eclipse HDR image using software he wrote (5,000 lines of Fortran) spending 500 hours over 18 months to produce the image.  Pellet’s approach was also time consuming. The radial-blur filter was applied to each of his 15 scanned 35mm film images. Rendering each filter took one to two hours until he upgraded his early Mac (took only? 15-30 min. per filter with the newer Mac). Remember that next time your fretting about how slow LR and PS are!

Rather than chasing down the Pellett article that uses an early version of PS, go on-line to get RussellBrownphseclipse.pdf. He ‘s Adobe’s Senior Creative Director. You’ll find the PDF, a video tutorial and his stacking and radial blur actions here: http://www.russellbrown.com/tips_tech.html  This covers alignment using rulers and Difference blending mode, exposure blending using simple luminosity masks and of course sharpening using the radial-blur filter. An article by Maurice Hamilton in the May 2006 Sky and Telescope p100 covers the same workflow.

Sean Walker, image-processing editor for Sky and Telescope, covered a completely different workflow in the June 2009, p64 and updated it in April 2012, p75. He used one of many similar astro programs, Maxim DL, using stars in the images to align them before importing into Photomatix Pro for HDR tone mapping. These steps are followed by the application of multiple High Pass Sharpening filters. He acknowledges that HDR processing of eclipse images can produce artifacts that require additional processing steps. Examples of HDR artifacts can be seen in these crescent moon images. See Walker’s articles for how to address these or use luminosity masks for exposure blending as described by Brown, Hamilton or Dyer. And odds are a hybrid sharpening approach is possible combining radial-blur and High Pass filters.

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Last Updated on June 7, 2017