Create a Striking Eclipse Montage
AUGUST’S ECLIPSE dragged a curved line of totality across the US, from northern Oregon on the west coast to the middle of South Carolina on the east. If you weren’t lucky enough to be on this line, which also took in parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, you will have seen a partial eclipse, which is still one of the greatest sights in the entire galaxy.
The total eclipse relies on the coincidence that our moon appears the same size as the sun in our sky, despite one being very large and far away, and the other being small and close. No other planet in the solar system has total eclipses, and it’s likely to be a rarity across the universe. So, we hope you managed to get some pictures.
If, like us, you weren’t quite sure of your camera settings when you went out, solar filter in hand, to record the eclipse, you might have ended up with some less-than-optimal results. Here’s what you can do with them. 1 RAW MATERIALS The image we’re going to create will be a montage of photos showing the phases of the eclipse, from first contact to greatest coverage (we didn’t see totality from our viewing position). We’re going to start in Lightroom this month, because we shot our eclipse photos as raw files, and we need to do some noise reduction before exporting them as JPEGs. The app comes bundled with Photoshop CC as part of Adobe’s Photographer’s Bundle, but if you prefer a different raw decoder, you can use that.
Lightroom is pretty good at noise reduction, but careful control of the slider is generally required to make sure you don’t smear any fine detail in your image. In this case, however, there’s little detail on the surface of the sun, thanks to wispy cloud that spoiled the view for us, and we don’t care about the black space surrounding it. Therefore, we can just whack the Luminance slider up and not care about the results [ Image A]. A little subtle shading from the clouds remains, which adds interest to the image.
2 NOISES OFF We can quickly apply the same noise reduction to the other image we want to export, by right-clicking the edited image, and selecting “Develop Settings > Copy Settings.” Click “Check None,” and add a check in the “Noise Reduction” box. Then copy the settings. Decide which of the remaining images you want to include in the montage, select them with a left click and the Ctrl button, and paste the noise reduction in with a right click and “Develop Settings > Paste Settings.” Keeping the images selected, export them as JPEGs using “File > Export.” Keep them at their original size, because we’re only going to want the sun and moon, not the dark space around them, and we might as well keep them as large as possible.
3 NATURAL SELECTION Open all your images in Photoshop as separate files. If, like we did, you’ve ended up with a lot of different colors on the sun, we can even them out so that the resulting montage doesn’t look like a row of jelly beans. Photoshop has the facility to do this for us, but you need to select the sun in each image first. There are lots of ways you can do this, depending on how your image has come out.
Our home-made solar filter (a circle cut from a sheet of proper solar safety film, squeezed between two cheap UV filters and a step-up ring) added some flare to the image, which isn’t going to look that good in the final montage, so we’ll be using the selection as an excuse to chop it out. We’re going to use the Elliptical Marquee, then tidy it up in “Select” and “Mask” [ Image B].
4 ELLIPSE ON THE ECLIPSE This tool is a bit of a pain to use, because the ellipse it creates starts its edge at your mouse pointer’s position, and it can be hard to get it the right shape. You can
constrain it to a perfect circle with the Shift key. Concentrate on getting it the right size to completely surround your sun, and move it into position after you’ve released the mouse button. Alternatively, you can use the Quick Selection tool on the background followed by “Select > Inverse,” if you’ve got a good clean division. Darken the sky around the sun using Levels’ black point slider to sharpen the edge. 5 COLOR SCHEMING Once you’ve got the sun selected on each of your images, it’s time to even out those colors. Pick an image that’s roughly in the middle of the color range, and remember its filename—this is going to be the source image. Select your first image, and go to “Image > Adjustments > Match Color.” In the window that opens, make sure the “Ignore Selection” box isn’t checked, and in the “Source” drop-down, choose the filename of your chosen source image [ Image C]. Tinker with the sliders until you like what you see, then do the same thing with all your other images, except the chosen source image. 6 SUNSHINE STATE To finish up, arrange all your suns on a black background—a straight line, especially diagonally across your image [ Image D], can look good, but a curve has much more visual interest. Keep them selected, and you can simply drag and drop them into a new file, or on to the background of an existing image, whichever looks better to you. Use “Select > Modify > Feather” to slightly soften the edge of the sun if it looks too hard, and if there are any suns that are a slightly different size, shrink them down using “Edit > Free Transform,” holding Shift so they’re all the same size as the smallest—making any of them larger loses quality. Finally, flatten any layers in your image, and export your composite as a high-quality JPEG file ready to print.