TaW:#2 - Moonshot Split tone.

Before Canon 1dmkII 300mm2.8L w/1.4x (500s @ F8 ISO200)

Okay, heres what I started with, a basic moon shot. I started this out as an exercise on using my camera's spot meter to properly expose a small moon against a dark sky as well as trying every trick I knew to get a sharp picture - Tripod, Mirror lockup, fast shutter speed, and since I didn't have my remote cord, I used the camera's ten second timer to make sure any vibrations from my finger hitting the shutter had a chance to settle out before the image was taken.

Well after getting the image into the computer it was pretty boring. So a little magic in Lightroom playing with Clarity, tone curves and finally a bit of split toning thrown in at the end just for fun got me this.

After:

It looks much better at full resolution. But tone curves is the magic tool to use for bringing out the texture in the moon's surface. Using the tone curve, I repositioned the shadow and highlight markers to the edges of the histogram, Then I set the shadow slider to -100 and the Highlight slider to +100 and adjusted the lights and darks to get as much texture out of the midtones as possible. This really let the sharpness tool get some extra detail when cranked up. Finally a little spilt toning to turn the shadows blue and there you go, quite a bit of difference from where we started. And no trips to CS3 - all Lightroom, I love it. :-)