What can be done?

[Swampy]

Opinions on what I can do to clean this up?

[memobug]

This is a great idea for a photo. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by cleaning it up, though, but I took a try.

It looks like there was too much contrast between the moon and the moonlit branches.

I created a duplicate layer and some histogram adjustment and increased the gamma by 1.3, then I erased the area with the leaf and the moon to let the original image show through (since it was relatively well exposed) then I burned the leaf a little, flattened the image and sharpened it. The gamma increase brought up the noise some, which may have been the opposite of what you were thinking, but it pulls the branches out more, and it just looks a little like film grain to me.

Next I just recropped it so that the moon was at the lower left, placing the point of interest at one of the "rule of thirds" points.

Regards,

Matt

[Andre]

A little sharpening, toning, and recropping is what I suggest.

[Swampy]

What I had in mind is what Andre did, which was to sharpen it all up and make it look like ISO400 instead of ISO1600. I'm not sure I like the toning that Andre did, but he did a great job. I think I'll be looking for a class on Photoshop. :)

So, I'm walking out of a restaurant last night, full moon, getting ready to hop in the car that's parked under this tree and I took a look at the moon and saw the bare branches in front of it. I took a few with the moon and just the branches, but as I thought, the branches wouldn't come out with the moon and the wife and I, at the same time, came up with the leaf idea. I should have moved the car and took some more. I had two legs of the tripod against the car to get this a a couple of others before the moon moved too far over with the car blocking the tripod. Actually had to sit on the ground to take this. This one was taken with my new Sigma 24-70mm at F32, 8 second exposure, ISO100 with a focal length of 70mm. The picture I posted was already modified by me, where the original, you can only see the leaf and a small area around it. The tree was illuminated by an orange street light to the left.

I'm going to take some of your suggestions (and any others that may pop up this weekend and see what I can do with it and I'll repost my final Sunday. When I'm taking pictures with this camera, I don't pay much attention to thirds, but just take a more wider angle, then crop it later.

Can I just take pictures, post them and have you guys edit for me? :D Any suggestions for a Photoshop class or what I should look for in a Photoshop class?

Thanks for the help!

[Andre]

Here's a site that helped me a bit with Photoshop.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/instant_photoshop.shtml

I'm using Photoshop Elements that came with the camera, and I'm fairly happy with it.

What you want to learn is how to use the layers. That gives you the most flexibility. I'm just learning them, but I've already learned a few tricks just playing around with them.

[Swampy]

Thanks for the link Andre. Opened my eyes a little bit. Been playing with this picture all weekend off and on. Got frustrated yesterday, took a 4 hour hike in the mountains and came back to it. Got frustrated again, slept on it, and I think I'm pretty happy with this one. I do want to play around some more and get the gradient light pattern out of around the leaf area from the moon light though.