Achieving evenly toned mosaics

[King]

After pulling off a decent crescent moon mosaic I thought I'd go for a full one (this is from 17th April). Resized from about 3000 square pixels...

I had a couple of complications pulling this off but the main concern is the unevenness of the shading. It is quite clear that it's not one image.

Is it simply a matter of exposure?

[GazOC]

nice shot. Are you adjusting exposure for each of the different panes? Its a lot easier to pan over all of the moon, try and find the right settings for the entire moon and stick with them for every frame.

[Rob_Jn]

Have you tried iMerge from John Grove:

Jon Grove's Homepage

I have used it a while ago and it gives seamless results.

Rob.

[WayBig]

I've downloaded Microsoft ICE, I've only used it once but it stitched and adjusted a lunar mosaic automatically. It's free too, I was very impressed, my favourite microsoft product

[King]

Actually I haven't used either and they just might help with the solar mosaic I'm working on right now so I'll give them a go now.

Cheers!

[WayBig]

Here's the link to ice.

Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor (ICE)

[King]

nice shot. Are you adjusting exposure for each of the different panes? Its a lot easier to pan over all of the moon, try and find the right settings for the entire moon and stick with them for every frame.

I scanned the whole moon before shooting, checked the exposure looked okay for the whole surface then kept the same settings for all the shots so it was a bit of a surprise really. I figured it has something to do with exposure being greater in the middle than the edges in each of the 20+ panes.

Incidentally, I used Photoshop Elements 5 "Photomerge Panorama" feature for the pane merging.

[ollypenrice]

ICE is very good but you can help it. In Ps choose a reference image from near the middle and then adjust its immediate neighbours in Levels and Curves till you see the same or very similar brightness measurements on the overlapping part of the images. Never touch the reference image, just the neighbours. Work outwards from there. The closer you are to start with the better ICE will work. You need big overlaps.

Olly