Combining Moon and Pleiades help please?

[Andrew*]

<dunce cap on>

I've got the pictures from last night, with the moon and M45 encounter. 1/400 for the moon, up to 2 seconds for the stars in the Pleiades. Now how do I combine them in photoshop? Links to any tutorials would be nice as well.

As you can see, the long exposure has picked up heaps of glare from the moon, making things a little trickier.

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

Cheers for any help

Andrew

[Psychobilly]

Like this you mean.....

(click to enlarge)

Open the Moon and Stars image convert it to graysacle then be really agressive with levels... so all your left with is the stars and the moon all the glare has gone. use the eyedropper to pic the background color and use this to paint out the moon ... use the eye dropper to pick the star color and use a brush with faded edges to paint inthe stars using their actual positions for the center...(i have used 9 pixels a bit big to show you the effect)...

Open the moon image...

Duplicate the layer and delete the background one...

Paste in the stars and make them the back layer....

Go back to the moon layer and erase the area covering the stars... flatten image... et voila'

Billy...

[themos]

do wot?

[Psychobilly]

There are a couple more stars in there if you want to "repair" them as well... if you want to be fussy to can alter the star size and colour of the fainter ones as you do it... like all things there are several ways of achieving the same effect...

Billy...

[Andrew*]

Thanks a lot for your help, Billy.

I tried your way first, but as I'm no good at this, I couldn't get a decent number of stars, so I looked through the processing primers and used MartinB's "Creating a star layer". Created one, then pasted it onto the moon image. Worked a treat! Result upcoming...

Thanks anyway,

Andrew