Here is an image I took when I was on a trip to San Francisco in February of
2023. This is a view of the city from Twin Peaks Park overlooking the bay
towards Oakland. I did not have a camera with me, so I snapped this on my
phone, at that time a Pixel 4a. The built-in photo app does not give lot of control,
but I did adjust the exposure/brightness to get some detail on the moon.
Post processing was done in Photoshop 2024. I did some initial exposure/color
adjustments in a Camera Raw filter doing a light dehaze and a smart sharpen,
since the initial image was a little blurry. These adjustments made banding in the
sky, probably a jpeg artifact more visible. To counter this, I did a Gaussian Blur of
the sky using a gradient mask and excluded the moon with the same mask. I
then tweaked the brightness/contrast on the moon using an adjustment layer with
a mask and finally did a saturation/vibrance adjustment layer to increase color
saturation a bit..
This round’s discussion is now closed! 6 comments posted
Adi Ben-Senior
Bill, This what makes photography so interesting. If you break this picture to its elements one at a time by the book - nothing works. Yet, the picture works wonderful. In a full sense and harmony. all the separate elements come together so perfectly. Where this is not your best picture I have seen, but as an example of how the antithesis can create a new thesis this is probably one of the better ones I have seen in years. Wow! Posted: 03/09/2025 09:05:31
Michael Jack
There is a lot to look at in the image, and I think the moon adds a lot of interest even though it is small. To my eye, the coolness of the shadow part of the image seems to be a bit of a distraction because of the color temperature difference so if my image, I would have considered warming it up a bit. Have you thought about this in B/W? Posted: 03/09/2025 12:22:36
Larry Treadwell
As noted there are a lot of elements in the image that individually are interesting. For me there is just too much blank sky that makes everything else in the image small and somewhat featureless. Posted: 03/11/2025 08:26:07
Barbara Gore
Hi Bill. I really like the vantage point from which you captured this photo as it provides a sense of the location and it gives me many things to look at. The moon's natural appearance is well done, but for me it appears somewhat small against the vast sky. Similar to Michael's comment, I find the transition between the shadowed and sunlit areas a bit abrupt. Posted: 03/13/2025 17:49:54
Grace Cohen
Bill - I like this image for what it says - the warm and cool contrasts and the contrast of the expanse of mankind against the vastness of nature and where they come together. Folks seem not to like the small moon - perhaps crop the sky down and insert your moon lower and larger ... Although this may not be a 'photographer's photo', it has a lot of editorial value. I've shot the opposite view from the distant peaks of Mt Tamalpais looking back at SF. Posted: 03/20/2025 20:39:26
Gokulananda Nandan
Bill, This is an interesting picture considering the moon, a vast sky and a cityscape are all in the same picture. I agree with Michael that I would have tried it making a B/W photo. Posted: 03/21/2025 00:05:07
