Oh, Mr. Moon

I've been working on getting an interesting shot of the moon for weeks. Seeing as we're in the middle of the rainy season in the Pacific Northwest, this is no small feat, but tonight I finally have something to share.

Here is my final image.

I wish I could say I just pointed my camera at the sky and used some mad camera skillz to get this shot but, sadly, that's not exactly what happened.

This is my original shot. The shutter speed on this was 1/50 second. It's not bad, but the moon lacks detail and the trees don't stand out from the sky.

I opened my original in Picasa and cranked up the brightness to make the trees pop. Then I opened it in GIMP.

Then I opened this in GIMP as a layer. This is the same shot as my original, but from the RAW file. As you can see, it's much darker than the jpeg. Then I set the opacity of the layer to around 35%...transparent enough to see the silhouetted trees in the base layer, but opaque enough to add some detail to the moon.

Then I flattened the image and voila! There you have it!

This was the easiest and fastest way I could think of to get an acceptable result, given that it was the first time I've used the software. I need to keep working on it so I can have more definition on the moon and more contrast between the branches and the sky.