close-up moon dissapears with auto correction

[Peter Vancoillie]

I think you should see this: the moon completely vanishes into black with auto exposure. Lr classic 14.4, canon R5 mkII

[GoldingD]

A couple of notes. The first one is a request for you to share, perhaps at a photo share site, a copy of your RAW file to test.

A second note, is have you considered avoiding using a global adjustment and instead using a mask, likely a Subject Mask as to adjust just the moon. You may also want to duplicate and Invert that mask as so to just adjust the sky (if needed). Now this will not allow for an auto-adjust. but..

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/y35ztb4w1kv0rtpy30hk8/2025-07-04-19-25-59.mp4?rlkey=9n4g9mgdeuq1xb6wn...

A third note, an inquiry, is do you have any plugin loaded that might affect auto tone? (not common)

[Peter Vancoillie]

Thanks David, but it's not that I can't get it edited manually, I was just suprised to see this result and wondered why, since it doesn't happen with lightning at night, of which I have hundreds of frames. That usually isn't that bad, and if anything, I turns it more into daylight but never black.

And I don't have a plugin that works within Lr.

[JohanElzenga]

That does not surprise me much. 'Auto' is not magic. It's a rather simple algorithm and clearly not adapted to an image like this, that is unusual because it contains (and should contain) a large number of purely black pixels and a large number of (almost) white pixels with very few pixels in between. I see the same limitation when editing night shots taken on a game drive with a spotlight, like this one. Even the adaptive profile, which is way more advanced than the 'Auto' button, can't deal with this kind of shot and grossly overexposes it.

[Peter Vancoillie]

Thanks Johan, I know it's not magic, and I know very well how to deal with it manually, I've used Lr since version 0. But since auto became much better from version 8 on, I usually give it a try, and adjust where needed because that's just faster. If I don't like it, I revert. I was just suprised to see such a strange result. When I do ligtning pictures shot at night, it often doesn't do a bad job, and a bright bolt in the night is somewhat similar. I never had a frame go black with lighting, if anything, it turns it almost into daylight.

[drtonyb]

@Peter Vancoillie 

I tried this with one of my own NEF files of the moon, very similar to yours. I got the same result with Auto - black.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Crop down to where almost no black night is showing. Apply Auto. Reset your crop. Is it any better?

The same issues occur when shooting on a seamless paper background where the subject is smaller than the boundary edges. Eliminate the superfluous area with a crop before asking Auto to interpret. 

[Peter Vancoillie]

Thanks Rikk,
but no. A crop till the edges of the moon made it dark gray, with a few
lighter gray edges of the brightest craters, a crop further into the moon
with only 2 small triangles made the frame completely black again.
This is the crop before auto of the last and most narrow attempt, from the
after I didn't make a screenshot since it was pitch black.


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[drtonyb]

@Rikk Flohr: Photography, @Peter Vancoillie 

Cropping is certainly a big factor, as is the actual size of the Moon in the original frame.

Here is a screen shot with Auto applied to a shot of the Moon that fills a large part of the original full frame of my Nikon D750.

As can be seen, Auto has no problem with this image, despite the relatively large area of near black. It has even brought out a bit more detail from the shadows along the terminator.

To quote @JohanElzenga, "'Auto' is not magic", so in some extremes it will fail to produce a good result. I also note for my example photo shown above, Adaptive Color fails miserably, grossly overexposing the Moon.