Simple Moon processing workflow with Open Source tools

About 50 pictures are taken through small 4.5 inch Newtonian using T-adapter. Since back-focus on this small scope is too short, Barlow x2 is used, what rises focal ratio from f8 to f16. Out of those 50 there is one or two where turbulence is not bad. After transfer of images from camera to hard drive, Rawstudio is used to preview them and find better ones. For conversion from RAW to TIFF I am using Darktable. Here you can see what processing is done in Darktable, what modules are active:

Exported TIFF is then imported in GIMP and GMIC is activated from Filters menu. We will stay in GMIC until end with exception when we are copying layers. From Colors, Tone mapping is performed, using default parameters, and we will work further with result of that transformation.

While it looks better I am not happy with amount of detail, so from the same group with default parameters Local normalization is performed and output mode is set to new image.

Again starting from tone-mapped image, using default parameters Local contrast enhancement from Enhancement group is applied.

At this moment one can decide to use those three image to create pseudo HDR using exposure blend, but I didn’t like flat border area in output, caused by local contrast enhancement. Now I copy-paste local contrast enhanced over local contrast normalized and in GMIC, using input layers all, execute Average blending in Layers group, that is the first one with [standard]. Over result of averaging I copy-paste tone-mapped image, one we started with and do again averaging. This is final result: