A solar eclipse sequence isn't one photo — it's several completely different lighting situations stitched into one story: a filtered partial, a fleeting contact moment, and totality itself. Editing it well means treating each phase as its own problem rather than running one edit across the whole set. The framework below is built on the phase-by-phase approach popularized by PhotoPills' eclipse editing guides, adapted here into how I actually work through a sequence.
Why One Edit Doesn't Cover the Whole Sequence
A filtered partial, a contact moment, and totality are three different lighting situations captured through three different setups — a solar filter comes off partway through the sequence, exposure swings by a dozen stops, and the color temperature of what you're actually recording changes completely. Run one global stretch or one blanket HDR merge across all of it and you'll get halos, an unnaturally orange corona, or a lunar disk that looks gray instead of black. The fix is to edit each phase on its own terms, then bring them together carefully at the end.
Editing the Filtered Partials
The goal here is simple: a clean disk edge and consistent color from the first frame to the last. Set white balance once, from a single reference frame, and sync that same setting across every partial in the filtered run — don't let each frame drift independently. Place your exposure using the highlights, not brightness alone; a clipped photosphere isn't coming back in post. Sharpen only the lunar limb itself, with a small radius and a tight mask, rather than sharpening the whole frame and dragging noise up with it. Watch for bright or dark halos forming right at the limb, banding that's hiding under crushed shadows, and the disk quietly changing scale from one frame to the next in a sequence.
Editing Contact Moments
Diamond ring and Baily's beads frames are more of a selection problem than an editing problem. Your job is picking the one frame that actually caught the moment — a clean bead, the full ring, the first hint of the pink chromosphere — instead of trying to reconstruct it from a frame that missed it. Set one neutral white balance reference per contact sequence rather than per frame. Mask the chromosphere locally and knock down color noise before you push saturation on it, not after. Watch for highlights clipped past the point of recovery, beads that get reshaped into something the camera didn't actually capture, and a thin rim inflated into a thick, unrealistic red halo.
Editing Totality
Totality rewards restraint more than any other phase. Keep white balance neutral — never carry over the warmer WB you used on the filtered partials, since that's the single most common reason a totality shot ends up looking orange instead of a neutral gray-white corona. Start from a low-contrast base rather than pushing hard right away. Use gentle, targeted masking instead of one aggressive global stretch: hold the inner highlights close to the disk back a little, apply mild contrast through the mid-corona, and only a small lift or dehaze on the faint outer streamers. Blend region by region rather than reaching for a single HDR merge across the whole frame — global processing is usually what turns a corona metallic-looking or crushes the disk edge into an unnatural dark ring.
Habits Worth Keeping Across Every Phase
A few things apply no matter which phase you're working on: process from the RAW file in 16-bit and treat it as your source of truth rather than re-editing an already-flattened export; keep dehaze, clarity, texture, and sharpening light and local rather than reaching for big global amounts; and if you're building a multi-frame sequence, lock one disk diameter, one rotation convention, and one spacing rule at the start and hold to it for every single frame — inconsistency here is what makes a composite fall apart on close inspection.
Compositing a Progression Over a Landscape
Once the individual phases are edited, arranging them into a single arc over a landscape is a separate discipline from the eclipse editing above — this is where a lot of otherwise well-edited sequences end up looking pasted in.
Build Order
Finish the base landscape completely first — RAW processing, sky/foreground masking, noise reduction, all of it — before a single eclipse element goes on top of it. From there, build up in layers: partial phases as their own subgroup, contact moments with tightly controlled masks, and totality last, since it functions as the visual anchor the rest of the composite is built around.
Blend Modes That Actually Work
Screen or Lighten handles the filtered partials sitting on a black background well — it lets the bright disk read through while the surrounding black drops out on its own, no manual masking needed. Diamond ring and totality frames need Normal blending with a hand-drawn mask instead, so the black lunar disk stays protected and its glow doesn't bleed into the phases sitting next to it. Difference mode is a useful temporary tool for checking alignment — misregistration shows up as bright edges when you flip to it — but switch back to your real blend mode once everything lines up; it's not a finishing mode.
What Keeps a Composite Believable
Don't hand-place the arc. Pull the real azimuth and altitude for each frame from your actual capture times or a planning tool, and space the phases using real elapsed time — or one fixed interval applied consistently — rather than eyeballing the gaps. Scale every phase off the lunar disk's diameter specifically, not the outer corona, since the corona's apparent size varies too much between frames to use as a sizing reference. And match the atmosphere to the sun's position in each frame: a low sun near the horizon wants a warmer color cast and lower contrast than one sitting higher in the sky, and skipping that step is often the last thing giving away an otherwise clean composite.
The phase-by-phase editing framework above is adapted from the eclipse editing guides published by PhotoPills, written here in my own words and process.