From the EXIF we can infer that every setting was left at the default. No exposure comp, no contrast, no HSL, no lens correction and a linear tone curve. Just the default Adobe Color profile at 5400K.
The photograph appears to show nightime on Earth with just a sliver of daytime. Beyond cities in Iberia and along the coast of Africa, most of what we can see would be reflected light from the Moon? We are just past full moon on April 1.
1/4 exposure time so 250 ms of light. the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon, plus the sun's rays refracting through the atmosphere which happens even at night.
The natural blue light is coming from the oxygen in the atmosphere but it's so overwhelming in that spot that it turns the light pure white. The red/orangish is coming from particulates and the green/red from aurora. My favorite part I think is the very bottom where you can see the blue light taper off and not overwhelm the camera sensor and you can see the aurora with it. I love this photo so much.
> the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon
And all the others are negligible by many orders of magnitude compared to the moon. So it's really just the moon as far as this photo is concerned (except for the small sliver that's still illuminated by sunlight, including refracted sunlight).
Maybe it’s because I (like many) have experienced taking pictures at night and seeing the grainy result that _this_ image struck me as incredibly realistic.
Almost like I ran the grainy-to-real conversion in my mind and I felt like I was imagining seeing this in person. Beautiful image!
It's beautiful as these all are, that one is probably my favorite. And as somebody else said it kind of feels more real seeing the grain like that. It's just beautiful. A side we never see quite like this.
The Lightroom one was processed from raw. Also, by brightening it a lot, the noisy high-ISO grain becomes more apparent. Noise is famously incompressible, so it leads to a much larger file size.
But lossy-codecs job is to utilize psychovisual tricks to discard as much high-frequency information as possible, whilst remaining similar visual effects. If you increase the brightness in RAW and then re-encode the JPEG - more noise is being pulled up in the visual spectrum, therefor less of that information (filesize) is discarded.
For example, if you render Gaussian noise in photopea and export as JPEG 100% quality, it has 9.2MB. If you reduce the exposure by -2 it goes down to 7.8MB. That's partially because more parts of the noise are effectively black pixels, but also I believe because of the earlier mentioned effect.
Noise that's easier to see will not be compressed away by the JPEG compression. JPEG is basically just DCT + thresholding. Any higher amplitude noise is going to stay and increase the final file size.
Also, pulling more data from your 14 bit or 16 bit raws results in more noise in the end compared to the straight-out-of-camera 8 bit JPEGs.
