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08-11-2011, 01:39 PM   #2446
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Moody Skies over Grasmere

Yesterday was a washout here in the Lake District and today wasn't far out and initially I only took a photo of Grasmere withg my iphone thinking it was too wet to get my 645D out of my backpack, especially bearing in mind it was here that my 645d went faulty the last time I was at this location, so it was meeting it's nemesis!

Shot with DFA 55 @ f/20 1/5 with a cokin ND4 Grad (this trip is the first time I have used Grad filters)

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08-11-2011, 01:54 PM   #2447
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Great mood in that one, itshimitis!

But now I can't keep quiet anymore. All of your posted pictures look very, very soft. How are you downscaling them for the web? They would gain tremendously in image quality by getting appropriate sharpening. You could also scale the images down in several steps with sharpening each time.

Try this for a start: Sharpen the original image with radius 0.5 pixels, 200% in Photoshop or whatever software you use. Scale the image down with bicubic resampling and sharpen it again with radius 0.2 pixels and ~50%. That will give a lot of bite, but adding more steps inbetween will be even better.

Also, I think you'll have to understand that there's no point of stopping down to f/20 when it isn't needed for DOF reasons. It'll only introduce diffraction and veil the image, even so slightly.

Hope this helps! I hate to tell people what to do, but you should really be able to get sharper results out of that fantastic camera.
08-11-2011, 02:19 PM   #2448
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QuoteOriginally posted by Makten Quote
All of your posted pictures look very, very soft. How are you downscaling them for the web?
He is "attaching" them to the message using the forum's attach mechanism. My experience has been that files uploaded to PF have the potential to be munged by the forum software. Conventional wisdom is to host the images with Flickr or some similar service at the intended resolution and link to the image.


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08-11-2011, 02:27 PM   #2449
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QuoteOriginally posted by Makten Quote
Great mood in that one, itshimitis!

But now I can't keep quiet anymore. All of your posted pictures look very, very soft. How are you downscaling them for the web? They would gain tremendously in image quality by getting appropriate sharpening. You could also scale the images down in several steps with sharpening each time.

Try this for a start: Sharpen the original image with radius 0.5 pixels, 200% in Photoshop or whatever software you use. Scale the image down with bicubic resampling and sharpen it again with radius 0.2 pixels and ~50%. That will give a lot of bite, but adding more steps inbetween will be even better.

Also, I think you'll have to understand that there's no point of stopping down to f/20 when it isn't needed for DOF reasons. It'll only introduce diffraction and veil the image, even so slightly.

Hope this helps! I hate to tell people what to do, but you should really be able to get sharper results out of that fantastic camera.

I'm using Lightroom 3 and scaling down to 3000 x 3000 in jpeg and using attachments in the forum. They look sharp on my screen with my eyes in lightroom and I look at 100%. In lightroom its defaults at radius of 1.0. and have sharpened to 60 in amount 39 in detail and 35 masking. As I've said I'm fairly new to PP and I'm probably making some mistakes, but I do feel I have a natural talent for taking the shots. I used f/20 mainly to soften the water as I wanted to make the most of the reflections.

here is one I took at f/16, but I prefer the earlier one because of the reflection in the water of the the hill on the right which is missing from this shot. maybe I'm just stupid or not understanding things properly (I'm not taking anything personally, I'm aware that I have so much to learn still!)

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08-11-2011, 02:35 PM   #2450
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QuoteOriginally posted by itshimitis Quote
I'm using Lightroom 3 and scaling down to 3000 x 3000 in jpeg and using attachments in the forum.
There is the problem. PF will scale your shot down. You'd be better off scaling your shot to 800px (or whatever size stops PF from scaling your shot) in the longest dimension from LR3 and then post here. LR3 will apply sharpening to the final size. You can lose some of your sharpening when sharpen at a larger size and then scale down.
08-11-2011, 02:42 PM   #2451
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QuoteOriginally posted by itshimitis Quote
I'm using Lightroom 3 and scaling down to 3000 x 3000 in jpeg and using attachments in the forum. They look sharp on my screen with my eyes in lightroom and I look at 100%. In lightroom its defaults at radius of 1.0. and have sharpened to 60 in amount 39 in detail and 35 masking. As I've said I'm fairly new to PP and I'm probably making some mistakes, but I do feel I have a natural talent for taking the shots. I used f/20 mainly to soften the water as I wanted to make the most of the reflections.

here is one I took at f/16, but I prefer the earlier one because of the reflection in the water of the the hill on the right which is missing from this shot. maybe I'm just stupid or not understanding things properly (I'm not taking anything personally, I'm aware that I have so much to learn still!)
Alright, let's skip the aperture thing. It won't make much of a difference here anyway. But the sharpening... I believe you when you say that they look sharp in Lightroom (they should!), but sharpness for web display is what we on the forum see. Or don't see. Don't you think they look very soft yourself?

If you want, I could try out some magic on one of your files and explain what I've done. You'll be surprised of what can be done without much effort at all, I promise.

Edit: And I hope no offense is taken. It just hurts me to see how beatiful images are turned into mud by not-so-good downscaling.
08-11-2011, 03:03 PM   #2452
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QuoteOriginally posted by Makten Quote
Alright, let's skip the aperture thing. It won't make much of a difference here anyway. But the sharpening... I believe you when you say that they look sharp in Lightroom (they should!), but sharpness for web display is what we on the forum see. Or don't see. Don't you think they look very soft yourself?

If you want, I could try out some magic on one of your files and explain what I've done. You'll be surprised of what can be done without much effort at all, I promise.

Edit: And I hope no offense is taken. It just hurts me to see how beatiful images are turned into mud by not-so-good downscaling.
Absolutely no offence. I have printed some of my images and they look great to me, and this one looks great in Lightroom. Difficult to see on the forum page for me...

08-11-2011, 03:13 PM   #2453
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Right, i have set up a flikr (I did have another but yahoo won't allow me back on, it doesn't think I know when I was born!) I have uploaded the image at 2000 x 2000 and 800 x 800


this is from the large one scaled to 1024




this one to 800




And somewhere there will be the forum's own uploader at 800 edit: here it is and it's double the size that the 3000x was.

It also looks lighter than the flickr ones. odd!
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Last edited by itshimitis; 08-11-2011 at 03:24 PM.
08-11-2011, 03:38 PM   #2454
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Well, there's still no sharpening, which is essential when downscaling an image. You have to do this yourself before you upload the images. See my previous post.
08-11-2011, 04:06 PM   #2455
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QuoteOriginally posted by Makten Quote
Well, there's still no sharpening, which is essential when downscaling an image. You have to do this yourself before you upload the images. See my previous post.
Am confused, perhaps I'm just stupid as far as photography is concerned

I have sharpening amount at 60, radius was at 1.1 in the original image, details at 39 and mask at 35. i'm new to PP and sharpening and would like to do things right. It looks sharp on my macbook pro at 100% bearing in mind that the shore is several hundred metres away. I follow my instincts in taking the shot but have much to learn in post processing.
08-11-2011, 04:23 PM   #2456
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QuoteOriginally posted by itshimitis Quote
Am confused, perhaps I'm just stupid as far as photography is concerned

I have sharpening amount at 60, radius was at 1.1 in the original image, details at 39 and mask at 35. i'm new to PP and sharpening and would like to do things right. It looks sharp on my macbook pro at 100% bearing in mind that the shore is several hundred metres away. I follow my instincts in taking the shot but have much to learn in post processing.
Nonono, of course you're not stupid! But you have to understand that we are looking at the websized, very small picture here. Due to the inferior medium to present the image (the web, the screen, and the low pixel count), you'd want to maximize the per-pixel sharpness in this small image. To do that, you have to sharpen the image after it has been resized.

No matter how good the original looks at 100%, you cannot just resize it and get good results for web display. Unless your resizening software does some wizardry for you (I think tucos images are a very good example of that).

Let me get back in a couple of minutes and I'll show you an example of what I mean.
08-11-2011, 04:27 PM   #2457
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QuoteOriginally posted by Makten Quote
Nonono, of course you're not stupid! But you have to understand that we are looking at the websized, very small picture here. Due to the inferior medium to present the image (the web, the screen, and the low pixel count), you'd want to maximize the per-pixel sharpness in this small image. To do that, you have to sharpen the image after it has been resized.

No matter how good the original looks at 100%, you cannot just resize it and get good results for web display. Unless your resizening software does some wizardry for you (I think tucos images are a very good example of that).

Let me get back in a couple of minutes and I'll show you an example of what I mean.

thank you...your earlier comment about my images being dark made me look at them afresh and they were indeed dark and my screen needed calibrating. I do find that the camera has a tendency to underexpose when I shoot in aperture mode. I'll often take a shot in Av to see what the camera thinkis it needs and then amend it until I see something I prefer.... I am a few updates beind as I am on 1.02 (that was the version it came back from Pentax in!)
08-11-2011, 04:35 PM   #2458
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Now, check this out! This image was shot with the Bessa III and scanned with Epson V700 @ 2400 DPI. Even with the fairly grainy Tri-X, the actual resolution is well beyond 20 megapixels on a digital, fullframe camera.

First version is only downsampled (bicubic) and saved, nothing more.




Looks OK, but it lacks bite. Right? Then look at this sharpened version of the same exposure...




Suddenly the first one looks very dull and uncrisp, because that's what it is. The best way to compare them is to open in separate tabs in your browser and flip between them, so here are the links:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v621/Makten/test/img006_oskarp.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v621/Makten/test/img006.jpg

Edit: FFS! Fore some reason Pentax forums are enlarging the images here, which makes them look even unsharper. Just do the tab-thing instead.

Last edited by Makten; 08-11-2011 at 04:42 PM.
08-11-2011, 04:43 PM   #2459
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QuoteOriginally posted by Makten Quote
Now, check this out! This image was shot with the Bessa III and scanned with Epson V700 @ 2400 DPI. Even with the fairly grainy Tri-X, the actual resolution is well beyond 20 megapixels on a digital, fullframe camera.

First version is only downsampled (bicubic) and saved, nothing more.




Looks OK, but it lacks bite. Right? Then look at this sharpened version of the same exposure...








Suddenly the first one looks very dull and uncrisp, because that's what it is. The best way to compare them is to open in separate tabs in your browser and flip between them, so here are the links:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v621/Makten/test/img006_oskarp.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v621/Makten/test/img006.jpg

Edit: FFS! Fore some reason Pentax forums are enlarging the images here, which makes them look even unsharper. Just do the tab-thing instead.
Yes, I notice it although I had to look closer....(so maybe I'm just a little stupid! )

The "oskarp' rails look kind of fuzzy when you look closer at it.
08-11-2011, 04:54 PM   #2460
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QuoteOriginally posted by itshimitis Quote
Yes, I notice it although I had to look closer....(so maybe I'm just a little stupid! )

The "oskarp' rails look kind of fuzzy when you look closer at it.
Have you tried to open them in separate tabs? If it still isn't much difference, I'm afraid I must begin to question your eyesight! Still no offense meant of course, but I think most people would value the difference as very evident.

Whatever. Scaling down an image without sharpening it (before and after scaling), means that you are throwing away a lot of information, accutance and sharpness. I see no reason what so ever to omit the possibility of getting the best results you can, even at small sizes.
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