Help Please: Camera vs Lens vs Light

[Stephenaweiss]

Can I get advice. I love this photograph, but I am worried by how fuzzy or painterly the colors are, particularly the greens.

Shot at 1/125, 24mm and f 11 with the D100 set at iso 200. I am using the Nikkor 24-85 2.8-4 Zoom lens.

I have done many other photographs and get much better sharpness in the detail of the image.

My guess: the day was rain on and off, at this moment it was not raining, but almost.

Any ideas what has happened.

PS: the image was manipulated in LightRoom to make colors more intense with increase saturation of the greens, yellows, and reds. BUT: the origional image has the same fuzziness of the greens, particularly along the left side of the road.

thanks, sw[attachment=335:attachment]

[boku]

Looks to me like you were dealing with fresh spring foliage blowing in the wind. But 1/125 should have taken care of that. Hmmm.

[Jonathan Wienke]

It's blue channel clipping, at least in the posted web image. The dark, saturated greens mostly have single-digit blue channel values. Any time you have clipped color channels, you will lose detail. The only to avoid this problem in sRGB is to back off on the color saturation in the darker tones, or mask off the darker tones when increasing saturation to avoid clipping. THis image really should be edited in 16-bit mode in either LAB or ProPhoto to avoid this problem, and you still may need to make output device-specific versions of it to keep as much color saturation as possible.