Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Landscape & Nature Photography => Topic started by: shadowblade on August 21, 2015, 01:26:44 pm
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Sunrise over Hong Kong from Victoria Peak.
Sony A7r with Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens. Multi-shot panorama, totalling around 350MP.
***Updated version. Original version also kept for comparison***
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It took a while to open but once I got a look, wow! Impressive detail in this image. The composition also works well and the glow of the city lights is exposed just right. Looks fantastic!
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Sorry no WOW here. The colors look terrible
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Sorry no WOW here. The colors look terrible
What specifically is wrong with the colours? As in, is it the tone, contrast, saturation, the combination of blue and orange making a weird combination of warm and cool tones, or something else? Seems like no matter what I do to it, it doesn't look quite right in the browser.
Although it seems to look far more saturated in the browser (including in colour-managed Firefox) than it does in Photoshop, where it looks almost party desaturated. I trusted the rendering in Photoshop...
Feel free to play around with it and see what you can get from the colours.
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From what I'm seeing the highlights along the waters edge are way over exposed and the orange hue in general is way over saturated to start with. I'm sure if you work on those you will have a nice image.
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From what I'm seeing the highlights along the waters edge are way over exposed and the orange hue in general is way over saturated to start with. I'm sure if you work on those you will have a nice image.
Those are street lights - how do you not have them bright when shooting a night scene? Would they not appear unrealistically dim if darkened? Nevertheless, they are not blown out, apart from the core of some of the lights themselves.
Do you mean oversaturated on an absolute level, or just too much of a contrast with the blue shadows/water/sky? In other words, would a warming filter, to bring everything to the warm side, fix it?
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...would a warming filter, to bring everything to the warm side, fix it?
If anything, the image appears too warm, almost like a molten lava is engulfing the city. I suspect that with a cooling white balance it might look better.
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I'm just not sure which program to trust regarding colour at the moment. I seem to keep producing images that look fine in Photoshop (colour-managed, on a wide-gamut, calibrated monitor) but which then look oversaturated in other programs on the same monitor, including in Firefox browser (with full colour management turned on). So far I've been trusting Photoshop (CS3), but, lately, I'm not so sure.
Or maybe this is one of those images where I should just give up on colour and make it black-and-white.
I tried cooling it - ended up looking awful, with the city lights turning pink and the whole photo looking like it was covered in a blue haze.
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It looks warmer here on my calibrated monitor than earlier but I still think it's a cool shot. Could have that sodium orange tamed a bit.
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Here is my two pence worth.
First thing, I like the image but:
1. The left hand third of the image is much more saturated and bluer than the rest. I suspect that this part of the pano was shot/ processed with different settings.
2. The sky looks posterised with only 4 colours/ tones.
3. The entire image looks oversaturated.
I have to be careful with the oversaturated comment as I find that their is a difference between European/ American standard renderings and what looks normal.
As for what programme to trust for colours I would go for Photoshop although I notice a difference between how jpeg images look on a wide gamut monitor compared to a normal gamut monitor. This leaves you with a problem with your lovely well balanced images ( in PS ) looking either garish/ dull on the web depending on browser.
I have had a play with 2 hue saturation layers removing the, to my eyes, oversaturation and lightening/ darkening parts of the image but obviously I am working on a small jpeg and any changes I make are not really subtle enough.
Keep working on it.
Ken
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Here is my two pence worth.
First thing, I like the image but:
1. The left hand third of the image is much more saturated and bluer than the rest. I suspect that this part of the pano was shot/ processed with different settings.
2. The sky looks posterised with only 4 colours/ tones.
They were actually shot in sequence using the same settings, and processed using the same settings (stitching before any processing was done). I'm not sure why the left turned out more saturated - I certainly didn't mask that section off and increase saturation there separate from the rest of the image.
Not sure why you're seeing the sky as posterised - might just be the small JPEG.
3. The entire image looks oversaturated.
I have to be careful with the oversaturated comment as I find that their is a difference between European/ American standard renderings and what looks normal.
What do you mean by European/American standard renderings?
Is it just the saturation, or also the contrast? What about the colour balance and colour tones?
As for what programme to trust for colours I would go for Photoshop although I notice a difference between how jpeg images look on a wide gamut monitor compared to a normal gamut monitor. This leaves you with a problem with your lovely well balanced images ( in PS ) looking either garish/ dull on the web depending on browser.
A problem ever since I went wide-gamut. I can't tell how the images actually look. All I know is that they print beautifully...
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Hi
Just to clear up a few points. This is on a calibrated wide gamut monitor
On colour manged Firefox your image looks identical to photoshop. On IE11 it looks much more saturated.
On the colour saturation differences between European/ American photographers. I don't want to start a fight about it but when I look at American web sites and PSA affiliated competition entries I find that many of the images look more saturated than images from RPS/ PAGB/ FIAP competitions. It is not to say thet they are better or worse just, on average, more saturated. This leads me to think that more saturated images are more popular in America. My knowledge of images from other areas of the world is too limited to come to any conclusions. Of course all of this is a generalisation.
As to the darker/ more saturated/ bluer left hand side of the image. I find it very visible in the water. On the Kowloon side the large recatangular building just to the right of the tallest tower seems to cast a dark shadow on the water and this dark colour is extended, in the water, to the far left of the image even though the sky is, if anything, slightly brighter just to the left of the tall tower the water also has a slightly magenta look to it. The water to the right of this line is more cyan. If the settings and processing were the same then I have no explanation as to why to the left of the tall tower the water is less cyan and the buildings are pinker with the reflections of the lights in the water being distinctly magenta'ish.
Am I alone in seeing this?
A good exercise is to flip the image horizontally while watching the water.
Despite all of this I still like the image.
Ken
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... What do you mean by European/American standard renderings?...
Glad you asked. :)
A couple of months ago, there was this guy on our forums that explained it much better than I can:
... My style definitely leans towards high saturation and contrast, though. Possibly due to that, I've noticed a definite geographical distribution sales - lots of sales to Mediterranean countries, Latin America and southern/southeast Asia, with very few sales in northern Europe, North America (outside of the US West Coast) and other English-speaking countries apart from Australia. They probably work better in a bright, tropical hotel or resort than in the darker, more subdued settings more popular in these places.
Not just in Asia. And, even there, India is quite different from southern China (both generally bold and colourful), which is very different again from northern China and Korea (more subdued), with southeast Asia displaying many influences from both southern China and India.
In the west, you can see a distinct difference between predominantly Catholic areas and predominantly Protestant areas. Paintings in Catholic areas - much of the western Mediterranean basin, including Italy and Spain - have tended to be bright, colourful and vivid, at least over the last 500 years. This seems to have also spread and influenced works and preferences in Latin America, the Philippines and other areas (pre-Spanish/pre-Catholic Filipino paintings are quite different from post-Spanish works). You may look at some of the 400-year-old works now and think they look a bit dull, but work backwards and take away 400 years of pigment fade, though air pollution and UV light, and you find that most of these works were, in fact, originally very colourful and strongly saturated - including many details and colourful ornamentations which have actually faded away completely over time. Conversely, works from Protestant-dominated areas have tended to be darker, with more muted tones. Compare and contrast the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome with St Paul's Cathedral in London. The former is bright and colourful, whereas the latter is much more muted, dark and subdued. Of course, there are many shades in between the two broad groups. Romanticist works, for example, tend towards darker shades, but use a lot of rich, saturated colours and a rendering designed to convey emotion (e.g. motion-blurred clouds or stormy seas) rather than the what-the-eye-sees approach of the realists and neoclassicists. Of course, this may also represent a north-south divide rather than one based on philosophical differences, although philosophical outlook certainly played a role. Northern areas, with long, dark winter nights, tended towards dark and muted tones, whereas brighter and sunnier southern areas tended towards bright and saturated tones.
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Glad you asked. :)
A couple of months ago, there was this guy on our forums that explained it much better than I can:
I don't believe I ever mentioned the words 'standard renderings'...
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It seems strange to be analyzing a 350MP image on the basis on of 0.5MP JPEG -- at least when it comes to details like the handling of the (inevitably) blown images of street lights.
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... More skyline shots at different times of the day...
I think this is way more important than any white balance or other post processing alterations. For blue-hour shots, there is only a few minutes of harmonious balance of twilight and street lights. Before and after that, no amount of PS magic can recreate it.
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Those are street lights - how do you not have them bright when shooting a night scene? Would they not appear unrealistically dim if darkened? Nevertheless, they are not blown out, apart from the core of some of the lights themselves.
Do you mean oversaturated on an absolute level, or just too much of a contrast with the blue shadows/water/sky? In other words, would a warming filter, to bring everything to the warm side, fix it?
I should have gone into more detail about the highlights. Maybe you could selectively tone them down or do an HDR blending to tame them.
I do get that we haven't seen your original so to judge the image based on this small sample is not really valid.
As far as the orange saturation, you could selectively go into the hsl sliders in camera raw and chose orange and adjust saturation & luminance.
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Although it seems to look far more saturated in the browser (including in colour-managed Firefox) than it does in Photoshop, where it looks almost party desaturated. I trusted the rendering in Photoshop...
Feel free to play around with it and see what you can get from the colours.
This saturation discrepancy between an image viewed in Photoshop and the same image viewed through another application, such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Luminous Landscape, is something that I frequently notice on my 'apparently' well-calibrated NEC MultiSync PA271W monitor. I really don't know what's going on, but I assume that these other applications are calibrated differently.
I've captured a screen shot of your image as it appears on my monitor, after saving and opening the image in Photoshop , to compare it with the view I get when I just click on the thumbnail of your image in this thread.
I wonder if anyone else can see the difference, and/or if the difference will continue to be apparent on my monitor, outside of Photoshop, after the processes of attachment and viewing through LL. The image as it appears in Photoshop, the less saturated one, is the upper image.
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This saturation discrepancy between an image viewed in Photoshop and the same image viewed through another application, such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Luminous Landscape, is something that I frequently notice on my 'apparently' well-calibrated NEC MultiSync PA271W monitor. I really don't know what's going on, but I assume that these other applications are calibrated differently.
I've captured a screen shot of your image as it appears on my monitor, after saving and opening the image in Photoshop , to compare it with the view I get when I just click on the thumbnail of your image in this thread.
I wonder if anyone else can see the difference, and/or if the difference will continue to be apparent on my monitor, outside of Photoshop, after the processes of attachment and viewing through LL. The image as it appears in Photoshop, the less saturated one, is the upper image.
That's pretty much the effect I'm seeing. If it looks good in PS, it looks oversaturated elsewhere. If it looks good elsewhere, it looks badly desaturated in PS. And I'm not sure which one is the 'correct' version.
Firefox (with the full colour management option turned on) is supposed to be colour-aware, so that it doesn't give these discrepancies. But it still does.
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That's pretty much the effect I'm seeing. If it looks good in PS, it looks oversaturated elsewhere. If it looks good elsewhere, it looks badly desaturated in PS. And I'm not sure which one is the 'correct' version.
Firefox (with the full colour management option turned on) is supposed to be colour-aware, so that it doesn't give these discrepancies. But it still does.
I'm out of my depth here. However, this color-saturation mismatch between Photoshop and various internet browsers, as viewed on my calibrated monitor, became significantly noticeable only after I upgraded my monitor to the current high-resolution, wide color gamut, NEC model, which claims to be able to display the full gamut of Adobe RGB.
The impression I get is that there are both advantages and disadvantages to a wide-gamut monitor, the disadvantage being that all un-managed software will produce colours that are very visibly over-saturated.
The benefits are, when I proof images for printing on my Epson 7600, the proof colors, contrast and vibrancy that I see on my monitor need far less adjustment than they did on my previous monitors.
On my previous monitors, which had a display gamut probably no wider than that of sRGB, as soon as I hit 'proof colors' in Photoshop, the entire image would loose contrast and vibrancy, and would require an increased adjustment of saturation and contrast until the image gained the appearance it had before I hit 'proof colors'. The color profiles I use with my Epson 7600 are those created by Bill Atkinson many years ago, and I process my images for printing using the ProPhoto RGB color space.
The following site might shed some light on the issue.
http://www.tedsimages.com/text/links5.htm
Or, perhaps Andrew Rodney would like to chime in. ;)
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I'm out of my depth here. However, this color-saturation mismatch between Photoshop and various internet browsers, as viewed on my calibrated monitor, became significantly noticeable only after I upgraded my monitor to the current high-resolution, wide color gamut, NEC model, which claims to be able to display the full gamut of Adobe RGB.
The impression I get is that there are both advantages and disadvantages to a wide-gamut monitor, the disadvantage being that all un-managed software will produce colours that are very visibly over-saturated.
The benefits are, when I proof images for printing on my Epson 7600, the proof colors, contrast and vibrancy that I see on my monitor need far less adjustment than they did on my previous monitors.
On my previous monitors, which had a display gamut probably no wider than that of sRGB, as soon as I hit 'proof colors' in Photoshop, the entire image would loose contrast and vibrancy, and would require an increased adjustment of saturation and contrast until the image gained the appearance it had before I hit 'proof colors'. The color profiles I use with my Epson 7600 are those created by Bill Atkinson many years ago, and I process my images for printing using the ProPhoto RGB color space.
The following site might shed some light on the issue.
http://www.tedsimages.com/text/links5.htm
Or, perhaps Andrew Rodney would like to chime in. ;)
Turning on colour management in Firefox is supposed to get rid of those issues - that article (which is a few years old now) says just that. But it doesn't seem to.
I'm pretty sure it used to. Maybe, somewhere along the track, they made it non-functional.
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Updated it (kept the old one for comparison).
One version which looks good in Photoshop but oversaturated in the browser, another which looks good in the browser but desaturated in Photoshop. Which one looks right to you?
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Hi Shadowblade,
I see a significant reduction in the saturation of the blue sea in your update, which is an improvement, but the image still doesn't look quite natural. In Photoshop I see that the red channel is at its maximum value of 255 in a number of places, including the brightest parts of the sky, which seems a bit odd considering that it was dawn, and that the sky is not particularly red, and that the city lights were still on.
Perhaps this is the sort of image that doesn't render well as a small jpeg within the narrow color gamut of sRGB. Perhaps the problem is also that the nature of the lighting, a combination of a fairly bright sky with strong artificial lighting, needs a combination of different White Balances. In other words, one single White Balance will be a compromise that's not ideal for either the natural lighting or the artificial lighting. Just speculating. ;)
The EXIF data doesn't provided any details of shutter speed and ISO. Was the exposure a full ETTR at base ISO, or were the shots handheld at a higher ISO? Can you show a 100% crop of one of the brighter areas of the city lights so we can see how much detail is actually present in what appears to be some fairly large areas that look blown in the small jpeg?
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Hi Shadowblade,
I see a significant reduction in the saturation of the blue sea in your update, which is an improvement, but the image still doesn't look quite natural. In Photoshop I see that the red channel is at its maximum value of 255 in a number of places, including the brightest parts of the sky, which seems a bit odd considering that it was dawn, and that the sky is not particularly red, and that the city lights were still on.
The parts of the sky in between the clouds were very bright compared with the rest of the scene. I'm not worried at all about the red channel being blown - it's all shades of yellow-orange behind them anyway and doesn't affect the image at all. The city lights themselves are also blown, for obvious reasons.
To me, the desaturated version looks ridiculous in photoshop - it looks like reality toned right down, not like reality itself. But I've never like completely natural images anyway - they always look very flat and dull to me. I prefer bold, strong colours. As I've mentioned in another thread, it may be a geographical thing. Not sure where most of the LuLa community is based, but I've sold very few prints in northern Europe and North America (outside the tropical and warmer areas) and get a lot of hate from those areas, but heaps in Asia and South America, quite a lot in the Mediterranean and a fair few in Australia.
Perhaps this is the sort of image that doesn't render well as a small jpeg within the narrow color gamut of sRGB. Perhaps the problem is also that the nature of the lighting, a combination of a fairly bright sky with strong artificial lighting, needs a combination of different White Balances. In other words, one single White Balance will be a compromise that's not ideal for either the natural lighting or the artificial lighting. Just speculating. ;)
The posterisation seen earlier was entirely the result of downsizing and conversion to 8-bit mode - there's no posterisation at all in the 16-bit version. So compression and downsizing has caused some problems.
What in particular is wrong with the white balance? Too warm? Too cool? Different in different parts of the image? Or the colours just aren't to your taste?
The EXIF data doesn't provided any details of shutter speed and ISO. Was the exposure a full ETTR at base ISO, or were the shots handheld at a higher ISO? Can you show a 100% crop of one of the brighter areas of the city lights so we can see how much detail is actually present in what appears to be some fairly large areas that look blown in the small jpeg?
ISO 100, blended exposures of 2 and 8 seconds (mostly 8s, with 2s for the very bright parts). I was also shooting through a haze, which was non-ideal, but common at this time of the year - at any other time of the year, the sun wouldn't have been rising from the right direction for such a shot.
Here's a crop:
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And a version with a different (split) white balance.
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ISO 100, blended exposures of 2 and 8 seconds (mostly 8s, with 2s for the very bright parts). I was also shooting through a haze, which was non-ideal, but common at this time of the year - at any other time of the year, the sun wouldn't have been rising from the right direction for such a shot.
Here's a crop:
Okay! Thanks for that. You've introduced a couple of additional issues. This is not only a pano but an HDR image. Many folks criticise HDR images for being 'excessive' in some way, and unnatural. This image of yours fits the bill. However, I don't personally think that HDR images have to unavoidably look unnatural. It's all in the processing. Also, a 2-stop increase in DR doesn't seem sufficient in this case. The 5 or 7 stop bracketing range of Nikon cameras might have done a better job.
The other issue is the haze. It's not apparent in the processed image, so presumably you've attempted to compensate for the effect of the haze, perhaps by moving the 'clarity slider' in ACR to its maximum. That can have an unnatural effect.
But I've never like completely natural images anyway - they always look very flat and dull to me. I prefer bold, strong colours.
Why would you shoot any scene that looks very flat and dull? I'm always attracted to shoot scenes that are interesting, unusual or vibrant in some way. During the processing of the RAW image, the initial result might sometimes look rather flat and dull, in which case I increase the contrast and vibrancy so that it matches my memory of the scene and what I consider realistic, natural and possible. In the process of increasing contrast and vibrancy I might prefer to err on the side vibrancy, especially with sunsets and sunrises, but I try to avoid any unnatural effects, defining an unnatural effect as one that could never exist in reality.
What in particular is wrong with the white balance? Too warm? Too cool? Different in different parts of the image? Or the colours just aren't to your taste?
Since I don't have the RAW images to play with, I can only speculate. I just think it's reasonable to presume there would be a WB problem when shooting a scene that is a combination of artificial lighting and natural lighting. A more obvious example would be shooting your living room at dawn, which includes the rural scene through the windows of your living room whilst all the artificial lights were on, then comparing the result of the same scene through the window with all lights off. I've never done the experiment, but I imagine the 'as shot' WB temperature in ACR would be quite different in those two shots.
The 100% crop does not look impressive. It's all red, yellow and black. If I were to take a single shot of this scene with a high resolution camera, such as my D800E, I would expect to see more detail in a 100% crop. If I were bracketing exposures, I'd ensure that one or more of the exposures were significantly underexposed.
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Okay! Thanks for that. You've introduced a couple of additional issues. This is not only a pano but an HDR image. Many folks criticise HDR images for being 'excessive' in some way, and unnatural. This image of yours fits the bill. However, I don't personally think that HDR images have to unavoidably look unnatural. It's all in the processing. Also, a 2-stop increase in DR doesn't seem sufficient in this case. The 5 or 7 stop bracketing range of Nikon cameras might have done a better job.
No HDR conversion here - just blended in the darker image over the brightest areas. Also had to capture the two exposures manually, due to the loss of bit depth (and DR) when shooting using automatic bracketing using Sony A7 cameras.
The other issue is the haze. It's not apparent in the processed image, so presumably you've attempted to compensate for the effect of the haze, perhaps by moving the 'clarity slider' in ACR to its maximum. That can have an unnatural effect.
Processed in Sony's Image Data Converter, which does a much better job with Sony's RAW files than ACR. Dehazed by increasing midtone contrast (graduated from front to back) and applying sharpening using a graduated high pass filter.
I'm not seeing an unnatural effect here, at least in terms of luminance (i.e. how it looks in black-and-white conversion). It's all in the colour balance, tone and saturation.
Why would you shoot any scene that looks very flat and dull? I'm always attracted to shoot scenes that are interesting, unusual or vibrant in some way. During the processing of the RAW image, the initial result might sometimes look rather flat and dull, in which case I increase the contrast and vibrancy so that it matches my memory of the scene and what I consider realistic, natural and possible. In the process of increasing contrast and vibrancy I might prefer to err on the side vibrancy, especially with sunsets and sunrises, but I try to avoid any unnatural effects, defining an unnatural effect as one that could never exist in reality.
I always liked using graduated tobacco-coloured filters, graduated coolong/warming filters and other graduated colour filters - particularly the 'strip' filters to selectively filter the part of the sky or ground in the distance, closest to the horizon. I don't know whether that counts as 'unnatural' or not. But, if I wanted a pure naturalistic effect, I could just take a snapshot with no processing, no long-exposure techniques, etc. I prefer to use colour and tone to create emotion or to simulate the feel of the place - warmth or coolness, isolation or familiarity, etc. rather than as a pure pictographic record. A bit like romanticism in painting vs neoclassicism or realism.
Since I don't have the RAW images to play with, I can only speculate. I just think it's reasonable to presume there would be a WB problem when shooting a scene that is a combination of artificial lighting and natural lighting. A more obvious example would be shooting your living room at dawn, which includes the rural scene through the windows of your living room whilst all the artificial lights were on, then comparing the result of the same scene through the window with all lights off. I've never done the experiment, but I imagine the 'as shot' WB temperature in ACR would be quite different in those two shots.
The 100% crop does not look impressive. It's all red, yellow and black. If I were to take a single shot of this scene with a high resolution camera, such as my D800E, I would expect to see more detail in a 100% crop. If I were bracketing exposures, I'd ensure that one or more of the exposures were significantly underexposed.
Underexposing further would not have done much except ensure increased noise after processing. The reason I shot this at such a high resolution was that I expected to lose a lot of it in postprocessing, after cutting through the haze, applying multiple curves and reducing all the resulting noise.
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..., due to the loss of bit depth (and DR) when shooting using automatic bracketing using Sony A7 cameras...
How does Sony lose bit depth/DR because of brackating!?
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How does Sony lose bit depth/DR because of brackating!?
Sony saves the RAW as a 14-bit file, but, unlike Canon and Nikon, it's heavily 'cooked'.
Some modes (single shot) compress it to 12 bits and process it at that depth; others (continuous, bracketed, silent shutter, probably some others too) compress it to 11 bits before expanding it back to a 14-bit file. The modes that compress it to 11 bits have less DR and more noise than those which compress it to 12 bits. Neither are as good as the 14-bit true RAW files produced by Nikon using the same sensor.
This is usually not an issue if you're just doing minor adjustments, but I tend to torture my RAW files...
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..I would expect to see more detail in a 100% crop...
Indeed.
Shadowblade, it pains me to badger such a competent photographer as you obviously are, but that detail does not look good, especially not from a 36 Mpx camera with a great DR. I am trying to understand why... over-processing that is starting to break the file? Out of focus? For comparison, here are a few 100% crops from a similar night panorama, done with the same focal length (35mm), but with a lowly 20 Mpx Canon 6D and its 24-105 lens (these are from +2 bracketed shots, unprocessed, unsharpened) - click on the thumbnail:
P.S. The whole panorama can be seen here: (https://flic.kr/p/xoR6Y6)
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Indeed.
Shadowblade, it pains me to badger such a competent photographer as you obviously are, but that detail does not look good, especially not from a 36 Mpx camera with a great DR. I am trying to understand why... over-processing that is starting to break the file? Out of focus? For comparison, here are a few 100% crops from a similar night panorama, done with the same focal length (35mm), but with a lowly 20 Mpx Canon 6D and its 24-105 lens (these are from +2 bracketed shots, unprocessed, unsharpened) - click on the thumbnail:
P.S. The whole panorama can be seen here: (https://flic.kr/p/xoR6Y6)
There was several kilometres of atmospheric haze between myself and the point at which the 100% crop came from. The crop was what was left after lifting the haze. I expected a lot of detail to be lost from trying to lift the haze and the 100% pixel quality to be pretty terrible, so I shot it at a much higher resolution than I normally would, to ensure a good result at the same print size (i.e. each pixel is awful, but there are 3-5 times as many pixels to make up for it).
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There was several kilometres of atmospheric haze between myself and the point at which the 100% crop came from. The crop was what was left after lifting the haze. I expected a lot of detail to be lost from trying to lift the haze and the 100% pixel quality to be pretty terrible, so I shot it at a much higher resolution than I normally would, to ensure a good result at the same print size (i.e. each pixel is awful, but there are 3-5 times as many pixels to make up for it).
Well, first let me say, it's good to be robust and to be able to accept criticism, so I congratulate you for that and for explaining your processes.
I'm getting the impression that the main reason for the excessively 'garish' nature of the image (only my opinion of course) is due to the processing effects of removing significant haze that was captured in the scene, coupled with your normal preference for, what some might consider to be, over-saturation in images.
I'm also getting the impression that your stay in Hong Kong was rather brief. You recognized the spectacular nature of the scene, realised that the weather conditions were not ideal because of the haze, but had no option to return to the spot later, on a clearer morning, because of your travel schedule. Right?
It's probably too much to ask, and you probably don't have the time or indeed the inclination to reprocess, but it would certainly be interesting to see the original 'dull' scene showing the full nature of the haze. ;)
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Glad you asked. :)
A couple of months ago, there was this guy on our forums that explained it much better than I can:
I've heard similar things as to how different cultures will process their images. One thing I've heard is how Westerners will process towards cooler temps and Asians will process closer to warmer temps.
Anyhow, its a cool image.
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I've heard similar things as to how different cultures will process their images. One thing I've heard is how Westerners will process towards cooler temps and Asians will process closer to warmer temps.
Anyhow, its a cool image.
It's a bit like geographical preferences for white balance in computer and TV screens for non-photographic purposes - in Asia (and also Australia) people tend to prefer a bluer, cooler white, while, in North America, they tend to prefer a warmer, paper white (tending towards yellowish).
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Well, first let me say, it's good to be robust and to be able to accept criticism, so I congratulate you for that and for explaining your processes.
I'm getting the impression that the main reason for the excessively 'garish' nature of the image (only my opinion of course) is due to the processing effects of removing significant haze that was captured in the scene, coupled with your normal preference for, what some might consider to be, over-saturation in images.
That, and the fact that I just realised my output sharpening plugin was still set for canvas print output, leading to horrible oversharpening on such a small final image for web output... No wonder it looked much better at full resolution.
I'm also getting the impression that your stay in Hong Kong was rather brief. You recognized the spectacular nature of the scene, realised that the weather conditions were not ideal because of the haze, but had no option to return to the spot later, on a clearer morning, because of your travel schedule. Right?
Very much so.
I find that, by significantly oversampling beyond what's strictly required for final output, images can take a lot more abuse in Photoshop. You should see what underwater fashion shots taken in a swimming pool look like before they make it to post-processing...
It's probably too much to ask, and you probably don't have the time or indeed the inclination to reprocess, but it would certainly be interesting to see the original 'dull' scene showing the full nature of the haze. ;)
Will post it when I get home.
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It's probably too much to ask, and you probably don't have the time or indeed the inclination to reprocess, but it would certainly be interesting to see the original 'dull' scene showing the full nature of the haze. ;)
This is what I was dealing with:
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If there ever was a reason to leave it as-is, this is the one!
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If there ever was a reason to leave it as-is, this is the one!
Why? Really not a fan of the haze... if I wanted haze, it's easy enough to add it in post-processing.
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You can, but you can't beat natural, it always trumps photoshopped. I consider myself quite a heavy photoshoppographer, but the best ones (images, that is) are those that do not scream "Photoshop." Seriously, that's the one I would buy, the OP one never.
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Shadowblade,
I tend to agree with Slobodan, except I don't think I would buy either because neither is ideal; although I can imagine I might buy it if I'd lived in Hong Kong for some time, had now left, and wanted a memo or souvenir, and your shot was the best one available of this particular view which had impressed me on the occasion I had visited the area.
This issue really highlights the problem we photographers face when visiting an area with a magnificent view, at a time when the conditions are not ideal. I always try to return to such places when the weather is clear, or the sky is spectacular, or whatever. In this particular case of the Hong Kong skyline, what was needed was a good shower of rain the day before you visited the area. ;)
Thanks for taking the trouble to explain your processes.
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Shadowblade,
I tend to agree with Slobodan, except I don't think I would buy either because neither is ideal; although I can imagine I might buy it if I'd lived in Hong Kong for some time, had now left, and wanted a memo or souvenir, and your shot was the best one available of this particular view which had impressed me on the occasion I had visited the area.
This issue really highlights the problem we photographers face when visiting an area with a magnificent view, at a time when the conditions are not ideal. I always try to return to such places when the weather is clear, or the sky is spectacular, or whatever. In this particular case of the Hong Kong skyline, what was needed was a good shower of rain the day before you visited the area. ;)
Thanks for taking the trouble to explain your processes.
There was no shortage of rain, and the wind was even blowing the right direction, carrying pollution from China further inland rather than blowing it over Hong Kong. There were clear skies every day, in the middle of the day - clouds and haze would always set in around sunrise and sunset... This was the best out of five mornings shooting from the same spot.
I could return there in November or January when passing through to somewhere else, but, at that time of the year, the sun rises from the wrong direction.
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There was no shortage of rain, and the wind was even blowing the right direction, carrying pollution from China further inland rather than blowing it over Hong Kong. There were clear skies every day, in the middle of the day - clouds and haze would always set in around sunrise and sunset... This was the best out of five mornings shooting from the same spot.
In that case, perhaps you could use the 'haze' shots as a political statement, to the effect that, even when the wind is blowing from Hong Kong to China, the pollution is still there. ;)