Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Jeremy Roussak on January 16, 2020, 02:52:14 pm
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Colour or B&W?
(or neither, of course).
Jeremy
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Both/either.
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Which is the color one?
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B&W. The coloured looks unnatural
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BW for me.
Both examples are oversharpened, IMO.
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B&W is better than the colour, but boy does it look crunchy.
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I'm curious about the alleged over-sharpening, as I've barely sharpened it at all. It's had my standard input sharpening in LR (amount 40, radius 0.8, detail 50, masking 25) and the output sharpening I've used for every shot I've ever posted here, namely "sharpen for screen".
What makes you think it's too much? Are you mistaking the sun reflections from the water for something else?
Jeremy
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I think it's just the contrasty light that suggests over-sharpening.
I prefer the B&W. The color doesn't add much for me.
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I'm curious about the alleged over-sharpening, as I've barely sharpened it at all. It's had my standard input sharpening in LR (amount 40, radius 0.8, detail 50, masking 25) and the output sharpening I've used for every shot I've ever posted here, namely "sharpen for screen".
What makes you think it's too much? Are you mistaking the sun reflections from the water for something else?
Jeremy
Sometimes you have to adjust the sharpening for a given image. Whatever the cause, the image looks crunchy or over sharpened.
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Sometimes you have to adjust the sharpening for a given image. Whatever the cause, the image looks crunchy or over sharpened.
Where?
Jeremy
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You cannot make motion or handshake blur better by sharpening. You get this effect as result.
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Where?
All of the water highlights in the lower two thirds, not including the animal itself.
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All of the water highlights in the lower two thirds, not including the animal itself.
You cannot make motion or handshake blur better by sharpening. You get this effect as result.
Well, well. Really? I am most grateful to you, Ivo, for your pearls of wisdom, which are as relevant to this shot as they were on the last occasion.
You get an effect similar to this, but not this. What you perceive as over-sharpening in this shot is caused by ripples on water and the sunlight they reflect. Nothing more, nothing less. I could blur it, I suppose.
Jeremy
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Hard to put my finger on it, but I also often perceive Russ' images as oversharpened (I assume they are not in reality). I know you both shoot with high megapixel cameras that capture an enormous amount of details. When posting to Flickr, for instance (when I was using 5Ds), I would often uncheck "sharpen for web" at export from LR, as Flickr algorithms would apparently add extra sharpening.
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Jeremy,
Perhaps you should have poured soap flakes into the water to quiet down those nasty ripples.
Of course, you would also need to ask the orca to wait quietly until you were ready to take his closeup.
(I suspect that some photographers get so immersed in post-processing details that they have a hard time recognizing natural phenomena unless they can produce them in PhotoShop.)
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Well, well. Really? I am most grateful to you, Ivo, for your pearls of wisdom, which are as relevant to this shot as they were on the last occasion.
You get an effect similar to this, but not this. What you perceive as over-sharpening in this shot is caused by ripples on water and the sunlight they reflect. Nothing more, nothing less. I could blur it, I suppose.
Jeremy
Why on earth are you asking critiques, Jeremy?
And your personal dislike to my person is very clear and I don’t care, but your expression of it is moderator unworthy.
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The subject and framing are nice but I agree with others there is something slightly off regarding the presentation, I'm not entirely sure what it is but I suspect it's related to the harsh light and the resulting contrast. I wonder if playing with decreased contrast/clarity in the water around the orca (or use them just on the orca if you used them on the entire picture) would help.
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Sometimes scenes with high frequency patterns (like dense leaves on a tree in the distance) look over-sharpened when reduced in size and converted to jpeg. Maybe that's what happened to the ripples here.
A nice picture of the whale, nevertheless.
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Good point, Arlen. Could be compression and scaling artifacts.
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Why on earth are you asking critiques, Jeremy?
Because I am interested in, and gain from, useful critique. Your comment is the equivalent of turning up at a university mathematics course and solemnly informed the assembled students that 2+2=4.
And your personal dislike to my person is very clear and I don’t care, but your expression of it is moderator unworthy.
I do not dislike you, Ivo; I've never met you and am highly unlikely ever to do so. I do dislike your pontification, which reeks of arrogance. You would benefit from Eric's insight.
(I suspect that some photographers get so immersed in post-processing details that they have a hard time recognizing natural phenomena unless they can produce them in PhotoShop.)
Yes, Eric. Quite.
Sometimes scenes with high frequency patterns (like dense leaves on a tree in the distance) look over-sharpened when reduced in size and converted to jpeg. Maybe that's what happened to the ripples here.
A nice picture of the whale, nevertheless.
Thanks, Arlen - and you could well be right. Slobodan's point is interesting too.
Jeremy
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I prefer the Black and White but feel the colour could work if it was slightly desaturated so there was just enough colour to make it not look black and white. I am also not fond of the magenta cast on the bottom left. Desaturating might calm that down a bit as well.
On the sharpening debate. If you say you did nothing extra with sharpening Jeremy then I assume that’s not the issue. It does look a bit crunchy though, and while it may be, as you have suggested, perfectly natural, it is a bit distracting which is all that matters in a photo. These effects can come from a bit too much clarity or texture in LR or the equivalent process in another image editor. Reversing that or if that wasn't used, applying those effects in a negative direction might remove what I certainly see as a distraction from the main subject which is obviously the orca. The eye obviously always gets pulled the the sharpest most contrast are of the image and I feel that this is happening here.
Use it or not you asked for input and that is mine.
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I apologize to have interrupted this discussion about an university level image with my toddler skills.
It will never, never happen again. How can ‘I’ be so arrogant. ....
;D ;D
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How can ‘I’ be so arrogant. ....
That's really the question. I hope you figure it out.
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I'm looking at a photograph by Edward Weston, China Cove - Point Lobos and the effect in the water seems similar to me.
I don't think that Weston had photoshopped it
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That's really the question. I hope you figure it out.
Ha, here is the second university level photographer of Lula.
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It doesn't matter if it looks like some other famous print, the OP asked for critique and a few here thinks it's over sharpened ( at least looks like it ) and that distracts from the image. My eyes are totally focused on the crunchy water rather than the real subject in the image.
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I don’t think they look particularly unnatural but, in this Weston photo those reflections seem to be the subject while in Jeremy’s shot they distract at some extent from the subject. My suggestion was to try to tame them at some extent and see where that leads, it might make the subject pop more or it might look unnatural.
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It doesn't matter if it looks like some other famous print, the OP asked for critique and a few here thinks it's over sharpened ( at least looks like it ) and that distracts from the image. My eyes are totally focused on the crunchy water rather than the real subject in the image.
My point is not if it looks like a famous print but to show that under similar conditions if you take a photo of that, you are likely to get that. No extra-sharpening involved.
It is just a print everybody can have access to - ergo valid as an example
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Ha, here is the second university level photographer of Lula.
Absolutely, Ivo, and if you work hard and pay attention, one of these days you may be able to get beyond the gradeschool level of photography and approach that kind of perfection.
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My point is not if it looks like a famous print but to show that under similar conditions if you take a photo of that, you are likely to get that. No extra-sharpening involved.
It is just a print everybody can have access to - ergo valid as an example
My point is no matter if it's natural or not or not caused by over sharpening...it is distracting in this image...which is what a critique is all about.
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My point is no matter if it's natural or not or not caused by over sharpening...it is distracting in this image...which is what a critique is all about.
Thank you. Exactly.
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My point is no matter if it's natural or not or not caused by over sharpening...it is distracting in this image...which is what a critique is all about.
It is not "ALL" about. The issue of oversharpening was also raised and discussed.
The OP just asked "color or B&W", You said "crunchy". Then we discussed "crunchiness"
Of course it's OK to add an opinion on crunchiness too, don't take me wrong .
But I associate "oversharpening" with accentuating the contrast along the edges of objects or subjects to the point of introducing artifacts (such as haloing) or noise-like textures in an image.
Just read the answers of other participants on that.
Hope this helps
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I apologize to have interrupted this discussion about an university level image with my toddler skills.
You are confusing a "university level" image, which this snap (in common with the vast majority of photographs posted here) plainly isn't, with "university level" critique and discussion, which we, collectively, aim for and often (well, sometimes) manage to achieve.
My point is no matter if it's natural or not or not caused by over sharpening...it is distracting in this image...which is what a critique is all about.
That is a perfectly fair point. Perhaps the thread demonstrates the dangers of leaping from observation of result to conclusion of cause.
The appearance of the water in the photograph accurately reflects (no pun intended) the appearance of the water as I remember it. I can see what people are getting at, but it's due to the weather conditions at the time the shot was taken, the sun reflected in the fine ripples around the beast. The effect may, as Slobodan suggested, be due to downsizing a very high-resolution image; certainly, it seems marginally more pronounced as posted here than it does in the original. I'll investigate.
Jeremy