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Author Topic: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama  (Read 22848 times)

shadowblade

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Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« on: August 21, 2015, 01:26:44 pm »

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***
« Last Edit: August 24, 2015, 12:26:03 pm by shadowblade »
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MattBurt

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #1 on: August 21, 2015, 04:58:30 pm »

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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ddolde

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #2 on: August 21, 2015, 05:35:21 pm »

Sorry no WOW here. The colors look terrible
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shadowblade

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #3 on: August 21, 2015, 08:33:46 pm »

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.
« Last Edit: August 21, 2015, 08:37:36 pm by shadowblade »
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Wolfman

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #4 on: August 21, 2015, 09:07:33 pm »

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.

shadowblade

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #5 on: August 21, 2015, 09:39:55 pm »

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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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #6 on: August 21, 2015, 09:46:27 pm »

...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.

shadowblade

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #7 on: August 21, 2015, 10:29:04 pm »

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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MattBurt

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #8 on: August 22, 2015, 12:25:03 am »

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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KMRennie

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #9 on: August 22, 2015, 07:40:54 am »

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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shadowblade

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #10 on: August 22, 2015, 09:57:44 am »

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.

Quote
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?

Quote
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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KMRennie

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #11 on: August 22, 2015, 11:25:06 am »

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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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #12 on: August 22, 2015, 12:09:22 pm »

... 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.

shadowblade

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #13 on: August 22, 2015, 12:51:50 pm »

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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BJL

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Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama. OR 05.MP panorama
« Reply #14 on: August 22, 2015, 01:02:58 pm »

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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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #15 on: August 22, 2015, 01:09:31 pm »

... 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.

Wolfman

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #16 on: August 22, 2015, 04:11:16 pm »

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.

Ray

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #17 on: August 22, 2015, 08:10:56 pm »

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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shadowblade

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #18 on: August 23, 2015, 04:48:51 am »


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.
« Last Edit: August 23, 2015, 01:49:14 pm by shadowblade »
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Ray

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Re: Hong Kong skyline - 350MP panorama
« Reply #19 on: August 23, 2015, 09:02:51 pm »

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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