Cornish Pic

I am very very much liking my K10D took this on Sunday......best of the days shoot......honest opinion please?
: Also, whats the view on 'sharpening' in camera - do you all tend to leave it on all the time and if so what level.
Or is it best to sharpen post processing?

[/img]

I like your composition, but I'd crop out the sun completely, leaving IMHO a fantastic letter box format picture.

The colour is very unusual, but I quite like it!

As for sharpening, that is best left for photoshop, where it should be the very last thing that you do before saving your image, usually as a TIFF. (Never save a JPEG as a JPEG). So I leave my camera sharpening at the central default setting.

Hope that helps a little.

John, yes, I agree, never thought of cropping sun out, just been too long since we last saw it
Will bear that in mind for future shots, it def stops the eye wandering north out of the pic.
So, do you save ALL your jpegs as .tiffs?

Do you know of a link anywhere that gives guidelines about how to save images for the archive that maybe used to submit for sale or comps? As I would like to get it right from the start

Hi Lilly great Pic , i agree with johns comments those subtle changes will make the pic even better.

Here is one i took with my old olympus E500 wished id have had the K10D

This has been entered into a competion for sillhouettes and to acheive as black a sillhoute as possible. i did a lot of changes with the white balance in camera to acheive the shot. The only post work done on it is sharpening a little in photoshop. Other than that its original. My last photo was graded as a pass so hopfully this will gain a pass mark. Im not bothered about wining (would be nice) but rather getting a pass mark.

Pete.

First of all I copy all the JPEGs on the memory card onto my hard drive, using a card reader. These are left just as they are as my "negatives" so to speak and the copying over does not degrade or change them.

However, the JPEG process involves a compression that loses some information, so once I open a file and work on it I never save that modified version as a JPEG but always as a TIFF.

The other "lossless" format that you might use when a picture is "in progress" but not finished is the Photoshop format PSD. This enables all your work to be saved complete with layers and so on so that you can just continue where you left off. In practice, I never use this as I never take that long to process a picture.

In summary, save for print or submission as a TIFF. The only time you need to save as a JPEG is when preparing pictures for web use, when they have to be JPEGs.

Thanks a lot for that John put very nicely in laymans talk, there are so may ways you can approach digital and I have a lot to learn

Here modified as you suggested - looks great thanks again, thanks too Pete for your input...good luck

I don't know how to take masterpieces in this kind of scenes. No one camera could take the dynamic range and it's impossible to catch at least two shots for HDR because waves, people and clouds are moving. I thing the best way is to make two shots - overexposed one to catch people and sea, and underexposed one to catch the sky. Then you could compile both of them into one image combining the best parts from each shot.

Que : If you are talking HDR then I wd presume that wd compose a completely diifferent atmosphere

ie. all shadows wd be lost. If that is your mission look at this - it must be possible some how
Discuss forum :

http://www.hdrsoft.com/examples.html

I have been reading about this subject and wonder if anyone has had any experience yet?

The examples look so unnatural that I don't think I'll bother to investigate any further.

G

Hi Lilly

HI had a go at HDR with a 5 shot sequence covering +2/-2, like George I thought it was a waist of effort myself. To appreciate HDR I reckon you need a very very powerful PC, loads of Ram and and a top of the range graphics card to start with, then you will need a 32bit monitor to see the true results, can't see the point for us mere mortals.

BTW, the pano works great

Lilly;
Youre learning fast, the cropped shot is much beter than the original.

Pete; as for your Olympus shot......and here we were thinking you were a total novice, you old snake!

Your image is too HDR.
I'm talking about the fact human eyes have better dynamic range than modern cameras (actually it's a complex camera+screen) and that's why some shots looks not like you really see. I have some shots in my garbage demonstrating the words.

1. Dynamic range is fine and you can see sky (clouds and sunlight) and dark windows.



2. Dynamic range is close to be fine but it's not because you can't see clouds. Everything in dark area is visible.



3. Dynamic range is too narrow for the scene. Trees and grass have all visible details but there is no sky and roofs' edges.



I have nothing against shadows, especially if it fits, but I like details.

I use the technique for static scenes having wide DR. Having HDR image you can play with it and find more appropriate view. If I remember correctly FDRTools' advanced version could compile HDR image with moving objects but I still have no time to try this out. I have no idea how they are gonna do this but imho cutting layers is more efficient way for simple scenes and you don't need HDR in this case.

HDR - yup

It can be used or abused. There are actually two things to HDRI:
1. HDR
2. Tone mapping

The HDR is where you grab several frames and software splices them into a single 32-bit per pixel image.

The tone mapping is where it goes pear-shaped and unnatural. Many examples over do the TM and make it painting-like (which is fine if that's what you want).

Yes, it needs shed-loads of RAM and CPU power (I have a 2Gb Pentium dual Xeon, and it's slow even on that )

Here's one I prepared earlier:
http://www.ephotozine.com/gallery/showlargepic.cfm?photoid=815867

Hopefully it's not immediately apparent that it's HDR
HDR is an emerging technology, and there's lots to be learned. It has its uses

Matt