K5d or D300s

Come on, Mike, there's loads of other approaches:

1 Throw away the camera and employ a pro.
2 Throw away the camera and take up painting.
3 Do no post-processing, then wonder why your pictures don't look as good as they might.
4 Throw away the camera and go to the pub, have twelve pints, then come back and join a discussion on the forum.

See? All these possibilities. I'm looking forward to hearing which one Danny proposes.

G

I thought I'd trademarked that one, especially when there's a website to comment on...

Actually, joking apart, IIRC, someone posted a thread of pictures a few months back, consisting only of images edited in the camera. Several of them had some quite impressive edits done to them.

To my mind it's a bit like having to lasso a cow through a window - an extraordinary achievement, but not a great plan when you need milk.

I don't want to get involved in any controversy, but sometimes given the quality of sensors / cameras a picture needs very little PP. I've put one on the Gallery tonight which has had a slight crop, but apart from that only the very tiniest bit of sharpening. No filters, no levels, no colour, no contrast tweaks etc. The pic is from my K-5; this is not possible with my other cameras (K-x, K-m), see link below.


link

Regards
David

That puts me in mind of Dr Johnson, who said of a woman preaching: "It is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but one is surprised to see it done at all."

Needless to add, that in quoting this I intended no offence to women. Johnson might equally have been discussing Ed Balls trying to give economic advice.

G

It does happen occaionally. Even low probability events are to be expected from time to time.
It's very nice. I think if you're lucky enough for the lighting, the composition and the exposure to coincide to give you a histogram that drops naturally into the shape you'd aim for after all the messing about, it is possible to get a shot that doesn't need it.

It's very rare, though, for even the sharpest of out-of-the camera raw files not to benefit from a little output sharpening after resizing.

I am saying nothing!

From time to time you may get a picture that is perfect straight out of the camera, but I submit that that is very rare. In B&W days, you would never allow a machine to process your prints - at least, not if you wanted to get the best from them. And digital is the same.

Which picture are you referring to?

ETA: Sorry. The gallery. I thought you meant your website. That picture takes full advantage of gorgeous light. Very nice.

G

George, I've put a link underneath so you can click on it to see.

Regards
David

Yes, I realised later that I was looking in the wrong place. I love pictures that take advantage of the light. Whether colour or black and white, pictures are always enhanced, and often only work at all, if the light forms a central part of the composition.

G

Bit soft and lacks in microcontrast, could really benefit from a bit of smart sharpening .
Nice anyway.

Hi Piotro, thanks for your input on this. Please bear in mind that when uploading to the Gallery the pictures are re-sized / compressed and this makes them look softer. On the original it looks a lot sharper.

BTW, your gallery images are pretty sharp so I guess you are using methods referred to above (smart sharpening). Could you please explain what you mean by this (I do not own any commercial image processing software other than Photomatix, so please excuse my ignorance). All of my processing is done in Paint.net.

Regards
David

Smart sharpening.

David - as per Mike's link, I would only add that there is a plugin for gimp that does all that magic, so no need to go through all steps described in tutorial.
It is just one of many algorithms of sharpening. Depends on situation/picture you get different results depends how you sharpen. I usually chose one depending on the picture I'm trying to sharpen.

Gimp could be some option if you want to try some PP (also noticed that your picture needs some clockwise rotation, it sinks to the left) - I wrote about gimp in this thread already.

I've just did a quick sharpen on your picture downloaded from gallery (so with all quality loss you mentioned - I hope you don't mind. In fact I've over-sharpened it, but to show how many micro details you may get with good sharpening.
The only PP I did on it was sharpening, you may notice how brighter it looks in places thanks to particular sharpen algorithm I used and improved micro contrast (i.e branches).
See also how many details can be recovered from for example road, these small stones started to shine and tracks are nicely visible now.
[IMG]http://i39.tinypic.com/52mgex.jpg[/IMG]

Now, we've really hijacked this thread .

Personal taste plays a big part in all this, and also, perhaps, the condition of one's own eyes and one's own monitor.

For me, Piotro's images (as seen on his website) are slightly over-sharpened, and slightly over-saturated. I stress "slightly".

David's on the other hand, I consider to be sometimes slightly under-sharpened. A good example of this is his B&W picture of Larry. I would also have given it a tad more contrast.

Perhaps they have been exaggerated for illustrative purposes, but I find the examples on the smart-sharpening site to be a bit over-done and artificial-looking.

Excessive sharpening and excessive saturation are the two great sins of digital photography, in my view. Closely followed by plasticisation - which makes everybody look like their dummy in Madame Tussauds.

So, I reiterate that in my view, every image will benefit from SOME post-processing, but many people (though not David!) overdo it.

G

Thanks for feedback by the way. I do admit I have number of a bit over-sharpened pictures, PPed them longer time ago and was to lazy to do them again (as own perception changes).
Over-saturation is new to me, in fact in 95% situations I do not add saturation in PP, but I do often use (again) sharpening (unsharp mask) to only add overall contrast to image, there is a trick for this, maybe I have to look at these pictures again, or maybe it is a time to calibrate my monitor again.