South Downs Way

Grabbed an hour on the South Downs before work. It was bliss and really great start to the day. Got there 15mins too late, so missed sun rise. Which was a pity. But still grabbed a few shots.

Really like these Russ, nice early morning light, which alas I seldom catch in the lakes, as the first bus to there doesn't leave town until 9A.M.

Thanks Jules. Almost missed it myself as i turned off the alarm and went back to sleep. Hence missing the sunrise itself.

Excellent set. Especially like the first two and the one with the spiders web is great

Thanks Mike. I really need to learn the art of post processing. I'm sure there's more i can get out of the photos.

Also, would you know what's causing a rainbow/stripe effect in the sky on some of the photos?

Hope you don't mind me jumping in, but I like your atmospheric shots - they capture the feel of these hills at this time of year beautifully.

I noticed the banding in the skys, and in my experience this can start to creep in once JPEG compression gets higher. I have noticed on my shots that reducing the compression (ie increasing the saved file size) helps.

Many thanks Nigel. I converted these from RAW to jpg at work where i used a free RAW viewer. But there is options when saving, so i guess its applying too much compression. Will have a look at home, do it properly with PS Elements.

btw great photos in your album

Cheers ! I use PS Elements to save out my JPEGs, often from TIFFs which can be up to 70-80 mb. In Elements I use the Save for Web dialogue to choose an exact file size. I used to routinely size everything to 1mb, but after seeing the banding in skies I experimented and found that it usually disappears once the files size reaches 2 or 2.5 mb.

The shadow areas are a bit too unnaturally dark for my taste in the first two, Russ, but I really like #4 for the interesting effect in the foreground cereal, and #5 for the beautiful spider's web.

Philip

Right okay i'll give that a try in a sec, see if it gets rid of the banding. I was doing the same, making them 1mb to be forum friendly.

A couple more from this morning:

The last of these new ones is my favourite - again, captures that special atmosphere of the time and season. I like the low viewpoint of the first (new) one, good composition I think - but its let down by the very obvious outline where you've blended the sky & foreground exposures - if you're using layers and a mask, a finer edged brush may help, and much smaller brush right at the join.

We've still got the banding - what size are your JPEGs now?

I checked, the banding is there on the RAW file..... It's on seven different photos. Can't workout why.

You are right about the obvious transition between the sky and ground on photo 1. That was Topaz Adjust and me being too heavy handed with it. Which i tend to be with Topaz, looks great in the editor but then pants once finished. lol

The last of the new ones is my favourite too. The light and the background seem to work quite well. And a bit of mist in the valley.

You can't see a RAW image You can see its embedded JPEG, on the camera rear LCD or in a cataloguing programs thumbnails. It may be worth just saving out to larger JPEGs anyway to test the theory. If you're using Elements try rendering out to a 16bit image from ACR into the main editor, then 'save as' a 16bit tiff in the main editor, to see if the banding remains there also.

When ACR displays the image during editing this is not full resolution (to keep the editing on the preview updating quickly), so the banding may still be there because of this.

Larger JPEG files have always resolved this problem for me, so if that's not the issue we'll have to call in some more opinion!

Right, i'll get on to it in a moment. And you learn something new everyday, thanks for the info about the RAW preview.