And the 55-300 is a 58mm thread too

Probably already known to many, here, but I thought I'd share a sharpening trick I discovered this morning.

You know the way you get annoying halos around things if you get a bit too enthusiastic with unsharp mask?

Well, I've experimented a bit with the 'Refine Edge' tool in Photoshop, in an attempt to prevent this, and discovered that with the thing you want sharpened selected, if you feather the selected area and, in addition, contract the selected area by a few percent, it's just enough to bring the boundary of the sharpening inside the actual edge of the thing you're trying to sharpen.

Very dependent on the type of image, but with a couple of my Farnborough pictures, I've found I can get away with much harder sharpening, without the give-away halos.

It covers a few sins, if not a multitude .

I'd sort of worked this out... but I agree with AJ, here - the dark part takes up half the frame so it's a real distraction.

Your other photos are so good that one that's less good tends to be very noticeable. So congratulations on becoming a victim of your own success

Lest the memory of such a short time ago pale, the following was posted 11 pages into this (currently) 23 page thread.

[quote="Peter Bargh"]I can't really see why you cannot enjoy a photo at 550pixels[/quote]And this, in the reporting system today:

[quote="Peter Bargh"]in theory you shouldn't even need an edit option[/quote]I'm sensing a similar mindset, to be honest.

Please, Peter, don't make it as hard to get our point across this time.

It's not as critical an issue as the image-size one, I know. But it is a nuisance the way it is right now, and I'm clearly not alone in thinking this.

And you did say this:

I'm having a dialogue with the support team via their reporting system, trying to persuade them to re-implement the rules we had before regarding editing posts.

Basically IIRC they were these:

- if your post was the last one on the thread, you could edit for a very long time with no 'edited by' message appearing.

- if there were posts after yours, you could still edit for some time, but got the 'edited by' message.

This was ideal, I think - the message discouraged edits that would change the sense of subsequent discussion, yet still allowed things like fixing image links.

They (and Peter Bargh in particular) seem reluctant to go back to the way we had it before, so I'm bringing the debate into the public domain.

In reply to Peter's most recent comment:

[quote="Peter"]Note left : 22nd July 2008 - 10:53
Peter Bargh Hi Chris
Richard has passed this on. Yes it's something we could implement but I'm really not sure if it has any extra worth. There is an edit option for 20 mins which should be more than enough time to amend a post and there is a preview option that you could use before you commit so in theory you shouldn't even need an edit option. [/quote], I responded thus:

[quote="I"]For a start, I ALWAYS use preview (I was the one that asked for it to be re-implemented with PMs!!). I'm one of the most spelling- and-grammar obsessed people around, and I still miss things which are obvious once I've posted, and it's then very annoying to have the 'edited by' message when all I've done is correct a typo, or move an image so that it looks better.

So having a period of time where no 'edited by' message appears (providing there are no subsequent posts) would be excellent - and something we always had before.

Secondly, I take Richard's point about subsequent comments potentially altering the sense.

All I can say is that when we had this facility, it almost never happened that the sense was altered.

It was extremely useful for things like fixing broken image links. Only this morning, for instance, I had deleted an image from my picture host, and had to reupload one of exactly the same name in order not to break the link in the post, which I could no longer edit. Some hosts generate their own link information, so this might not even have been possible.

If there are subsequent posts, we always got the 'edited by' message - which seemed to be perfectly adequate to deal with the potential 'changed sense' problem.

My view is that the greatly increased restrictiveness of the edit feature is a retrograde step.

[/quote]If there are any that, like me, are finding the new editing regime too restrictive, please throw your hats into the ring!!

This is very unlikely to be the same from one card-full to the next, since the amount of compression it gets with each picture will be different.

An empty 2Gb card result in a camera prediction of about 120-something RAW(PEF) images in my K10D, but I was getting more than 180 the other day, since there was a lot of featureless sky in them which would have compressed a lot.

I had one heart-stopping moment during the display. Just as the Vulcan turned in for its display, my K10D froze up completely. It wouldn't focus, the shutter wouldn't release; it wouldn't even turn off. The symptoms were identical to when I was doing that SR testing a few weeks back.

Fortunately I'd borrowed my dad's one, which had the Sigma A-400mm F5.6 on it. The best is this one:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Aviation/Farnborough%202008/IMGP1363.jpg[/IMG]

But I had a lot of messing about to get it to look even as reasonable as this. The Sigma 400mm is light, reasonably sharp stopped down, and quick to AF. But it does suffer quite badly from purple fringing, and dark aeroplanes against bright white sky is the best way of guaranteeing a lot of it. Fortunately, there's not much magenta in the Vulcan, so desaturating removes it quite easily. That said, if you look closely along the leading edge of the left wing, you can see the grey where the magenta was, so it's not ideal.

Once it had gone past, I pulled the battery from my frozen K10D, and replacing it restored normal function with no recurrence of the problem. It's a bit of a worry, though.

The photos are hosted at PhotoBucket.com, and the forum software displays them inline.

So within this post, you should see a picture of the only airworthy Vulcan bomber in the world, just after take-off:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Aviation/Farnborough%202008/IMGP0361s.jpg[/IMG]

The photo should be above this line.

You're getting a bit ahead of me there. That one is where I've only got as far as cloning out the very worst - I wanted to see if it was worth persevering with it.

It had just taken off, and the amount of stuff it kicked into the air was unbelievable. I had to turn away to stop it all going into my eyes about three seconds after taking the shot, and then I had to tip all the crap out of the lens hood.

There is quite a bit of muck on the sensor, but nowhere near that much

I thought it would be something like this.
Very helpful.

However, the menus seem to be a bit different in CS3. The only way I could find to do this was

File | Scripts | Image processor... and then

Use open images / Save as JPEG / Convert profile to sRGB

But it seems to work - I've replace the file in the shot above, and the EXIF is available again.

Thanks!!